Among those who chronicle the relentless depletion of the telecom workforce, all eyes were on Verizon and new boss Dan Schulman, who entered his new office in October and immediately erected a makeshift guillotine, promising the US telco’s glum investors that 13,000 heads would soon roll. When results were published last week, as reported by Light Reading, they showed that 10,300 jobs had been cut from the total in the final three months of the year, leaving Verizon with 89,900 employees on New Year’s Eve.
But across the whole year, there was almost as much carnage at close rival AT&T, which avoided the same scrutiny. For the first time in ages, Verizon’s workforce grew slightly in early 2025 before Schulman replaced Hans Vestberg as CEO and launched his program of layoffs. This meant the net reduction in headcount for the full year was 9,700, according to Verizon’s financial statements. Over the same period, AT&T eliminated about 8,000 jobs, finishing the year with 133,000 employees.
That total net loss of 17,700 jobs at AT&T and Verizon was equal to about 7% of the combined workforce at the end of 2024. This would not look so troubling for people in the US telecom sector had 2025 been a year in isolation, when operators were responding to short-term business hardship. Yet neither company suffered a collapse in sales or similar financial calamity, even if results were underwhelming.
AT&T’s revenues increased by about 2.7% last year, to $125.6 billion. Verizon’s were up 2.5%, to $138.2 billion. Those are uninspiring gains that just about mirror the US rate of inflation. Still to report its full-year results, T-Mobile US managed year-over-year sales growth of 7.5% for the first nine months of 2025.
The axman cometh
Sadly, last year’s job losses were not an isolated event but the continuation of a decade-old trend that has gutted the telco workforce. At its high point for staff numbers in 2017, AT&T employed as many as 280,000 people, including those it would acquire with its $85 billion takeover of Time Warner. Around 147,000 jobs have subsequently disappeared, showing the workforce has more than halved in just eight years.
Much of this shrinkage was blamed on AT&T’s ignominious retreat from a TV market that former CEO Randall Stephenson had judged critical to future growth. Eventually divested and now part of Warner Bros. Discovery, Time Warner proved to be one of the most disastrous deals in corporate history. AT&T’s share price dropped more than a third during Stephenson’s tenure between 2007 and 2020, although that didn’t stop him from pocketing about $29 million in total compensation for his final year in charge.
AT&T’s headcount, meanwhile, has continued to shrink. Since the end of 2022, the year it completed its Time Warner divestment, the operator has shed almost 30,000 jobs. There has been a similarly dramatic offloading of employees at Verizon. In 2017, it employed 155,400 people, some 65,400 more than the current total. Together, the two big telcos have slashed 212,500 jobs over this period, making them half the size they were less than ten years ago.
Inevitably, there is talk of automation and AI as factors in this downsizing. Predictive maintenance has reduced the need for truck rolls to repair faulty equipment. Much of what previously required an engineer’s touch can now be handled by software programs running at underpopulated network operations centers. Even the most primitive chatbot seems likely to have had some impact on customer service roles. Retail jobs have been affected by the consumer preference for shopping online.
Nevertheless, what most people including senior telecom executives now mean when they say AI is the mutation that emerged with ChatGPT in late 2022. The companies today seen as integral to AI were attracting relatively little interest until that moment. Nvidia’s share price fell about 46% in 2022 and was worth less than 8% of its current value at the end of the year. CEO Jensen Huang and other AI evangelists are now desperately trying to popularize the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), when machines are supposedly equal to or smarter than humans. Physical AI, describing intelligent robots, is the latest expression to seep from technology into telecom. The bosses of both Ericsson and Nokia have already used it this year.
Skeleton crew
What’s unsettling for the average telco employee is that so many jobs were evidently superfluous even before the age of ChatGPT. Last year, Verizon generated $12.2 billion more in annual sales than it did in 2017 with about 60% of the workforce that it had back then. Accordingly, its annual revenues per employee have surged from around $811,000 to more than $1,537,000 over this period. AT&T’s annual sales have fallen by nearly $35 billion in this timeframe, following its exit from some markets. But its headcount has clearly dropped at a much steeper rate. Its own revenues per employee rose from about $573,000 in 2017 to almost $945,000 last year.
One school of thought is that telcos have trimmed as much fat as they can. In much leaner shape, they will have to look to other areas outside the workforce for any future savings. Verizon, interestingly, has said it will reduce capital expenditure from about $17 billion in 2025 to between $16 billion and $16.5 billion this year. That is potentially bad news for suppliers such as Ericsson and Samsung, the vendors chiefly responsible for its 5G network, but perhaps not so worrying for employees.
Yet AI will be a major disappointment to investors if it does not allow operators to cut costs, grow sales or both. And meaningful sales growth seems unlikely. Customers pay operators for connectivity, not for the application it supports. They are probably not going to spend any more on connecting to an AI app than they would to watch YouTube or play games. At best, AI might help operators to tailor services for specific customers, improving loyalty and reducing churn.
The fear among employees will be that AI or AGI ultimately allows telcos to continue serving their millions of customers with just a skeleton crew, a small fraction of today’s workforce. Software that writes software would seem to put many of today’s desk-bound jobs in danger. With the arrival of physical AI, robots, not humans, might one day be scaling masts and digging trenches to repair or install equipment.
Regardless, for all the job cuts so far, profitability has not dramatically improved within numerous telcos. Verizon’s adjusted margin for earnings (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), a preferred telco measure, was 36.2% last year, the same figure it reported for 2018.
Industry-wide operating costs have also remained stubbornly high in recent years. “Global opex only decreased by 0.2% in 2024, making us question if years of automation and, recently, developments in artificial intelligence are in real terms having any significant impact in telecom efficiency gains,” said Dario Talmesio, global research director at Omdia (a Light Reading sister company), referring to a tracker that monitors opex levels across the telco industry.
Layoffs can initially be expensive, and some operators have resorted to heavier reliance on contractors as they have cut internal jobs, offsetting some of what they might save on staff wages. Labor costs, of course, also account for only a share of total operating expenses, previously reckoned by Moody’s, the ratings agency, to be about 25% for the average European telco. Even a 10% reduction in staff numbers is likely to have only a minor effect on margins. But with so little prospect of sales growth, operators are eking out whatever gains they can.