Bill Gates said today that the world is not prepared for the job force changes AI will bring. Thanks, Captain Obvious.
Here at the Fierce Network virtual news desk, we don’t go a day without getting a press release or a pitch about agentic AI, Level 4 autonomous networking or automated customer care and the changes AI will bring to the industry.
One press release from IFS shouted out: “Industrial workforce capacity gap being filled by agentic digital workers in Telecommunications,” and stats like this included: “Digital workers adoption is accelerating: two businesses are investing in digital workers over the next 12 months for every one that isn’t.”
Indeed, the number of “Digital workers” is on the rise according to a piece of research from Futurum titled: “Bridging the Capacity Gap - Why 66% of Enterprises Are Investing in Agentic Digital Workers.”
The report’s data below demonstrates how enterprises are buying digital workers to speed efficiency. The highest percentage is buying and then customizing these digital workers, according to Futurum. (See the chart below.)
“More than three-quarters of decision-makers have delayed or avoided a strategic initiative because their teams lacked the time to pursue it, and roughly two-fifths of employee time goes to manual, repetitive work,” said the report. “That capacity constraint is the opening for digital workers: AI that executes a multi-step operational process end-to-end rather than assisting a person through it one task at a time.”
Can digital workers close the telecom skills gap?
Telcos are enterprise businesses, and they have been facing a skills gap for so long that everyone is probably tiring of hearing about it. This is where telcos have no choice but to embrace AI if they want to survive.
Telcos need the cost reduction, efficiencies and revenue-generating opportunities AI can bring, said AvidThink’s Roy Chua in an interview with Fierce earlier this year.
Telecom is uniquely suited for an AI overhaul, one which allows AI to take over rote tasks and leaves the humans to do the field tech work, such as climbing towers and installing equipment. And robots may even take over the field tech work, as physical AI and big AI-powered machines are now working in warehouses and loading and unloading cargo ships
Should telecom buy digital labor?
According to the most recent 10-K filings, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon employ the following numbers:
- Verizon: 89,900 employees ... 89% of whom are based in the U.S.
- AT&T: 133,030 persons
- T-Mobile: 75,000 full-time and part-time employees
Together, that's roughly 300,000 people employed by the nation's three largest wireless operators.
For years, telecom executives have talked about AI to augment employees. Give employees a copilot. Help engineers troubleshoot outages faster. Automate some of the paperwork. Free people up to do more valuable work. However, that language is changing.
Now the industry is talking about execution. Digital workers don't generate a draft and wait for human approval. They complete tasks, initiate workflows and make decisions within guardrails. They close tickets and take actions.
If enterprises are increasingly buying digital workers rather than software licenses, telecom executives eventually have to answer an uncomfortable question: At what point does digital labor become a substitute for human labor — and if so, can they afford to care?
Operators have spent decades trying to reduce operating costs through outsourcing, automation and network virtualization. AI may be the first technology that promises to attack labor costs directly across customer care, network operations, IT systems, sales support, and BSS/OSS at the same time.
Fortunately for telcos (and unfortunately for their employees) telecom might be uniquely positioned to adopt digital labor.
The industry already generates enormous amounts of structured data. It relies on complex workflows. It always struggles to recruit and retain specialized talent. It always faces pressure to cut costs while somehow generating growth.
In other words, telecom has many of the characteristics that make digital workers attractive. (Yikes!)
Gates is right. We are totally unprepared for what comes next. But telecom sometimes has a way of arriving at the future early – the way Star Trek foreshadowed technology such as flip-open communicators, tablet computers and voice recognition.).
The industry moved from switchboard operators to switches, from giant switches to software, from manual provisioning to automation, and so on.
If digital workers become as capable as their advocates claim, the telecom industry may once again become a preview of what happens when technology doesn't just help people do their jobs better. It starts doing the jobs itself.
The uncomfortable possibility isn't that AI destroys telecom. It's that AI finally fixes telecom's long-standing productivity problem. Yay!
But if that happens, what becomes of the people whose work was fixing it? Maybe those digital workers will figure it out.