AI will displace ‘a large percentage’ of CX jobs: Verizon CEO
MANCHESTER, UNITED STATES — Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said AI agents will displace “a large percentage” of customer service jobs — a direct counterpoint to the augmentation narrative that has dominated industry responses to AI’s impact.
According to a report from CX Today, Schulman cited Verizon’s own three-month AI agent experiments, which showed customer satisfaction rates 1,280 basis points higher than previous service models.
AI agents outperform humans in Verizon’s CX trials
Verizon began testing AI agents to replace customer service representatives three months ago — producing a 1,280-basis-point improvement in customer satisfaction over the previous service model.
A satisfaction gain of 1,280 basis points is not an incremental improvement — it is a structural performance argument for AI replacement in routine CX delivery, and Schulman indicated Fortune 100 peers are reaching the same conclusion.
Schulman specified the scope: routine tasks — password resets, billing inquiries — are fully automatable, while complex issues still require humans and AI working in combination.
“In the last 3 months, we’ve been experimenting with agents that are replacing some of our customer service reps,” Schulman said.
Fortune 100 AI adoption and $20Mn reskilling commitment
Schulman described the coming AI adoption wave as inevitable across the Fortune 100 — and said Verizon would lean heavily on the technology, expecting peers to do the same.
Verizon has committed $20 million to employee training and reskilling programs to prepare workers whose roles will be affected by AI deployment.
Schulman framed workforce displacement not as a consequence to be accepted passively, but as something companies have a direct responsibility to address — and the $20 million commitment is an early marker of what corporate accountability for worker transition looks like at enterprise scale.
When a Fortune 100 CEO pairs a 1,280-bps satisfaction advantage with an explicit displacement forecast, the augmentation-not-replacement framing that most BPO operators are still leading with faces its most credible challenge yet.
“I’m going to lean heavy as I think all of my colleagues will. All of Fortune 100 will lean heavy on AI,” Schulman said.
For BPO and CX operators, Verizon’s 1,280-bps trial result and Schulman’s Fortune 100 forecast signal that AI displacement is running ahead of the sector’s planning assumptions. The $20 million reskilling commitment is an early indicator of what accountability for workforce displacement will eventually require at scale.
