Verizon CEO Daniel Schulman said artificial intelligence could replace a large percentage of the company's customer-service workforce during a conference this week.
The admission highlights the growing tension between corporate efficiency and labor stability as generative AI becomes capable of handling complex human interactions. For a telecommunications giant, the shift represents a fundamental change in how the company manages its largest point of customer contact.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech Conference 2026 in San Francisco, Schulman said that AI is coming for jobs and that the reality is widely recognized [1]. He said the technology can efficiently handle routine, high-volume interactions, such as billing inquiries, while working alongside remaining human agents [1, 2].
Schulman said that roughly 20% of customer-service jobs at Verizon will be automated over the next few years [3]. This transition is tied to a $5 billion cost-saving plan that relies heavily on AI automation [4].
Recent workforce reductions underscore the urgency of this transition. Reports vary on the scale of recent cuts; one source said Verizon fired over 13,000 employees in November [5], while another noted the company is cutting hundreds of jobs as part of AI-driven restructuring [4].
Schulman said that the shift toward automation in the contact-center function will improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs [2, 3]. He said that the ability of AI to process routine requests allows the company to scale its operations without proportional increases in staffing.
Despite the projected efficiency, the transition remains a point of contention. The company's strategy involves a blend of total automation for simple tasks, and AI-assisted support for human workers to handle more complex issues [1].
“AI is coming for your job, and everyone knows it.”
Verizon's strategy signals a broader trend among S&P 500 companies to move beyond AI as a productivity tool and toward AI as a direct labor replacement. By quantifying the expected job loss at 20%, Verizon is providing a benchmark for the telecommunications industry's transition toward an automated service model, prioritizing a $5 billion cost reduction over traditional employment structures.
