Bad news for this telecom company, to layoff 55000 employees by…, not Ratan Tata's TCS or Narayana Murthy's Infosys, it is…
CEO of the British telecommunications company BT, Allison Kirkby revealed this in a Sunday interview with the Financial Times. He said that progress in AI technology might result in additional reductions at the company.
BT in 2023 had planned to cut up to 55,000 jobs by 2030, to reduce its cost base by the end of this decade. However, he also informed the FT that this strategy 'did not reflect' the 'full potential' of artificial intelligence.
As now BT has increasingly used AI to change operations in areas like customer service. 'Depending on what we learn from AI … there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade,' Kirkby said.
The company is planning to use generative AI to assist with sales and support operations in BT and its mobile network division, EE. By December, the firm reported that EE's virtual assistant, Aimee, was able to manage up to 60,000 customer conversations weekly.
BT is not only one company which is planning automation in full swing. The Swedish payments firm Klarna is also taking initiatives to use AI in customer service operations. In 2024, Klarna had revealed that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was performing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents.
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