Visa's AI layoffs hit India hard: Why even top performers may no longer be safe at work

Visa has cut about 2,600 jobs globally—roughly 7% of its workforce—as part of an efficiency drive centred on artificial intelligence, with India’s large technology hubs among the most affected. With this, Visa joins a growing list of companies that have cited AI as a key factor in recent layoffs, including Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Cisco, Cloudflare, PayPal, Atlassian, and Standard Chartered.

For some employees in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad, the change began with pre-dawn emails on July 29 that landed between 4 am and 5 am; they lost system access within a few days.

What happened in India

Visa employs more than 3,500 people across its Indian technology and corporate centres, but the company has not disclosed the exact number of layoffs locally. One India-based unit of 28 reportedly lost 10 members, including senior directors and engineering managers. Affected staff were offered severance and notice periods of about 15–30 days, though several said laptop returns and ID deactivations followed quickly.

Visa's cuts primarily hit technology and product teams, according to a Reuters report. Notably, Visa had about 34,100 employees in fiscal 2025. That means the latest cuts amount to roughly one in every 14 employees globally.

READ ALSO: Visa plans 2,600 job cuts as payments giant reduces workforce by 7%

Why Visa is cutting jobs

Visa says the restructuring is not due to a business crisis but to redirect resources toward areas where it sees stronger growth, with AI at the core of that plan. CEO Ryan McInerney told staff the company must evolve how work gets done, noting that AI is also helping to accelerate this evolution and shape the way work gets done at Visa.

ADD A BIT MORE ON WHAT THE CEO SAID

The focus is shifting from AI tools that assist employees to “agentic AI”—systems that can perform tasks with minimal human supervision, raising the question of whether fewer people will be needed for the same output.

Not just a Visa story

The payments sector is resetting around AI and cost discipline. Mastercard, earlier this year, said it would reduce its global workforce by about 4% to refocus investment, while fintech Block announced plans to cut nearly half its staff, around 4000 jobs. The broader corporate world is moving in the same direction. Amazon announced plans to eliminate around 16,000 corporate roles. Cloudflare planned to cut more than 1,100 jobs. Atlassian announced around 1,600 job cuts as it reshaped its workforce around AI. Similarly, Standard Chartered also said it plans to eliminate 15 per cent of corporate-function roles over four years amid the AI push.

READ MORE: Amid layoffs and falling gaming revenue, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma lays out multi-year growth strategy

Good Performers Not Necessarily Safe

Former Visa employee Arnab Das said on X that his former manager had been laid off despite owning a product end-to-end and receiving strong performance reviews. His comments highlighted the uncertainty created by the cuts.

“Learn, unlearn, apply”: the new career contract

For India’s tech workforce, the Visa layoffs underscore a broader shift from task-based roles to judgement-heavy work. Umesh Kothari, assistant dean and assistant professor at SP Jain School of Global Management, said, “The rapidly growing use of AI is changing the workplace from one organised around tasks to one increasingly organised around judgement, problem-solving and decision-making… In a workplace where technologies and roles will continue to evolve, the ability to learn, unlearn and apply knowledge in new contexts will ultimately become one of the strongest forms of career resilience.”