Verizon’s ai gamble: 2.25 million subscribers lost, a human cost?
Verizon’s latest strategy – a wholesale handover of the customer experience to AI – is rapidly proving to be a disastrous miscalculation. CEO Dan Schulman’s ambitious plan to ‘treat subscribers like humans, not like accounts’ is colliding headfirst with a stark reality: subscriber numbers are plummeting.
A bet on bots, a loss of trust
Schulman admitted the carrier’s competitive edge over rivals has significantly eroded, rendering ‘best network’ alone insufficient to retain customers. His response? An aggressive push into AI, starting with Anthropic’s Mythos model, delivered with a disconcerting dose of dismissiveness towards those ‘scared’ of the Technology.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Just weeks after quietly raising prices on its popular Netflix and HBO Max bundle – a move that immediately triggered customer outrage – Verizon is doubling down on a strategy that feels, frankly, tone-deaf. The simultaneous layoffs of 13,000 employees and the embrace of AI represent a brutal cost-cutting exercise masquerading as customer-centric innovation.
The human factor – overlooked
Let’s be clear: customers aren’t looking for a smarter chatbot. They demand a real person, someone who can actually resolve their issues. Schulman’s recent admission that AI could push unemployment past 20% – a consequence of automating call centers and retail operations – underscores the very human cost of this technological leap.
Verizon’s subscriber base is already voicing its discontent, flooding social media with frustrations about the direction of the company. It’s a resounding message: this isn’t the customer experience they envisioned.
Beyond the algorithm
What Verizon truly needs isn't a sophisticated AI assistant. It’s accountability. It’s a consistently applied loyalty discount policy – one that doesn’t repeatedly vanish into thin air. Mythos can optimize email campaigns and predict retention offers, certainly. But it can’t replicate the nuanced understanding and genuine empathy of a human representative. The hard part – the part that prevents customers from fleeing – is fundamentally human.
Schulman’s relative honesty about the pricing debacle offers a sliver of hope, and Q4 finally saw a breach in the losing streak. However, layering Mythos on top of a company grappling with massive job losses and aggressive cost-cutting initiatives feels less like a strategic pivot and more like a desperate attempt to streamline operations. Verizon's subscribers are telling them, in no uncertain terms, that they’re prioritizing efficiency over genuine customer care.
The question remains unanswered: what does ‘customer centric’ truly mean when the strategy is predicated on replacing human agents with an algorithmic facade?