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It's always great to have the CEO of a company that you've been a customer of for like most of my adult life. So all my grievances, I'm just going to bring them to the to the to the to the table here in all seriousness, you've been CEO of Verizon since October, something of a homecoming for you, having having grown up at AT and T getting Virgin Mobile off the ground when it comes to running a wireless company, and you had that long interlude in the middle at PayPal.
So we'll talk about that later. But what are the old rules no longer? Reply?
Well, I think we live in a time right now of change that I've really never seen before. The pace of change is dramatic, I say, inside company right now, anytime the pace of change outside is greater than the pace of change inside, we're falling behind. And that's a that's a really high bar to get over. I think there's some similarities and some differences. I mean, way back when when I was at AT and T. You know, we're a big bureaucratic company. Verizon is a big bureaucratic company.
It loves its processes, it loves to show its work, but like I'm about outcome and how fast can we move the company forward. We're very risk averse, and I get that, like there should be places where we are risk averse when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to the integrity of our financial numbers, Like, my tolerance for risk is like a one. But for the most part, my tolerance for risk for trying things and failing fast and then learning from it and moving forward is like
an eight or nine. And I think in general the company's probably had a two to three. We're very hierarchical. I need to be very careful what I say, yeah, because it's taken as gospel, and the truth of the matter is things are changing so fast. Like yeah, I'm always learning. I can't predict the future. I can try and do my best to ascertain like the direction of it, but I'll frequently be wrong on that as well.
It's still less than a year that you've been there. But how do you get from that? You said round two in those areas of eight areas where you want to see people take more risks, how do you get closer to that eight to nine level of tolerance?
Well, I think you or I. I don't know if you would, but you know, I think leadership is like three things in my view. The first is to clearly define reality. And nobody really wants to hear that, to tell you, certainly. My first coming on stage in front of all the employees of Verizon, yeah, I had no slides, no nothing on screen, no talk track, just kind of like what I saw. And what I saw was a company that was losing in the market. We had lost
market share for five straight years. We had gone from being number one in market cap to being last or forward P was last in the market and terrible, and so you know, I kind of laid that out for everybody, and I think we had just gotten used to gently seething market share. I suppose to playing to win. That just doesn't work for me. I mean, that's just not who I am. You know, when I first came in, I think people were scared because I said that, you know,
we wanted to play to win. We wanted to stop losing market share and start gaining market share, and people were worried that was going to lead to, you know, a price war. But that's not the way that you compete, Like anybody can compete on price. Price is easy. It's about competing on other parts of the value proposition where
you can actually differentiate yourself and create lasting value. Like if somebody puts some promotion out there, like I can match it now in two hours, so's there's no competitive advantage to that. So I think it's really about laying out the reality of where you are, and people don't want to be part of a losing team. And then the second thing a leader needs to do is inspire, lay out a vision of what you want to do.
How are you going to reclaim your market leadership, and then clearly out the path between reality and that vision, and like how are we going to get there and over what time frame and what things are we going to chew off first and start to work on. So it is going probably faster than I imagine. I'm proud of the team. I don't like giving out compliments that easily, but I am proud of where they are. There's a lot more work to.
Do, so you've talked about you've given hints on some of that work that you want to do. Moving away from low margin, highly promotional activity, simplify promotions, simplify plans, put some more flesh on those bones.
For us, what does that look like? Well, I think at the end of the day, the reason people leave of Verizon is one when we price up with no incremental value, and we have done that for three years in a row. We have done something like thirty price ups with no incremental value, and that obviously distresses customers.
And so we had started to see our churn go up, and I told the company, like, the first roll a rule of getting out of a hole is stop digging, and so we're just not going to raise prices without any corresponding value. And I'm beginning to see that as our churn starts to come down. The second is friction in the process. When you come into our store, How quickly can we help you when we sell you something?
Is that reflected on your first bill? When you call in a customer service, you get somebody who's empathetic, does do what they see match with what you heard in the store and on your bill? And that's really really difficult.
That's the end to end customer experience, and that's hundreds, if not thousands of things that you need to do better, and we are focused on every single one of those is incrementally getting better because I feel if we can have the best end to end customer experience, that's real differentiation because it's very hard to imitate and it's extremely hard to do, but extremely appreciated by customers.
It's going to be hard for me, as a customer who's been with Verizon for a very long time, to notice even many incremental things. I might understand, Okay, yeah I do have a better but is it a better customer experience? But there's something concrete that I should look forward to to keep me from taking that offer from T Mobile or whatever.
Yeah, there will be.
Can you give us a little bit more of an indication? No, I want to be conscious for your point.
