Global call center headcount sits 5.3 percent below its December 2023 peak. That decline has run for eight straight quarters. Every quarter marked a year-over-year drop, Revelio Labs reported Oct. 61. New hires per 100 workers fell from 25.1 to 17.2 since November 2022, when ChatGPT launched1. A decade of growth turned into an eight-quarter slide, right as carriers, banks and airlines began routing calls through a chatbot first.
The easy read calls that slide proof: a machine does the job better than a person did. Dan Schulman, Verizon's chief executive, made exactly that case at a Bloomberg Tech Conference appearance in June. "In the last 3 months, we've been experimenting with agents that are replacing some of our customer service reps. And those agents, their customer satisfaction rate is 1,280 basis points better than what we had before," Schulman said2. That gain works out to 12.8 percentage points, and a company swapping workers for software, watching its own score climb, sounds like the end of the argument.
That argument continues past the one number Schulman cited. A satisfaction score measures the call that got answered, and it skips the worker who lost the shift. Revelio Labs counted both halves: only 10.8 percent of departing workers land in technical support, customer success or software roles, the jobs analysts call the industry's upward path. Instead, 49.7 percent move sideways into other customer service, sales or office work1. The ladder stayed the same height, and fewer workers now reach it.
Chart 1
Only 10.8 percent of departing call center workers reach a technical or software role
Share of departing global call center workers by where they land next, Revelio Labs, Oct. 6, 2026
One bar splits into three segments: the accent segment moves up to technical or software roles, the base segment moves sideways to other service or sales work, and the gray segment covers every other exit.
Source: Revelio Labs [1]. Chart by The AILately.com Desk.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Technical or software roles | 10.8% |
| Sideways to service or sales | 49.7% |
| Other exits | 39.5% |
| Whole | 100% |
Verizon is the wireless industry's clearest example of that shortening. Schulman's company cut 16,600 jobs over nine months ending in July3. AT&T runs the same play. Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Legg told WIRED in September that the carrier expects a smaller headcount in five years, after cuts of roughly 8,000 jobs in 2025 and 2,160 more in the first half of 20266. Two carriers, two executives, one direction: fewer people answer the phone, and more of the budget goes to the software that now does.
Verizon's own research complicates the story its chief executive told from the stage. The company's CX Annual Insights report, published in August 2025, found human-led service earning an 88 percent satisfaction rate, against 60 percent for AI-driven service: a 28-point gap running opposite the number Schulman cited ten months later4. Jeannie Walters, chief experience officer at Experience Investigators, read that gap the way someone who studies contact centers reads it. "A bot's scorecard often rewards keeping customers away from live agents, so that's what the bot is literally trying to do," Walters said5. A metric that rewards avoided calls will always look better than one that rewards solved problems.
Chart 2
Verizon's 2025 research found a 28-point AI service gap; its CEO cited a 12.8-point AI gain in 2026
Percentage-point gap between AI-led and human-led service, two separate Verizon-linked readings
Each column is one reading of the AI-versus-human gap: the gray column is Verizon's 2025 study, where AI trailed by 28 points, and the magenta column is the 12.8-point AI gain Schulman cited from 2026.
Sources: CX Today [2]; Channel Insider [4]. Chart by The AILately.com Desk.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 2025 CX study | −28 points |
| 2026 AI pilot | 12.8 points |
Caelan Wilkie-Rogers, the Revelio Labs economic analyst who wrote the Oct. 6 report, named the stake plainly. "For more than a decade, call centers were one of the most reliable ways into formal office work in middle- and lower-income countries. That route is now shrinking," Wilkie-Rogers wrote1. Call centers paid little, and they asked for a phone line and a headset, a lower bar than a degree, which is why workers in the Philippines, India and the American South used the job as a first rung into office work at all. Revelio's data show the decline moved from richer countries first and reached poorer ones only in 2025, the order a company cuts costs when money leads and skill follows1.
McKinsey's own labor forecast backs the shape of that worry, scaled past any single carrier. The firm's Global Institute expects automation to cut demand for 36 million American jobs by 2035. It expects 41 million jobs created elsewhere, yet only one in seven displaced workers has a direct path into one of the growing roles, Fortune reported from the October report7. A net gain on a spreadsheet and a missing rung on a ladder are two different findings. Wireless carriers are running the experiment that decides which one describes an actual worker's year.
Who pays for the basis points Schulman cited in June? Verizon's shareholders collect the lower cost to serve either way. Its executives get to cite a number that favors the quarter they report. The worker who answered phones last year absorbs what is left. That worker competes for a sales floor job against every other worker a chatbot also freed up, in a labor market where the next rung keeps getting harder to reach.
Call centers paid little and promised less glamour, and this argument skips any claim to keep one on the strength of nostalgia. The claim runs narrower and harder to wave away: for a decade, the first rung into formal office work ran through a phone bank, and the industry removing that rung has yet to build the next one at the same scale. Verizon counts its win in basis points. Revelio Labs counts it in people who used to have a route up and now settle for a sideways move. Both numbers are real, and only one of them shows up in a press release.
Wireless carriers will keep publishing the number that favors them, and the industry's own workforce data will keep telling a colder story underneath it. The Signal, AI Lately's daily email brief, tracks which number wins the argument next, with a signup waiting at the bottom of this page.
Sources
- Caelan Wilkie-Rogers, "After a Decade of Growth, Global Call Center Employment Is Shrinking," Revelio Labs, Oct. 6, 2026, https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/ai-and-work/after-a-decade-of-growth-global-call-center-employment-is-shrinking
- Nicole Willing, "Verizon CEO Says AI Agents Could Displace a Large Percentage of Customer Service Jobs," CX Today, June 8, 2026, https://cxtoday.com/verizon-ceo-ai-agents-could-displace-a-large-percentage-of-customer-service-jobs
- Adrian Parham, "Verizon Cuts 16,600 Jobs in Nine Months as Its AI Stack Nears Completion," Tech Times, July 19, 2026, https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320972/20260719/verizon-cuts-16600-jobs-nine-months-its-ai-stack-nears-completion.htm
- Franklin Okeke, "AI Customer Service Falls Short of User Expectations: Verizon," Channel Insider, Aug. 19, 2025, https://www.channelinsider.com/ai/verizon-cx-study-ai/
- Matt Vartabedian, "Customers say AI has made their service experience worse," Customer Experience Dive, Oct. 2, 2026, https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/customers-say-ai-made-their-service-experience-worse/831944/
- Harj Singh, "AT&T Layoffs 2026: CTO Sees a Smaller Workforce Ahead," Grind Hotline, Sept. 23, 2026, https://www.grindhotline.com/att-layoffs-2026-cto-smaller-workforce-ai-copper-network.html
- Catherina Gioino, "McKinsey: AI will create more jobs than it kills — after destroying 11 million," Fortune, Oct. 3, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/10/03/ai-job-displacement-creation-new-careers-11-million-americans-workforce-mobility/