In a deeply unsettling move, Zomato has laid off around 500 employees from its customer support team in Gurugram and Hyderabad – many of whom were hired under the Zomato Associate Accelerator Program (ZAAP).
What’s more troubling is how it was done: reportedly employees received a vague message saying they were “identified as faulty based on data,” followed by immediate logout from internal systems and an offer of two months’ salary. There was no official announcement. No proper notice. Just a quiet exit – reportedly requested to be done “with a smile” so others wouldn’t panic.
Sources say the layoffs came after the rollout of “Nugget,” Zomato’s AI-powered customer service tool that now handles 80% of customer queries across Zomato, Blinkit, and Hyperpure. But it’s not just handling queries – it’s allegedly judging employees too. Nugget’s internal performance system assigns “karma scores” like Gold or Iron to evaluate staff. These scores reportedly played a role in who stayed and who didn’t. For those who were fired, the reasons remain unfair and vague, as expected – some say they were terminated for being a few minutes late or for how they spoke to customers.
As AI takes over tasks once people handle them, companies like Zomato prioritize efficiency over empathy. These aren’t just job cuts – they’re a warning that performance will be judged by algorithms that can’t understand context or nuance, while human dignity gets reduced to data points. And in this race to automate everything, ethics are being quietly deleted. And yet, this is being quietly normalized. When a company like Zomato does it, others are bound to follow it. Tech is framed as neutral when in reality, it is only as ethical as the hands (and motives) that build and use it.
What Zomato did wasn’t just a layoff. It was a glimpse into a future where workers will not only be replaced by AI – but evaluated, judged, and discarded by it too.
