On the heels of Vodafone Group’s 11,000 job cuts, BT Group announced it will be cutting 55,000 jobs in the next several years, with a sizable portion of those jobs replaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
Reviewing fiscal 2023 results, BT Chief Executive Philip Jansen said it was a good year for BT, which grew revenue and EBITDA for the first time in six years. It’s also investing at an all-time high in fiber and 5G, and it’s beginning to pay off.
But moving forward, it’s going to be a leaner BT. The total workforce will be reduced from 130,000 to about 75,000-90,000 by the fiscal year ending March 2030.
Jansen said the introduction of AI across its business could result in the elimination of what equates to about 10,000 roles, according to The Guardian.
“For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said, according to the publication. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitization, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”
Jansen said the job cuts would come from across the global business, but a “big chunk” of those were expected to be in the U.K. as fiber broadband and 5G rollouts are completed and old 3G and copper technologies are phased out, the report said.
EE is BT’s mobile network. The company said the 5G network now covers 68% of the U.K. population and it plans to increase that to 98%. It has 8.6 million 5G connections, up 62% over the last year.
For the full fiscal year, BT reported revenue was down 1% with the growth in its Openreach fiber unit more than offset by declines in other units.
Earlier this week, newly seated Vodafone CEO Margherita Della Valle announced that Vodafone will be cutting 11,000 jobs over the next three years.
Telco returns are among the lowest in Europe while the capital investment demands are high. But Vodafone in particular needs to get back to the basics when it comes to winning over customers in the market, and that’s part of the roadmap to getting back on track, according to Della Valle’s presentation for investors.