Oracle has reportedly started another round of job cuts globally, with industry experts tracking the company estimating that around 10% of its India workforce, or roughly 3,000 employees, could be affected.The company had already eliminated 21,000 jobs earlier this year, including around 12,000 positions in India, as it shifted its focus and spending towards AI infrastructure.Pareekh Jain, chief executive of market intelligence firm EIIRTrend, said the latest reductions could bring Oracle’s India employee count down to about 27,000 from 30,000. According to Jain, the company’s recruitment for AI-related roles is unlikely to offset the job losses because “new hiring in AI will be in small numbers and on a case-by-case basis”.
Oracle Layoffs
Reports of the layoffs have also surfaced on X and Reddit, where some users identifying themselves as Oracle employees in India discussed the job cuts.Some said they were given little advance notice before being informed that their positions had been eliminated.One user shared what was described as an Oracle termination email, saying the date on which it was received was also their final working day. Another person claiming to have spent 10 years with the company said they had received an email informing them that they no longer “fit the bill”.The latest Oracle cuts come against the backdrop of similar workforce reductions at several large global capability centres (GCCs), as multinational parent companies trim employee numbers across their international operations.ET had earlier reported that Visa reduced its India workforce by around 1,500, PayPal cut 500-600 jobs and ServiceNow eliminated a few hundred positions.Jain estimates that layoffs currently account for around 1% of the overall GCC workforce.Despite these reductions, India’s GCC sector is still expected to add employees overall. Industry estimates indicate that GCC employment could increase by 9-10% this year as new centres are established and existing operations expand.The more significant shift, however, is in the type of technology professionals these centres are seeking as their hiring requirements evolve.
GCC hiring trends
Global Capability Centres, the specialised offshore operations of multinational companies, are increasingly drawing employees away from the traditional IT services sector.A recent PwC report on GCCs says these centres have moved well beyond their earlier role of handling transactional back-office work. They are now involved in shaping enterprise strategy and outcomes across areas such as advanced analytics, product engineering, cybersecurity, AI research and development, and, increasingly, global P&L mandates.This shift is making GCCs a more significant source of technology hiring in India. As companies move beyond operations built primarily around cost savings, their requirements are expanding towards technology, innovation and enterprise transformation, pushing up demand for specialised talent.Demand for professionals with artificial intelligence-related skills is also rising, experts said. The PwC report found that the strongest requirement is for people who can build AI models, create the data infrastructure that supports them, manage associated risks, secure their deployment and turn these technologies into products and platforms that produce measurable business outcomes.The biggest opportunity lies at the mid-career level, where GCCs are looking for professionals who bring both technical expertise and an understanding of business. At the senior level, hiring is more focused on specialised roles such as architects, AI leaders, product leaders and cybersecurity and cloud specialists, experts said.The challenge, however, is that the availability of such talent is limited. GCCs require niche skills, and the gap between demand and supply remains significant.According to the PwC report, the biggest constraint for GCCs is finding professionals who possess deep domain knowledge alongside advanced technology capabilities.Competition for this talent is also intense. GCCs are competing with other GCCs, IT services companies and startups for the same limited pool of professionals. At the same time, there is a shortage of senior leaders with the strategic capabilities needed in the AI era.“This supply-side challenge is multi-layered and self-perpetuating. Acquiring AI-ready talent is becoming increasingly difficult, driven by scarce specialised capabilities, leadership gaps, and intense market competition,” the PwC report says.“The hybrid, senior, AI-fluent talent with domain expertise that India’s GCC ecosystem needs most is hardest to find, most expensive to acquire, and most fiercely competed for across the market,” it adds.
