Verizon's chief executive expects AGI within 18 months and says not everybody will land in a better place

Dan Schulman, the chief executive of Verizon, told an audience in Detroit on 30 September 2026 that he expects "some form of AGI in the next six to 18 months" and that the effects on work will arrive faster than training systems, labour markets and public policy can absorb them. "It is about machines that will in many ways be able to do things better than a lot of human tasks are done today," he said in conversation with Fortune's Diane Brady at the Ford Pro Accelerate event. He applied it to his own company. Verizon has more than 250,000 employees and contractors, he said, and will have to move from a workforce built around "very defined roles and functions" to a "much more fluid organization." He did not announce or attribute any job cuts. What he offered was a warning to other leaders: "Our responsibility is to think about what might go wrong; what might we need to address; what might the disruption look like; and how do we put guardrails, training, programs in place to minimize that risk." Verizon announced a $70 million AI training initiative the week before, open to workers outside the company. "Everybody's job is going to shift," Schulman said. "I don't think everybody will land just magically in a better place per se." The other chief executives on the panel, from PG&E, Trane Technologies, Stanley Black & Decker and Dycom, described the opposite problem: too few skilled people to build the power lines, fibre and data centres that AI needs.