TL;DR
Verizon is laying off about 3,000 retail workers and transferring 274 corporate stores to independent owners under CEO Dan Schulman.
Verizon is cutting about 3,000 employees from its corporate-owned retail stores and transferring 274 locations to independent operators, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The changes take effect on August 16 and will leave the largest US mobile carrier with 1,000 company-owned stores alongside roughly 5,000 independent franchises. A company spokesperson said many of the workers at the transferred stores are likely to be retained by the new owners, though they will no longer be on Verizon's payroll.
The cuts are the third major round of layoffs under CEO Dan Schulman, who took the role in October 2025 after leading PayPal for nearly a decade. In November, Verizon eliminated 20 percent of its nonunion workforce, roughly 13,000 employees, as part of a campaign to cut $5 billion in operating expenses by the end of 2026. Hundreds more positions were cut in May.
Schulman has been direct about where he sees the savings going. In a June interview with Bloomberg, he said he expects artificial intelligence to replace “a large percentage” of customer service work, pointing to routine tasks like billing inquiries and account changes as especially vulnerable. Verizon has said its AI systems already produce satisfaction scores nearly 13 percent higher than human agents on comparable interactions.
The shift from corporate-owned stores to independent franchises reduces Verizon's fixed retail costs while pushing operational risk to third-party owners, a familiar playbook in an industry converting payroll into capital expenditure. Verizon also recently launched a simplified wireless plan and a new loyalty rewards programme offering discounts to existing customers, both efforts to slow subscriber losses as competition from T-Mobile and cable providers intensifies.
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The telecom industry's embrace of AI-driven cost-cutting mirrors what is happening across corporate America. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said AI has already eliminated 30 to 40 percent of jobs in some divisions, and the tech sector alone has shed more than 95,000 positions in 2026, with nearly half of surveyed hiring managers citing AI as the primary driver. Verizon is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on July 24.
What Schulman has not addressed is whether AI can actually replicate what in-store retail employees do, which extends beyond answering billing questions to handling device trade-ins, troubleshooting hardware, and closing sales face to face. The franchise operators inheriting those 274 stores will need the same staff to do the same work, just at lower cost to Verizon. The jobs are not disappearing so much as they are moving off one balance sheet and onto another.