BT has said it will become a “leaner business” as it announced plans to reduce its workforce by as much as 55,000 by 2030, more than 40% of its global employee base, including about 10,000 jobs replaced by artificial intelligence.
The telecoms company employs about 130,000 staff globally, with approximately 30,000 of those contractors through third parties, and has about 80,000 staff in the UK.
On Thursday, BT said it intended to reduce its total workforce to about 75,000 to 90,000 between 2028 and 2030.
The telecoms group has embarked on a rollout of full fibre broadband and 5G infrastructure and has benefited from digital trends such as AI.
The company said that over the rest of the decade it expects to complete the most labour intensive part of the rollout of next-generation full-fibre and 5G networks across the UK, meaning fewer engineers will be needed.
The company also aims to benefit from a broader move to digitise its business and take advantage of new technology, such as artificial intelligence, which could be used to make areas such as call handling and network diagnostics less labour intensive.
Philip Jansen, the BT chief executive, said the introduction of AI across its business could result in the elimination of the equivalent of about 10,000 roles.
“For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”
While Jansen said that the job cuts would come from across the global business, a “big chunk” of those were expected to be in the UK as fibre broadband and 5G rollout was completed and old 3G and copper technology phased out.
“When we stop building the network we won’t need that workforce,” he said. “We will rely on a much smaller workforce and new networks are much more efficient. There will be fewer contractors, natural attrition and reskilling. Only 5,000 [job cuts] in this plan are what you would call ‘normal’ restructuring. This is not new news to any of our union partners.”
However, Prospect, the union that represents thousands of BT managers, expressed concern at the size of the cuts planned over the next seven years.
“Prospect are deeply concerned by the scale of these cuts,” the Prospect national secretary, John Ferrett, said. “Announcing such a huge reduction in this way will be very unsettling for workers who did so much to keep the country connected during the pandemic. As a union we want to see the details behind this announcement in order to understand how it will impact upon members and have demanded an urgent meeting with the chief executive.”
However, the Communications Workers Union (CWU), which represents the majority of BT workers, said the cuts plan was not a surprise to members.
“The introduction of new technologies across the company along with the completion of the fibre infrastructure build replacing the copper network was always going to result in less labour costs for the company in the coming years,” said a spokesman.
“However, we have made it categorically clear to BT that we want to retain as many direct labour jobs as possible and that any reduction should come from subcontractors in the first instance and natural attrition.”
BT, which reported a 12% drop in pre-tax profits to £1.7bn for the year to the end of March, aims to make £3bn in annualised cost savings by 2025.
The company also reported that its pay-TV sport joint venture with Warner Bros Discovery made a £123m loss for the year.
BT said the joint venture had “underperformed against business plan” due to a range of factors including “cost of living pressures affecting the premium sports subscription market”.
On Tuesday, Vodafone announced it is to make 11,000 job cuts over the next three years, the largest in the telecoms company’s history.
