Verizon CEO Dan Schulman has stated plainly what most enterprise leaders have avoided saying publicly: AI agents will displace "a large percentage" of customer service roles, and this disruption is unavoidable. His comments cut through the industry's preferred narrative that AI will augment rather than replace human workers. Verizon's own testing supports this trajectory—AI agents handling routine queries have achieved customer satisfaction scores 1,280 basis points higher than traditional representatives, and Schulman confirmed the telco is already "replacing some of our customer service reps" with these systems. The distinction he draws is instructive: rote work (password resets, billing inquiries) will be fully automated, whilst complex issues will require human-AI collaboration. Yet this framing raises a critical question for CX leaders implementing Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, or similar platforms: if "rote stuff" represents a large percentage of current contact center volume, what does workforce displacement actually look like when you remove it? The answer likely depends on how aggressively your organisation pursues automation versus augmentation.
The tension between cost pressure and the augmentation narrative is now explicit. Board executives are demanding AI deployment specifically to reduce labour costs—a reality Simon Thorpe from Pegasystems acknowledged directly. Schulman's $20 million reskilling investment, whilst notable, is described as "the tip of the iceberg," suggesting even Verizon recognises the scale of retraining required will far exceed current commitments. Meanwhile, OpenAI's Sam Altman has privately revised his position on job replacement after attempting to automate his own communications, concluding that customer service interactions require human judgment and empathy that remain difficult to outsource. This creates an operational paradox for support leaders: your platform vendors are building increasingly capable agentic systems, your boards are demanding deployment, yet the evidence suggests customers still value human interaction for anything beyond transactional queries. The defining question is no longer whether to automate, but which specific interaction types your organisation can safely hand to agents without degrading trust or accountability—and whether your current team structure can be redeployed to handle the complex cases that remain.
Executives, CX leaders and analysts are increasingly framing AI agents as tools that can augment human representatives rather than eliminate them entirely, pointing to the continued importance of empathy, judgment and relationship management in customer interactions. But comments from Verizon CEO Da
Verizon CEO: AI Agents Could Displace ‘A Large Percentage’ of Customer Service Jobs CX Today