In May, Verizon’s new CEO Dan Schulman spoke at a MoffettNathanson conference, and one thing he said stunned me.
Schulman said, "We're so used to doing things the way we did them, as opposed to being massively analytical.” And then he said that Verizon will be looking at not just "like four segments," but "hundreds of thousands of segments."
What in the world?!
Industry executives have been talking about segmentation for a while now, and it hasn’t been immediately clear precisely what they’re planning.
Sure, operators have always had some segmentation. That’s why they offer different speed tiers to meet different demands. They also offer different plans for seniors and for lower-income customers, which could also be considered segments.
But Schulman’s comment made it sound as if Verizon could potentially take customers’ personal data and use it to customize plans and prices at a much more granular level.
It makes me wonder if perhaps telecom operators are thinking about individual pricing as their ultimate goal.
Lest this sound far-fetched, there is already concern that airlines might do this. In August 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was concerned about the use of AI to set personalized airline ticket prices. Duffy said, "To try to individualize pricing on seats based on how much you make or don't make or who you are, I can guarantee you that we will investigate if anyone does that."
Delta Airlines executives had made some comments that led people to fear they might implement individual pricing, but Delta denied that it was planning such a thing.
The telecom spin
When you ask most anyone in telecom whether they consider thousands of segments to be a bad thing, they say, “Absolutely not. It’s going to benefit consumers because they will be able to pay for exactly what they want, and not more. Their plans will be extremely customized.”
I recently posted about this topic on LinkedIn, which generated a lively discussion.
Peter Adderton, founder of MobileX and Boost Mobile, commented, “The idea of everyone having a personalized plan tailored to them — instead of being forced into one of four standard plans — makes sense to me.”
Ronan Dunne, former CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, chimed in on LinkedIn saying, “Verizon has a detailed understanding of its customers, legitimately gathered through the services it offers. Segmentation driven by relevant, actionable insight is in the interest of customers. Whether micro segmentation can be achieved at scale is less certain in the telco space, and so dynamic pricing is unlikely to be a (material) feature of any segmentation/personalization initiative in my view.”
Recon Analytics principal Roger Entner said his company is fully on board with segmentation as part of its research. “At Recon Analytics we are building similar fingerprints and detailed views of each carrier’s customer bases,” Entner said.
Another LinkedIn poster said, “I work from home and am a light data user since I'm in Wi-Fi coverage most of the time. I don't need unlimited everything. If Verizon had a customer offer for me of a few GBs at a significantly reduced rate, I'd be more inclined to use them than a MVNO.”
What do operators get out of this?
I hate to be the cynic here (but really, that is my job as a journalist). If segmentation is all about saving customers money, why would operators be interested in it? Stating the obvious: They want to make more money, not less.
But I have heard some reasonable explanations for it, from an operator’s perspective. Customers are diverging into two clear camps: the premium segment with lots of money and demand for extra services; and then everybody else who are concerned about their budgets.
It’s similar to Disney World, where most people sweat it out, waiting in long lines out in the Florida sun, but the lucky few who can afford it, buy passes to skip the line. Or there’s the example of football stadiums, where there’s a trend to build more premium boxes to serve the affluent few. Or airlines — the masters of nickel and diming — who are reaping great profit margins on their super deluxe seats.
We’re clearly not living in a one-size-fits-all economy.
But we are living in a society where businesses are tapping AI for everything under the sun, and so it feels inevitable that AI will be used to create customized pricing.
The question is: How customized? Hopefully, the use of it will be ethical and fair.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not necessarily represent the opinions of Fierce Network.