On an ordinary day, a Visa Inc. employee would log in, pick up work from the previous day and go through emails and routine tasks. In recent months, some found themselves with more time on hand as automation took over parts of their jobs.
Few, however, expected the first email of the day to be their last in the company: from human resources informing them that they had been laid off. For employees in India, the emails came between 4 am and 5 am on 29 July.
Visa, the $40 billion San Francisco-based payments company, said on 28 July that it would cut about 7% of its workforce, roughly 2,600 roles. Chief executive officer (CEO) Ryan McInerney told employees the reductions were meant to drive efficiency.
McInerney said on an earnings call on 28 July that AI is changing how work gets done at Visa.
“Today, we announced that we are eliminating roles, with the majority being in our technology and product teams, to ensure that we are continuing to position Visa for future growth,” the CEO said. “Now, as we enter the era of agentic AI, we are going beyond AI assistance and harnessing the power of AI to execute work and tasks with our supervision.”
He said agentic commerce will expand the company’s addressable market and drive growth for Visa. Agentic commerce refers to the emerging use of autonomous AI agents to research, select, negotiate and make purchases on behalf of humans.
Visa did not say how many of the roles being eliminated would be in India, its largest technology base outside the US. Its global headcount rose about 8% in fiscal 2025 to roughly 34,100. While the number of employees in India is not public, the company said in a statement in 2024 that its workforce exceeds 3,500 employees here.
Whole teams hit
Visa operates corporate, business and major technology hubs in India from Bengaluru and Mumbai, with additional corporate presence in Chennai and Hyderabad. Bengaluru is the company’s primary large-scale technology and software development centre.
Mint spoke to six former and current employees from India to piece together what happened last week. All of them spoke on condition of anonymity, not wanting to jeopardize their job prospects.
Visa did not respond to queries sent by Mint at publishing time.
The cuts were deep enough to hollow out whole teams. On one India team of 28 people, 10 were let go, employees said. Seniority did not help. Among those who lost their jobs were a director with about two decades at the company and a senior director with 21 years, along with several long-serving engineering managers.
Severance packages varied widely and came with roughly 15 to 30 days of notice.
“Some are getting a lot and some are getting less,” one employee said on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Although they were asked to serve notice periods, many employees had to hand over their ID cards and laptops and their access to company email was removed by Friday. The Bengaluru office emptied out within days. On Friday, people had been scuffling about to find places to sit. By Wednesday the place was dead silent.
“Seeing your colleagues’ empty tables hurts a lot, and you can be the next any time,” said an employee who kept their job but lost their manager. The experience was draining, they said, even for those who were safe.
Several of those laid off turned down invitations from former teammates for a farewell.
“When I reached out to all of them, most of them were not ready to come,” one employee said. They did not want anything to do with the company that had just let them go.
Impact of AI
The Visa job cuts show how AI is slowing the pace of hiring and taking over or supplementing some roles in companies. Goldman Sachs, in a 28 July report, said 8% to 12% of India's non-agricultural employment is at risk of substitution from generative AI and 42% to 48% of jobs are more likely to be complemented by it, closer to augmentation than displacement.
It found that job cuts in Indian technology have been concentrated in the six largest listed IT services firms, which shed a net 64,000 roles out of 1.7 million, while the rest of the sector, including global capability centres like Visa's in Bengaluru, added 700,000 people in three years.
“For instance, in financial services, Gen-AI can complement analyst roles by automating some form of basic modelling, but may completely substitute routine back-office functions like basic compliance checks,” Goldman Sachs said in the report.
The advent of AI has also led companies to reduce hiring. Total new hires at nine of the 30 Sensex companies fell 27% between from FY24 to FY26, Mint reported on Monday.
The cuts at Visa did not come out of nowhere, employees said, even if the timing was a surprise. Over the preceding months, contractor hiring was pulled back and spending on outside software vendors was cut with the justification that AI could replace some of it.
Token limits
In July, caps appeared on AI tool usage where access had been open before. Developers in the US said they were expected to use large language models for their work, then handed a $1,500 monthly limit on the tokens they could consume.
“This is the fourth such cost-cutting measure within the last quarter,” a Bengaluru-based employee said.
The contradiction is not lost on the people in Visa. AI is simultaneously the reason costs have escalated and the justification offered for the headcount reduction.
“It's making us more efficient but we are not seeing the impact that is expected by the CXOs,” the employee said. “On the other hand, the cost has gone out of hand.”
The scale of that spending is not in dispute.
Visa consumed about 1.9 trillion AI tokens a month as of March, twice what it had used in February, Business Insider reported on 10 April. Four months later, in a follow-up report by Business Insider, employees were being metered.
Visa's layoffs are not the first of its kind in the payments industry. In January, Mastercard said it would cut 4% of its global workforce, or about 1,400 employees. Chief financial officer Sachin Mehra said on an earnings call the layoffs would “free up capacity to further invest in our strategic priorities.” During the call, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach introduced “agentic commerce” as a key growth pillar for 2026.