Dan Schulman became Verizon's CEO last October and within a month cut more than 13,000 positions, roughly 20% of the company's nonunion workforce. He simultaneously announced a $20 million reskilling fund to prepare those workers for what he called the "age of AI." That fund, divided evenly, comes out to about $1,538 per person.
By April, Schulman was on a full media tour. He told the Wall Street Journal that AI and humanoid robots would push unemployment to 20% to 30% within two to five years. He compared the technology's significance to the Renaissance and the invention of fire. He urged fellow CEOs to stop sugarcoating what's coming for their employees.
"It's a very difficult time, and everyone knows it is," Schulman said. "So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth, as best you can, is essential."
That authenticity extended to specifics. At a Morgan Stanley conference in March, Schulman didn't mince words about the cuts going beyond the initial 13,000. "We took out a whole heck of a lot of our contracted workforce as well," he said. Verizon also started converting 179 corporate stores to franchises and reviewing its office space across four states. Then the company went quiet. Fierce Network noted that Verizon had gone unusually silent on specifics while the restructuring continued internally.
What Schulman doesn't bring up in those interviews is that Verizon was shrinking long before generative AI existed. Between 2015 and October 2022, the company saw its headcount fall by 58,200 employees. In 2016, Verizon had about 161,000 workers and operating costs around $97 billion. By last year, headcount was under 90,000 and those costs had actually climbed to roughly $109 billion. A decade of layoffs and the bills still went up.
The business pressures tell a clearer story than the AI rhetoric. Verizon lost about 2.25 million customers over the past three years because of price hikes and tougher competition. Postpaid phone churn reached 0.95% in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 7 basis points from the same quarter the year prior. This is a telecom company dealing with telecom problems, and AI provides a much better narrative for cuts that were already in motion.
Schulman's own 30% unemployment prediction also creates a problem for his bottom line if you follow it to its logical end. Verizon's postpaid wireless business averages almost $150 a month per account. If nearly a third of Americans are out of work, millions of those customers simply can't afford that bill anymore. For context, 30% unemployment would be several points worse than the Great Depression.
Wall Street hasn't rallied behind the vision either. Verizon's stock is down roughly 20% since 2021, though the shares are still worth a bit more than when Schulman took over. Light Reading started calling him "telecom's AI doomster-in-chief."
Schulman might be the most candid CEO in corporate America right now, and there is something genuinely refreshing about a leader who warns employees before cutting them rather than after. But candor and investment are two very different things, and $1,538 per worker is a rounding error with a press release attached to it. Verizon was cutting tens of thousands of jobs for a decade before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. The new CEO just found better language for it.
