By Chip Cutter and Patience Haggin
For a big-company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon's Dan Schulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce.
Just months into the job, he has predicted 20% to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years. He warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual-labor jobs still seen as safe today. And he has pushed for more education and reskilling to help workers adapt to the intensifying tech disruption.
Couched in the blunt AI talk is a warning for other CEOs: Be candid about the coming disruption, or risk a public backlash.
"It's a very difficult time, and everyone knows it is," Schulman said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth, as best you can" is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20 million career-transition and retraining fund for the "age of AI" when the company began laying off 13,000 workers last year.
"Change is necessary, but it can be difficult," he wrote to staff then.
The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public-company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth but demur on, or even reject, the idea of job losses.
"A lot of people are saying AI is coming, we're going to run out of jobs -- it's exactly the opposite," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and prosperity. Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI. Though some roles will be replaced, "there will be other jobs created," he told CNBC in February.
In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces. Block, which cut nearly half of its staff, predicted other companies other companies would soon follow suit. A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will reshape roughly half of U.S. jobs in two to three years and that up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright.
Many Americans fear that will happen, too. In a Quinnipiac University survey of 1,400 U.S. adults in March, 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year.
That anti-AI sentiment has fueled protests over the building of energy-guzzling data centers to run the technology -- and even violence: The suspect in a Molotov cocktail-style attack at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's California home called for "Luigi-ing some tech CEOs" months before, a reference to the 2024 fatal street shooting of a UnitedHealth executive.
"CEOs are not thinking about this in the right way," said Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, who is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. "They should be very candid with them and paint the big picture."
Schulman's big picture has also included sweeping job cuts. The 13,000 layoffs he announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October were Verizon's largest ever -- but necessary to make Verizon more efficient, he said. Altogether, he is seeking to cut $9 billion in costs. Verizon has said its layoffs weren't related to AI.
The carrier was "too hierarchical, way too bureaucratic, way too process-oriented as opposed to outcomes-oriented," Schulman told investors at a Morgan Stanley event last month.
In meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after asking employees how he could reduce bureaucracy, he said.
Schulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost-cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology, from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers.
And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all-hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary to see how the technology works and how it frames their lives. He has also invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. (He said he has done the same for his wife.)
Some employees responded by using AI to write poems for Schulman -- and they weren't bad, he said.
"Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I happen to like it," he said in the interview.
"It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or, like, when fire was first invented -- how cool would that be?" he continued. "We're in that stage. We're just not appreciating it for what it could be."
Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Schulman in acknowledging AI's potential for disruption. After the attack on his California home, OpenAI's Altman wrote that public anxiety about AI was justified since it would usher in more change than society has perhaps ever experienced. Just days before, OpenAI also floated the idea of a four-day workweek and other policies "to keep people first."
News Corp, owner of the Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
Others have also recently sounded warnings. "There's a real risk artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality," BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month. JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. "It may happen faster than we can adjust to it," he cautioned.
Schulman said AI may reach human-level ability, known in the industry as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, by the end of next year -- on the early side of most industry predictions. Quantum computing will come next, he said, and "change everything again." The rise of humanlike robots may not be far behind, either.
"That's definitely the world that we're in right now," Schulman said. "It's really fast, fast changing."
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com and Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 19, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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