Verizon and AT&T won’t stop cutting jobs.  Will it ever end?

In a September security filing, Verizon said 4,800 jobs would be cut by March 2025 at a severance cost of about $1.8 billion.  Its latest results this week showed headcount had fallen by another 2,700 between July and September, to about 101,200 total employees.  Sales growth was flat year over year, reaching $33.33 billion. Service and other revenue growth was offset by declines in wireless equipment revenue

At AT&T, job losses were 2,400 during the same time period, to 143,600 employees down from 149,900 on January 31, 2024.  AT&T is expanding its $8 billion cost-reduction program, which includes significant layoffs. The company has reduced its workforce by more than 115,000 employees over the past five years, with further cuts expected in 2024 (Sources: TechBlog, WRAL TechWire).

Combined, the two major U.S. telcos now have only 244,800 employees and that number will surely shrink from now till March 2025.  Yet in 2015, they had a combined headcount of 459,150, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The disappearance of 214,350 positions since then, almost half the entire workforce, has occurred as telecom has become a more critical feature of most people’s lives with mobile everything and video streaming (mostly over wireline networks).

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Combined revenues fell from $278.4 billion in 2015 to $256.4 billion last year due entirely to a sales decline at AT&T. Last year, its turnover of $122.4 billion represented a 16% drop on the figure in 2015. But this meant sales per employee rose from about $520,000 to $813,000. At Verizon, they have grown from roughly $741,000 to $1.27 million. The only telecom rival they have had to worry about is T-Mobile US, which launched its disruptive “Uncarrier” campaign before 2015.

For sure, automation, digitization and reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) have all been acknowledged by telco executives as factors in headcount shrinkage.  Their objective now is to realize “zero-touch” or “fully autonomous” or “intent-based” networks, which are able to operate themselves and perform tasks with minimal or no human intervention.  Such a network essentially manages itself by performing tasks based on predefined goals or “intents,” without requiring manual configuration or troubleshooting.  Here’s a quick summary:

• Zero-touch:

  This term emphasizes the ability to automatically provision and configure new devices on a network without any manual intervention, essentially “plug and play” functionality. 
• Fully autonomous:

  This signifies a network that can not only self-configure but also monitor its own health, diagnose issues, and take corrective actions independently, adapting to changing conditions without human input.
• Intent-based:

  This concept focuses on expressing the desired network behavior or outcome through high-level instructions (“intents”), which the system then translates into specific actions to achieve that goal. 

It remains to be seen if such zero-touch, autonomous, intent based networks will live up to their potential and promise.

References:

https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/AT&T-and-Verizon-cut-5,100-jobs-as-AI-fears-grow-

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