A San Francisco property company most Malaysians have never heard of has just made a decision that anyone working in Malaysia's GBS and shared services hubs, from KL Sentral and Bangsar South to Bayan Lepas, should pay attention to. Opendoor, the online home-buying platform, is shutting down its India operations less than two years after expanding there, and its reasoning has set off a debate about whether AI is starting to break the economics of offshore work.
Announcing the move this week, chief executive Kaz Nejatian said the company wants operational work back in the United States, closer to its customers, and that it is reorganising around smaller, AI-native teams. TechCrunch reports that Opendoor had roughly 250 employees in India when it opened offices in Chennai and Bengaluru in 2024. The company has been shrinking overall: securities filings show 1,042 employees globally at the end of last year, down from 1,470 a year earlier, so the India closure is not purely an AI story.
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The debate is bigger than one company
What made the announcement travel was where it landed. India is now the world's largest market for global capability centres, the dedicated offshore units multinationals run for IT, finance and R&D. Figures cited by TechCrunch put it at more than 2,100 centres employing about 2.36 million people and generating close to US$100 billion a year. Investors read Opendoor's exit as an early signal for that entire model, and one venture capitalist called it a watershed moment for AI-driven operations.
Phil Fersht, chief executive of outsourcing research firm HFS, told TechCrunch the real shift is not jobs moving from India back to America. It is that AI reduces the amount of operational labour companies need in the first place, wherever that labour sits. "This is not an isolated restructuring," he said, describing a broader pattern of companies redesigning operations around AI and leaner workflows.
Why Malaysia's GBS hubs should be watching
Malaysia plays the same game, one rung up the value chain. The country hosts more than 600 GBS and shared services companies, ranks third on Kearney's Global Services Location Index, and the sector was projected to reach US$6.7 billion in revenue by 2025. Penang alone counts over 90 GBS operations employing more than 20,000 professionals, and 87 per cent of new GBS setups between 2021 and mid-2025 landed in KL and Selangor. MDEC promotes Digital GBS as a key sector under Malaysia Digital, and recently extended employment pass salary-threshold concessions for GBS roles to keep hiring moving.
The pitch that fills those towers is cost plus capable talent. That is exactly the pitch Fersht's analysis undermines. If a multinational can run finance operations, document processing or customer support with a fraction of the headcount, the savings from putting those roles in Malaysia instead of Boston shrink with them. The roles most exposed are the transactional ones: data entry, invoice processing, level-one support, routine compliance checks. These are the anchor workloads many Malaysian centres were built on.
The other way to read it
There is a more hopeful reading, and it happens to match where Malaysia was already heading. Industry groups here have spent years pushing GBS work up the value chain, from transactional processing into analytics, regional compliance and transformation roles. AI may even favour smaller, higher-skill hubs over megascale ones, because the new constraint is judgment and domain knowledge rather than the number of people who can follow a workflow. Malaysians working in shared services can read Opendoor as a two-year warning: the workflow-following part of the job is what the machines are coming for, so the value sits in everything around it. The cost side of that shift is something we covered when Malaysia's AI Nation ambitions met the token bill.
Opendoor itself is a messy case study, a company that was cutting costs everywhere long before this announcement. But the next time a multinational with a large Malaysian back office starts talking about AI-native teams, it will not just be a US housing story anymore.
Images courtesy of Vlad Shapochnikov and Arlington Research on Unsplash.