BT has revealed plans to slash up to 55,000 jobs - including AI replacing workers.
The telecoms giant wants to cull its workforce from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by the end of this decade.
Around 10,000 of the cuts will come from what BT called “automation and digitisation”, including in customer services.
BT boss Philip Jansen admitted that would include ramping-up the use of AI - artificial intelligence - to do tasks currently done by humans.
“We will be a huge beneficiary of AI,” he said, adding that “generative AI” tools such as ChatGPT “gives us confidence we can go even further”.
On the future of AI, he said: “I think it will be as big as the internet and mobile phones.”
Mr Jansen, asked by the Mirror if it would mean customers having to deal with a robot instead of a person, insisted: “We are multi-channel, we are online, we have 450 stores and that’s not planning on changing at all.
“There are plenty of opportunities for our customers to deal with people at BT... plenty of people to speak to.”
However, BT’s admission that AI will replace large numbers of staff will spark fears about the march of artificial intelligence in many other companies too.
Mr Jansen, while embracing AI, issued a warning that it needed to be controlled.
He said: “In the wrong hands, people can do things we don’t want them to do.”
More than 15,000 jobs are expected to go as BT’s roll-out of fibre broadband and the 5G mobile network tapers off.
Jobs elsewhere will go as older technologies are phased out, including copper broadband and 3G.
John Ferrett, national secretary at the Prospect union, said it was “deeply concerned” by the scale of these cuts.
“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,” he said.
“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.
“We have always opposed compulsory redundancies in BT and has been able to ensure over the years that any reductions have been achieved on a voluntary basis.”
It came as BT reported a 12% decline in its profits to £1.7billion over the past year.
