Every major technology and telecom company has been talking about AI and workforce efficiency for two years. Most of them have been careful about how specific they get. Dan Schulman just got specific.
The Verizon (VZ) CEO told Bloomberg that artificial intelligence could replace “a large percentage” of the company’s customer service work, and he said it plainly, without the usual corporate hedging that surrounds that kind of statement.
What Schulman told Bloomberg about AI and Verizon jobs
Schulman said AI will handle routine customer service requests while human workers focus on more complex cases, according to Bloomberg. The shift, in his view, is not a distant possibility. It is already underway inside the company.
Schulman said he does not believe anyone can honestly claim AI will not disrupt certain job functions. Customer service, in his assessment, is among the most exposed because a large portion of the work is repetitive and process-driven.
Password resets, billing questions, plan explanations, and account changes are the kinds of interactions that can be standardized and handed to AI without meaningful loss of quality for customers.
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The statement lands at a sensitive moment. Schulman cut more than 13,000 Verizon employees in late November 2025, reducing the company’s workforce from approximately 100,000 to around 87,000.
He has described the strategy as “aggressively reducing our cost base” and has been candid since taking the role in October 2025 that AI is central to how he intends to do it, according to Light Reading.
Why telecom customer service is especially exposed to AI replacement
Verizon handles enormous volumes of customer contacts every day across wireless, fiber broadband, and enterprise services. The overwhelming majority involve a short list of predictable problems.
A customer cannot log into their account. A bill looks wrong. A device is not connecting. A plan change needs to be made.
Those interactions share a common characteristic: they follow scripts. The customer describes a problem, the agent works through a decision tree, and the resolution is one of a small number of standard outcomes. That is precisely what AI systems are trained to do, and they can do it faster, at any hour, and without a queue.
The business case is straightforward. If AI resolves a meaningful percentage of those contacts without human intervention, Verizon can reduce labor costs, improve response times, and handle volume spikes without adding headcount.
In a wireless market where subscriber growth has been difficult and margins are under pressure, that combination is worth a great deal to investors, according to Bloomberg.
Verizon’s CEO said he does not believe anyone can honestly claim AI will not disrupt certain job functions.
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What the hybrid model means for the Verizon jobs that remain
Schulman was careful to say the future will be hybrid rather than fully automated. For more complex cases — technical escalations, retention conversations, billing disputes that require judgment — human employees and AI agents will work together rather than AI working alone.
That framing matters for understanding which Verizon jobs are most at risk. The roles built around repetitive first-line interactions are most directly in AI’s path. In contrast, the roles built around judgment, retention, and escalation handling are more likely to survive in some form, though they will change as AI absorbs more of the front-end volume they currently manage.
What Schulman’s comments make clear is that the hybrid model does not protect the overall headcount level. It is simply a description of what the remaining jobs will look like after AI has taken its share of the workload.
The number of people doing customer service at Verizon is expected to fall significantly. The ones who remain will work differently.
Key context on Verizon’s AI strategy and the broader jobs picture:
- A former Verizon employee told Phone Arena that teams had been used to train AI-powered troubleshooting systems for over a year before they were laid off in the November 2025 cuts, directly contradicting the company’s initial statement that the terminations were not a result of AI, according to Phone Arena.
- Verizon’s headcount had already been shrinking before Schulman arrived. Under previous CEO Hans Vestberg, the company cut 44,900 employees between 2018 and 2024, a 31% reduction from the earlier total, Light Reading reported.
- Schulman came to Verizon from PayPal, where he served as CEO from 2014 to 2023; before that, he held leadership roles at AT&T’s consumer unit, Virgin Mobile US, and Sprint, giving him an unusually deep background in telecom workforce and customer operations, according to Bloomberg.
- Verizon completed its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications in early 2026, adding significant fiber broadband infrastructure and customer service volume just as Schulman was reducing headcount, Light Reading confirmed.
- Verizon’s EBITDA was $48.8 billion in 2024, up from $47.2 billion in 2019, despite the ongoing headcount reductions; the company’s challenge is topline growth and subscriber retention rather than profitability, which is why Schulman is using AI as both a cost tool and customer experience tool, Light Reading noted.
What Schulman’s AI and jobs message means for Verizon stock investors
For investors, the direct read on Schulman’s comments is positive at the margin level. Automating a large percentage of customer service interactions at a company with roughly 87,000 employees and hundreds of millions of annual customer contacts represents a meaningful cost reduction opportunity.
If AI can absorb a significant share of front-line service volume, the labor savings compound quickly.
The risk is on the customer experience side. Telecom providers are not well loved by their customers, and automated service interactions have a history of increasing frustration when the AI hits its limits and cannot resolve the problem.
If churn accelerates because customers feel they cannot get help, the cost savings from fewer agents get partially offset by higher subscriber acquisition costs to replace them.
Schulman’s broader track record at PayPal suggests he understands that tension. During his tenure there, he scaled digital financial services while managing customer trust carefully.
The question for Verizon investors is whether the same discipline applies here, and whether a large percentage of customer service work can be handed to AI without the quality decline that has undermined similar moves at other large service companies.