Adidas lays off 15% of its India workforce: Report

Adidas has begun cutting jobs at its India Technology Hub in Gurugram, with around 350 employees understood to be affected, according to sources who spoke to MartechAI. The reduction could affect nearly half the hub’s estimated 700 employees, placing a substantial section of its technology workforce under uncertainty.

Sources indicated that software engineering, data science and data engineering positions are among the affected roles. Employees were informed of the exercise on September 15, with departures being implemented in phases.

Some employees reportedly received exit letters immediately, while another group has been asked to remain until December 15 to complete handovers and explore alternative opportunities. The final number of departures and the terms of employee separation remain unconfirmed.

The development raises a question increasingly relevant to technology teams inside consumer businesses: as AI changes how digital work gets done, how will companies decide which capabilities to retain, retrain or reorganise?

There is, however, no established evidence that AI deployment directly triggered the Adidas cuts. Describing the affected employees as having been replaced by AI would go beyond the information currently available.

AI is already part of Adidas’s corporate agenda. Its 2023 Supervisory Board Report recorded discussions on AI use cases, opportunities and associated risks. Its 2025 corporate governance disclosure also states that the supervisory board receives updates on artificial intelligence, alongside information security, data privacy and relevant regulation. These disclosures establish management attention to AI, but do not connect it to the current workforce reduction.

The wider employment debate offers context. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 41 per cent of surveyed employers planned to reduce their workforce as AI automated certain tasks. At the same time, 77 per cent planned to upskill employees in response to AI. These are employer expectations, rather than evidence explaining any individual company’s layoffs.

For marketing and customer experience leaders, the strategic issue extends beyond the size of an engineering team. Decisions about technology staffing can influence the capacity to maintain customer platforms, connect data, test new services and deliver digital experiences.

The question for brands considering smaller technology teams is whether productivity improvements can sustain those capabilities without weakening institutional knowledge, accountability or execution. An AI tool’s ability to accelerate a task does not, by itself, establish that an entire role has become unnecessary.

At Adidas, the unanswered questions remain specific: which responsibilities are being eliminated, which are moving elsewhere, and whether automation has changed the resources required to perform them. Greater clarity on those decisions would help distinguish organisational restructuring from technology-led substitution.

For now, the layoffs place a major consumer brand’s technology workforce within the wider debate over employment in the AI era. They do not yet provide proof that AI is the reason those jobs are disappearing.