Fatima* was 35 years old and had worked at Corohealth Infotech in Kochi for four years when everything changed. Every morning, she walked through the glass doors of the multi-storey building near the Vyttila-Edapalli bypass, sat at her desk, and coded medical records from 9 am to 6 pm. It was routine. It was stable.
On July 3, 2026, that routine shattered. HR representatives gathered the staff and told them the company was shutting down operations in Kerala entirely. "None of us could believe what the HR representatives said," Fatima recalled. "Some of us felt suffocated and we walked out of the office for fresh air. By the time we tried to re-enter, our access was blocked."
The separation letter Corohealth sent spoke of workforce restructuring "due to the continued decline in the Company's Hierarchical Position Category (HCC) vertical" — a technical term for grouping diagnoses used in risk-adjusted payment models. But to Fatima and her colleagues, it felt like the same story unfolding everywhere: AI was eating into the work they'd spent years doing, and companies were finding ways to cut people loose before anyone could stop them.
Approximately 800 employees lost their jobs that day — at the Kochi and Kozhikode offices combined. The compensation? Two and a half months' salary.
Now Fatima comes to the building every morning anyway, not to work but to sign an attendance register arranged by the district labor office. She sits on the granite steps in the basement, watching the closed glass door, and waits. "We really don't think the company is going to reverse its decision," she says. "We are just following the instructions of government officials."
The layoff has hit her hard financially. There are children's expenses to cover, and a loan to repay. Her colleague Srilakshmi K had just gotten a home loan approved when the layoff came — the application was immediately cancelled. "People like us are no longer able to relocate," Srilakshmi said. "Even when there are vacancies, companies are still offering salaries that are much lower than what we get."
Both Fatima and Srilakshmi refuse to fully believe that AI took their jobs — not yet. But they've seen the writing on the wall. The medical coding industry, built on meticulous human review of patient records, is exactly the kind of work that AI systems are getting better at every year.
The Kerala government has called the layoffs illegal under the Industrial Relations Code, which requires 90 days' notice for companies with more than 300 employees. But for Fatima and her 800 former colleagues, legal proceedings won't bring their jobs back. They sit on those steps and wonder what comes next for people whose careers were built on skills that machines are now learning to do.
(*Name has been changed to protect her privacy.)