AT&T's CTO says the company will not have today's headcount in five years

A customer who calls to cancel an AT&T landline can still set off a process that runs on paper records and needs a person to work it by hand, and AT&T says some of that work is now being automated ^[9].

That one request carries two different stories: a model taking over a task, and a product being withdrawn so the task stops arriving. Copper is the larger of the two. By the end of this year AT&T expects it will no longer have to offer copper across more than 85 percent of its existing footprint ^[13]. Withdrawing those services generally needs state and federal approval, because rural areas may have no alternative, and the plans have drawn local protests in some communities ^[14]. "What it allows us to do is to retire underutilized infrastructure, and infrastructure that is absorbing a lot of power and personnel attention," chief financial officer Pascal Desroches said at a conference earlier this month ^[15].

AT&T declined to share exact electricity figures. It said in July that total energy consumption fell 13.1 percent from 2020 through the end of 2025 ^[16], and that moving off copper has saved 660,000 megawatt-hours since 2024, enough on the company's reckoning to power about 65,000 homes ^[17]. "There's a bunch of copper out there that probably makes AT&T the fifth-largest copper mine in the United States right now, seriously," chief executive John Stankey said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco this month ^[18].

The hub swap moves work rather than deleting it. From next year, cloud software from the Israeli startup DriveNets, in which AT&T is an investor, replaces physical hardware at thousands of central hubs, so a technician can make a change remotely when a customer asks for faster internet ^[11]. The request still comes in; a person handles it from a console. AT&T expects a number of middle management and junior developer roles to disappear as more tasks are automated ^[12]. The AI systems it names are specific: customer service, picking sites for new towers, finding maintenance problems on existing ones, writing code, and a generative system called GeoModeler that adjusts network settings on the fly during rare events like extreme weather ^[10].

Start from the headcount. AT&T employed nearly 131,000 people as of June ^[3], so reaching 85,000 means removing about 46,000 roles ^[1]. Across the four and a half years from June 2026 to the end of 2030, that is roughly 10,200 a year ^[2]. The company shed 8,000 last year ^[6] and some 2,100 in the first half of 2026 ^[5], an annual rate of about 4,200, so the target needs roughly two and a half times the current pace ^[3]. Hold the first-half rate and AT&T ends the decade near 112,000 people ^[4]. The 85,000 figure came from a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly, and AT&T called it inaccurate ^[7].

Revenue per employee rises when revenue grows or when headcount falls, and Legg said that comparing AT&T's staffing levels with those of peers plays a role in its decisionmaking ^[2]. Public financial disclosures show AT&T generated less revenue per employee last year than Verizon or T-Mobile, both of which have let go of workers in recent months ^[8].

For anyone applying this to their own estate, the useful question is whether the demand that created the work still exists. Copper disconnects fail that question, because the line goes away and the queue goes with it. Hub configuration passes, and the work has moved to a console. Customer service contacts and code changes pass too, and there the claim is that software absorbs them. Only that third group is a productivity claim, and the numbers AT&T has published are energy numbers ^[16]. Jobs in US telecommunications have been declining for 25 years, according to government data ^[19].