#AI-mad Verizon to continue with cuts after CEO's jobs warning
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman has now completed the 13,000 layoffs he promised last November, but more could lie ahead. [ Lightreading 📰].
Iain Morris,International Editor,Light Reading — April 30, 2026
Company bosses occasionally praise their employees in public and note the importance of talent. That doesn't quite ring true when they are cutting thousands of jobs, as many are, which might partly explain why lauding AI is now much more fashionable. Attributing job cuts to the solid efforts of the new AI recruit, which bosses have anthropomorphized by saying it is an "agent" or does "reasoning," is even trendier.
It's quite a turnaround from a few years ago, when linking #automation, let alone AI, to job losses was as taboo as nudity in the workplace. No, no, managers frowned, new tech will merely liberate workers from drudgery and provide time for more satisfying pursuits. This was obviously before generative #AI (GenAI) threatened to liberate content creators from creating content so they could spend more time cleaning laptop screens or making tea – until GenAI turned out to be a duff substitute prone to mendacity.
Regardless, investors, if not employees, like the sound of a super-lean and highly profitable company run by AI rather than people. Fearful of missing out on a new tech bonanza, authorities have stopped worrying about the risks and jumped. Suddenly, the hallucinating software developed by a strange cult of effective altruists is being foisted on the world's population by governments and companies of all types. No longer taboo, the linkage between #AI and #joblessness has been normalized in that process.
Into this maelstrom stepped Dan Schulman on October 6 last year, when he was appointed CEO of Verizon, one of the biggest telecom operators in the US (and, therefore, the world). It has been a major US employer, with more than 180,000 members of staff back in 2012. Yet by the time Schulman joined, just 100,000 were left after multiple rounds of restructuring and #layoffs.
Schulman's Verizon shrank even more rapidly during his first three months in charge and already seems to feature more agents than The Matrix. It's "where we have agent-building capabilities," was how he described part of Verizon's AI tech stack to equity analysts on the company's earnings call this week. Another layer "is where we deploy agents," he continued. The cost cutting looks set to go on.
'Never send a human to do a machine's job'
In the last decade, most of the job losses at #Verizon have had very little to do with AI and almost nothing to do with its generative version, which did not even exist until around three-and-a-half years ago, when the company was already down to fewer than 120,000 employees. Even so, another 30,000 had disappeared by the end of last year, including about 10,000 since Schulman took over. In November, he had warned staff of plans to cut 13,000 jobs. All those now seem to have been cut. "We're running leaner with the 13,000 reduction behind us," said Tony Skiadas, Verizon's CFO, on the earnings call.
https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/ai-mad-verizon-to-continue-with-cuts-after-ceo-s-jobs-warning