BT to cut 55,000 jobs and replace 10,000 of them with AI

UK Telecoms giant BT group is slashing up to 55,000 of its 130,000 employees in the next seven years, claiming that artificial intelligence could replace at least 10,000 of them.

Philip Jansen, CEO of BT Group, stated: “We will be a beneficiary of AI unequivocally.” He also said that the artificial intelligence would help BT deliver customer service “in a more seamless way,” according to CNN.

At the moment, BT Group’s AI positions include its own chatbot “Amy” which “deals with lots of customer queries already,” Jansen noted. However, the telecoms firm is beginning to explore new products and services that also might come from “generative AI and large language model AIs,” says the CEO.

“By continuing to build and connect like fury, digitise the way we work and simplify our structure, by the end of the 2020s BT Group will rely on a much smaller workforce and significantly reduced cost base,” the CEO said in his statement.

The employees affected will be full-time customer service employees and third-party contractors.

Last week, the so-called “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, left his position at Google to spread awareness of the “dangers” of artificial intelligence.

In an interview with the New York Times, Hinton worried about how AI could take jobs and create a world where many will “not be able to know what is true anymore”.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people – a few people believed that. But most people thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that,” he said.

Big tech corporation IBM, also released a statement recently revealing that it has put the brakes on hiring new employees, with the idea that AI could replace nearly 8,000 of its jobs, too.

Its CEO, Arvind Krishna, said that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automation in the next five years.