June 09, 2026
Verizon CEO Just Said What the Contact Centre Industry Already Suspected About AI and the Workforce
Executives rarely admit in public what they might say in private about artificial intelligence and the workforce, especially contact centre roles. Dan Schulman, chief executive of Verizon, broke that convention at the Bloomberg Tech Conference in San Francisco on 4 June, telling the audience that AI will replace “a large percentage” of the company’s customer service work. He did not hedge.
“For sure, you’re going to see disruption with AI in certain job functions,” Schulman said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “I don’t see how that’s not possible. I don’t see how anybody can look people in the eye and say that’s not possible.”
What made the remarks land harder than the usual AI conference commentary was what came with them. Schulman outlined in the interview that Verizon has spent three months running AI agents alongside human customer service representatives. The AI agents are producing a customer satisfaction rate 1,280 basis points higher than the previous benchmark. Rather than being merely a proof of concept, it is an attention-grabbing production result.
Schulman described the division of labour in straightforward terms. Routine interactions, such as forgotten passwords, billing queries, and standard account changes, are handled by AI. More complex cases involve a human and an AI agent working together. The goal, he suggested, is a more individual and empathetic service experience, not simply a cheaper one.
Schulman said:
“What we’re seeing in our customer service is that the rote stuff can be done by agents, more complex stuff is a combination of an agent and a human working hand in hand to satisfy an agent much better than working alone.”
Schulman took over as Verizon CEO in October 2025, having previously led PayPal. He has been explicit from the outset that AI is central to the company’s cost strategy. The 13,000 redundancies announced shortly after his appointment represented Verizon’s largest ever workforce reduction. It was part of a programme targeting $9 billion in cost savings.
The company also completed its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications in early 2026, absorbing significant additional contact volume at the same time as reducing headcount.
What the Analysts Are Saying About AI’s Impact on Contact Centre Jobs
Schulman’s comments arrived days after Forrester published a report forecasting that 49% of current customer service jobs will disappear by 2030, based on analysis by researchers Kate Leggett and Laura Ramos. The firms most exposed are those handling large volumes of simple, repeatable enquiries. This is precisely the model that most telecoms operators have run for years.
“There are humans today doing jobs that don’t require the level of intelligence that a human has. That work is going to go away,” said Max Ball, Principal Analyst at Forrester.
Forrester modelled one organisation with 1,000 customer service representatives and projected that the headcount could fall to 40 within four years. The analyst firm does expect new roles to emerge, such as relationship managers and technical specialists, but not at anything close to a one-for-one replacement rate.
Gartner offers a more cautious view, expecting that half of organisations currently planning significant AI-driven headcount reductions will scale those plans back by 2027. The analyst firm cites implementation complexity and data quality as the primary obstacles.
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What the Predictions Mean in Practice For the CX Workforce and Leaders
The Verizon data, supported by Forrester’s research this month, potentially tweaks internal conversations. A 1,280-basis-point CSAT improvement from a live deployment removes the most common objection to contact centre AI investment: that better efficiency will come at the expense of customer experience. Here, the evidence points the other way.
Arguably, the more pressing point of discussion for CX leaders and tech buying committees is readiness rather than appetite. AI agent performance scales with data quality. This encompasses clean CRM records, well-mapped customer journeys, and clear escalation logic, which are things that need to be in place before deployment, not figured out during it. Organisations with fragmented customer data will find the deployment gap wider than they expect.
