According to public financial disclosures, AT&T generated less revenue per employee last year than its competitors Verizon and T-Mobile, both of which have let go of workers in recent months. If AT&T continues cutting jobs at the same pace as last year, when it shed 8,000 people, its workforce could approach 85,000 employees by 2030. A person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly, described that number as the company’s target.
AT&T called the figure inaccurate. In the first half of 2026, the telecom giant cut some 2,100 jobs. By the end of the decade, AT&T wants to be seen as a “dramatically different” company with a “fantastic” fiber internet service and “kickass wireless network,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco earlier this month.
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AT&T’s transition provides a window into how legacy companies are trying to rebuild their operations as artificial intelligence tools become increasingly capable. AT&T has been around for 150 years, and it still plays a major role in the global economy. Legg says it handles about 15 percent of the world’s internet traffic, and the company employed nearly 131,000 people as of June.
The question is whether it can drive innovation while also shedding costs and trying to keep up with the likes of Elon Musk. Some of AT&T’s decades-old systems still run on paper records and require workers to do things manually, such as when a customer wants to disconnect their phone service. Some of that work is now being automated.
The telecom giant is using AI systems for customer service, to help identify locations for new cell phone towers, and to find maintenance issues on existing ones. A generative AI system AT&T calls GeoModeler adjusts network settings on the fly during rare events like extreme weather. And like many companies, AT&T is using AI to generate software code and help manage service issues.
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