On April 26, LostJobs covered Verizon CEO Dan Schulman’s warning that AI could push US unemployment to 20-30% within two to five years, delivered days after he asked employees to draft their own obituaries using AI tools. We named three things to watch: the July earnings call, whether any other Fortune 100 CEO would match Schulman’s $20M retraining fund, and whether BLS data would start showing the strain. Four months later, two of those three have an answer, and a fourth data point nobody was watching just landed on top of them.
The numbers that came in
On July 24, Verizon posted the highest adjusted EBITDA in company history: $13.7B, up 7.2% year over year, at a 40.1% margin, up from 37.1% a year earlier. Free cash flow hit $6.4B for the quarter, up 24.4%, and $10.2B for the first half, up 16%. Verizon added 184,000 postpaid phone subscribers and cut consumer churn to 0.84%, its best mark in five years. The company raised full-year guidance on the strength of it.
Layoffs kept pace with the profit. Cumulative headcount reductions under Schulman, who took over in October 2025, now exceed 16,600. November 2025 brought the heaviest round: 13,000 jobs, roughly 13% of the workforce, the largest single cut in Verizon’s history. May added several hundred more. The most recent round, announced in July and effective August 16, transferred 274 company-owned retail stores to independent operators, about 3,000 roles off Verizon’s payroll, split between roughly 500 genuine corporate eliminations and 2,500 employment transfers. Verizon told Reuters that in past divestitures, about 70% of transferred staff kept their jobs under the new operator.
Seventy percent retained is not seventy percent unchanged. The Communications Workers of America represents more than 30,000 Verizon employees and struck 39,000-strong in 2016, the last time the union tested how far it could push back against a restructuring of this size. A store changing hands changes who the employer is, which reopens the bargaining unit, the recognition, and the contract terms for whoever the new operator keeps on. Retention answers whether someone has a job. It doesn’t answer whose contract they’re working under, and that distinction is exactly what CWA representatives are positioned to contest store by store rather than in one national fight.
Verizon still owns roughly 1,000 company-run stores after the August transfer. If the 274 divested locations hold their sales numbers under independent operators through the holiday quarter, the arithmetic for moving another tranche in 2027 gets easier, and AT&T or T-Mobile get a live domestic comparison to point at. That is the part of this story with the longest tail: not the headcount number this quarter, but who employs the American telecom retail workforce five years from now.
What Verizon says, and what its own timeline says
Verizon is explicit that the latest round isn’t about AI. That denial sits uneasily next to the company’s own schedule: an enterprise-wide AI stack, covering customer service, digital sales, software development, and network operations, targeted functionally complete by July 2026 and fully operational by November. November is also the month the company’s $5B operating-expense target, a “substantial portion” of it from headcount by Schulman’s own account on the January earnings call, is due to close.
Oracle set the harder-to-walk-back precedent in June: its annual report told the SEC that AI adoption “have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” attached to a 21,000-role cut. That’s a disclosure in a 10-K, not a line in a press release, and one that’s much harder to retract later. Verizon has chosen the press-release denial for now. Whether that holds past November, once the AI stack is live and the cost target has to be explained on its own terms, is the thing worth re-checking.
The regulatory footnote that isn’t a footnote
On August 17, the Supreme Court declined, without explanation, to hear Verizon’s bid to recover a $47M FCC fine, its share of an April 2024 penalty against four carriers for selling customers’ real-time location data, alongside T-Mobile’s $80M, AT&T’s $57M, and Sprint’s $12M. AT&T’s case survives on a different procedural track. Verizon’s doesn’t. The appeal is over.
The irony sits one layer down. The fine was about how Verizon handled customer data. The Court just confirmed the FCC’s authority to penalize that handling stands. The operation doing that handling is exactly the one Verizon is in the process of automating: customer service and data operations are named line items in the AI stack rolling out through November. Compliance-adjacent headcount is also the kind a company trims quietly, with no press release attached, once a case is capped and paid rather than open and live. That’s not a cut Verizon will ever list on a slide. It’s the kind of attrition that shows up nowhere except an org chart two years out.
The labor read
Zoom out and the shape isn’t Verizon-specific. PayPal cut roughly 6,700 roles this quarter in an ongoing restructuring. Uber cut 3,300. Robinhood trimmed 10% of full-time staff. Meta’s 8,000-person round, with $1.18B in severance, is already on the record. Polymarket’s contract on whether 2026 US tech layoffs finish the year higher than they started sits at 88% Up, having gained 21.5 points in the past month, real money betting on acceleration, not a peak.
Two of LostJobs’ three April questions now have answers. Verizon’s Q2 results put it ahead of the pack on margin improvement, confirming the operating logic behind the cuts. No other Fortune 100 CEO has matched the $20M retraining commitment as of this writing. The third question, whether BLS data breaks, is still open. What’s now added to the list: whether Verizon keeps saying “not AI” once the stack goes live in November and the $5B target has to be accounted for on its own terms. That sentence, not the next earnings call, is the one worth watching.
