AT&T Is Automating Away Jobs—and Retiring Its Old Telecom Empire

AT&T, which has shed more than half its workforce in a decade, plans to keep cutting jobs as it prepares for the AI era. The 150-year-old telecom giant is also retiring its landline network and automating internal work with AI — a downsizing its CTO, Jeremy Legg, says is already cutting electricity use.

Not the same headcount

“We’re not going to have the same headcount in five years as we do today,” Legg told WIRED, adding that comparisons with peers shape its decisions. Public disclosures show AT&T earned less revenue per employee last year than Verizon and T-Mobile, which also cut staff.

At last year’s pace — when it shed 8,000 people — AT&T’s workforce could approach 85,000 by 2030. A person familiar with the matter, not authorized to speak publicly, called that the company’s target; AT&T says the figure is inaccurate. It cut about 2,100 jobs in the first half of 2026 and employed nearly 131,000 people as of June, carrying roughly 15 percent of the world’s internet traffic.

AI moves into the network

Some decades-old AT&T systems still run on paper records and need manual work, such as disconnecting a customer’s phone service; part of that is now automated. The company uses AI for customer service, to help pick sites for new cell towers and to spot maintenance issues on existing ones, and a generative AI system called GeoModeler adjusts network settings during extreme weather.

Starting next year, AT&T will replace hardware at thousands of central hubs with cloud software from Israeli startup DriveNets, in which it is an investor, letting technicians make adjustments remotely. As more tasks are automated, some middle management and junior developer roles are expected to disappear.

Copper out, fiber in

AT&T is also decommissioning the energy-intensive copper network that long powered landline and DSL service. Dropping those services usually needs state and federal approval, since rural areas may lack alternatives, and the plans have drawn local protests. By the end of this year, AT&T expects it will no longer have to offer copper across more than 85 percent of its footprint.

“It allows us to retire underutilized infrastructure that is absorbing a lot of power and personnel attention,” chief financial officer Pascal Desroches said this month. AT&T won’t share exact electricity figures, but says total energy use fell 13.1 percent from 2020 through 2025 and that leaving copper behind saved 660,000 megawatt-hours since 2024 — enough for about 65,000 homes.