> The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times.
> BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI.
> Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers
Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse.
You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.
> The massive cut represents more than 40% of the company’s 130,000-strong workforce—including 30,000 contractors—and it will impact both BT employees and third-party contractors, according to the Financial Times.
> BT CEO Philip Jansen told reporters that the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become “leaner,” but added that he expects around 10,000 of those jobs to be replaced by AI.
> Citing an unnamed source close to the company, the FT report added that the cuts will also affect 15,000 fiber engineers and 10,000 maintenance workers
Can you replace customer service agents with AI? The experience will be worse, but as with every innovation in customer service in recent decades (phone trees, outsourced email support, "please go browse our knowledge base"), you don't need AI to save money by reducing CS costs. I think this is just a platitude thrown out to pretend they have a plan to stop the service getting worse.
You can also see it with the cuts to fiber engineers and maintenence workers. AI isn't laying cables yet or in the near future, so clearly they're hoping to save on these labour costs by doing less and working their existing workers harder (maybe with the threat of AI taking their jobs). Some of that may be cyclical, they're probably nearing the end of areas they can economically upgrade from copper to fiber, and some of that is a business decision that they can milk their existing network longer before looking at upgrades.