The British multinational telecommunications company, BT, has announced that it will reduce its workforce considerably over the next seven years. Thus, the company has made it known during the annual presentation of its accounts this Thursday that, will eliminate a total of between 40,000 and 55,000 jobs, representing a cut of between 31% and 42% by 2030.
The layoffs will be spread across all the company’s locations around the world, but most will be among its employees in the United Kingdom.
The future of BT lies in AI
The news has emerged when the London-based multinational has openly admitted that this number of jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence. The company’s CEO, Philip Jansen, announced that “for a company like BT there is now an opportunity to use AI in a much more effective way. (https://www.leankitchenco.com/) ”
In this way, the British operator will go from the 130,000 workers it currently has, of which 30,000 work in subcontractors, to expect between 90,000 and 75,000 in the coming years. Thus the CEO of the company said that “by the end of the 2020s, BT will have a much smaller workforce and a significantly reduced cost base”, of which a large part will be engineers.
Jansen affirms that in this process they will have to be careful, and although it is the most drastic reduction carried out by the company since it was privatized in the eighties, the benefit provided by artificial intelligence will mean a leap in quality into the future.
The business plan goes through the digitization of calls
BT plans for the next seven years end the national coverage of fiber and 5G systems throughout the country, which will lead to the disappearance of 3G with copper wire. From then on, activities such as call management and diagnosis of network problems will be the mission of new technologies, specifically artificial intelligence.
Jensen himself has stated that by then they will depend on a “much smaller workforce, and with new communication networks that will be much more effective. There will be fewer subcontractors, less job burnout and less need for active training.”
According to information, the operator’s adjustments will mean a cut of more than 15,000 engineer jobs, 10,000 maintenance jobs and 10,000 due to the use of new digitization and process automation technologies. Still, Philip Jansen stressed that BT remains a multi-channel company, with an online presence and 450 physical stores, and stated that there will still be opportunities for customers to interact with people.
The response of the unions has not been long in coming
Given this, the Prospect union has expressed concern about “the scale of these cuts.” The national secretary of the same, John Ferret, has stated that they demand to know the details of the plan “to know what its real impact on employees will be.”
For its part, the company’s majority union, the Union of Communications Workers, has stated through its spokesperson that “we have made it categorically clear to BT that we want to retain as many direct jobs as possible, and that the cut will be perform in subcontractors and through retirements”.
For their part, the markets seem to have punished the company’s plans, and that is the shares have finished with a fall of 5%. In addition, the multinational reported at the close of its fiscal year that in March they obtained a net profit of 2,191 million euros, which is 49.5% more than last year, although its income fell by 0.8% up to 23,789 million euros.
