The nation’s three largest mobile network operators managed to cut more than 27,000 jobs last year and, yes, artificial intelligence (AI) did play a role.

AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile US all recently released their 2023 annual reports, showing the depths in which they managed to cut headcount.

AT&T cut the most total number of jobs last year, with the operator reducing its headcount from 162,920 employees at the end of 2022, to 150,470 employees at the end of last year. The latest year of cuts was drastically below the nearly 40,000 jobs AT&T managed to drop in 2022, but those cuts also involved the carrier’s much larger asset-shedding strategy.

AT&T CEO John Stankey stated during his company’s Q3 earnings call that the carrier was gaining operational cost efficiencies from using AI.

“And while we're still in the very early stages of generative AI, we're already seeing tangible AI-driven improvements in productivity and cost savings,” Stankey told investors. “Measurable progress has been made with lowering customer support costs, unlocking software development efficiencies and improving our network design effectiveness. We expect these capabilities to play a key role in our continued efforts to achieve our future cost savings objectives.”

Verizon cut slightly fewer jobs than AT&T last year, though it was a higher overall percentage of its employee base. The carrier slashed 11,700 positions in 2023, ending the year with 105,400 total employees.

T-Mobile US ended last year with 71,000 employees, having officially cut 4,000 jobs during the year. However, the carrier in mid-2023 also announced plans to cut 5,000 jobs and took a $471 million charge on those cuts during its third fiscal quarter.

T-Mobile's management at that time stated new technologies – like AI – will allow the carrier to recoup that cost and find greater financial benefits.

“We’re not the only company that has noticed this, but the technology landscape around us is rapidly changing,” T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert said. “That means there’s an opportunity for us in our post-integration era as we plot the next chapter to think about recrafting our company, taking advantage of the technologies that are now available to us to become much more deeply data informed, much more AI-enabled, much more digital first.”

He continued, “That’s taking up a lot of our team’s time and attention now to reimagine how can we create a business model that really creates a fantastic experience for each customer individually, but at the same time is more efficient to operate — and that’s where we have ambitions.”

T-Mobile's job cuts are also concerning as job growth was a rallying point for that carrier’s eventual acquisition of rival Sprint.

“This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the new T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from day one and every day thereafter,” then-CEO John Legere wrote in a blog post in early 2019. “That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact.”

Legere then went on to state where those new jobs would come from, before proclaiming the carrier would have “more than 11,000 additional employees on our payroll by 2024.”

Nascent domestic operator Dish Network has also moved on cutting jobs. The carrier earlier this year filed a notice that it was cutting 157 positions in its home state of Colorado. That move came just two months after it filed plans to cut 499 jobs in the state.

The cuts represent about 5% of Dish Network’s approximately 14,000 employee count.