British Telecom CEO says AI could replace 10,000 jobs

• British telecom giant BT said it will cut 40,000 to 55,000 jobs by 2030.
• The company said the reduction will come from completing the construction of fiber networks and the replacement of AI.
• CEO Philip Jansen said the company “obviously benefits from AI.”

British telecoms giant BT Group said it plans to cut up to 55,000 jobs by 2030, at least 10,000 of which could be replaced by some form of artificial intelligence.

BT Group Chief Executive Philip Jansen said at an earnings call that the company “will undoubtedly benefit from AI,” according to CNN. The company employs approximately 130,000 people.

He said the company’s chatbot, named “Amy,” can already answer most customer questions. The company’s continued experimentation with generative AI, like OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, could lead to new products and services, he said.

The company said it hopes improvements to its artificial intelligence and low-maintenance network will reduce the need for thousands of full-time customer service employees and third-party contractors. Earnings slides show that the company has cut its workforce from 135,000 to 130,000 over 2022-2023. By 2030, the number of employees is expected to grow from 75,000 to 90,000.

Janssen estimated that about 10,000 of the jobs BT will cut could be replaced by processes of “digitization and automation” such as AI replacement.

Employers inside and outside the private sector have long sought to incorporate AI elements. For example, a New Mexico government agency had been implementing AI-driven automated processes for years to support public services, Insider previously reported.

Recently, however, the growing interest in generative AI and ChatGPT seems to have attracted even more participants.

A small study is also currently being conducted to show how employees, especially customer service employees, operate such tools. One study on the use of AI chat programs, involving more than 5,000 of his customer service representatives from unidentified Fortune 500 companies, found productivity gains to varying degrees depending on who used them. I was.

According to the study, more specialized customer service representatives did not realize that using such tools would improve their productivity. One of the study’s authors, Professor Eric Brynjolfsson of the Stanford Human-Centric AI Lab, told Insider that he felt agent productivity gains were “close to 0%.”

Research has shown that the tool helped improve productivity for agents who needed more training and experience. Studies show that the program increased average productivity by about 14%.