I mean, I mean the answer still is no, I won't. But I think that when we talk about kind of this end to end value proposition, there are little things, there are bigger things, or how do you simplify things, how do you add elements of loyalty into what you're trying to go do? And so you know, my view is there's never a big bang in what you're going to do in front of customers, because if you can do a big bang, then your competitors can do a
big bank. It's really it's unfortunately, it is like having a long term plan and every as I say inside the company, every single day matters, like I want to see incremental improvement every single day, and so learning to use the tools of our time, whether that be AI, and how we serve customers much better, whether it be specifical offers we put in front of you elements of
the value proposition. So when you see things, expect that there will be other things a month from now, the next month, the month after, because it's got to be a steady drumbeat of improvements.
When it comes to using encouraging your staff to use AI tools, what's your stature, what's your stance on that? And specifically, I think early on a lot of businesses were saying, hey, get out there, use as much as you want, create things, create chatbots, build agents. Have you had to become more disciplined about that? And what are your what are your marching orders when it comes to using AI tools to make either the workplace or the customer experience better.
Well, I'm pretty outspoken on a as some of you may know, and I think as leaders of companies, I think we have a responsibility to talk about what could happen as a result of implementing AI. It's clear to me that whatever we have right now, these are the worst models that we will ever have in our lifetime. Because yeah, she knows it, like she'd be the first second. Yeah. Open AI is going to release four models, new models
between now and the end of the year. Each one of them will be a step function improvement from where they are today. And so it's clear to me that AI will do at least three things inside the company. It will dramatically improve our productivity levels. It will dramatically
improve our ability to satisfy customers. You know, in the last three months, we've been experimenting with agents that are replacing some of our customer service reps, and those agents their customer satisfaction rate is one thousand, two hundred and eighty basis points better than what we had before. Think about that, if it was fifty basis points, that'd be a big improvement. So our ability to satisfy customers, our
ability to ingest all of the data around you. Like you may think of yourself as one customer, we think of you as kind of like the some total of who what lines you know, are under your account? Your kids aren't your account? Where do they call? How do you use it? Do you have a nest associated with your broadband service? And so we need to see all of that to be able to satisfy you. And then finally,
AI is going to radically redefine our value proposition. I mean, my view of this is that we have an initiative inside the company called every Customer has a name, and that means every customer's individual. How we respond to you it should be empathetic, but every part of our value proposition should be tailored to the three hundred plus different ways that we can look at you and tailor or proposition to you.
To what extent does AI just completely replace if they're so much better, To what extent does AI replete replace human customer service agents completely?
For sure, you're going to see disruption in with AI in certain job functions. I don't see how that's not possible, And I don't see how anybody can look people in the eye and say that's not impossible.
What percentage of customer service gets displaced?
It can be a large percentage of customer service. I think that function, you know, is a function that has a lot of route parts of it. I forgot my past word. You know what's my billing amount? Those are all simple and easy things for an agent to go do.
More complex things will be a combination of human and machines working together to satisfy what that doesn't mean like you will have functions that will be disrupted for sure, And I don't see how anyone again could say that they won't be, but you will have Like what we're seeing in our customer service right now is the road. Stuff can be done by agents more complex as a combination of an agent and a human working hand in hand to be able to satisfy that customer much better
than either of them could do alone. And so I think you'll see all of those things happen. But I'm I'm going to lean heavy as I think all of my colleagues will, all the fortune one hundred will lean heavy on AI. You cannot be a part of this age without understanding the technological revolution. It'll be AI. I think personally we get to AGI, like some are saying before this now, but I think in the next two to four years we're in AGI. I think in the
next four years we're at quantum. We're already preparing for Q day as there early as two years away, because we need to look at all the encryption pieces of this, and then you're at humanoid robotics, you know, a couple of years after that. That's all happening, and we need to be ready as a society, as leaders of corporations, and then we need to take the responsibility of that.
So for instance, you know, I think I was one of the first to pull together a pretty wide scale We put aside twenty million dollars to train and reskill people that are impacted by AI. That's the tip of the iceberg for what we're going to go do. Like my view is, we have a responsibility to put serious money, resource and effort into training not just our employees, not just people that are impacted, but the communities we serve
as well in utilizing AI in a responsible way. But as I say to everybody inside the company, you should not be scared of AI. You need to learn AI. You need to be able to use it in your work, you need to be able to use it in your personal life, because that's the age we live in.
One of the first moves you made was a difficult move, admittedly, in eliminating a lot of jobs at Verizons to the tune of thirteen thousand, you set up this fun twenty million, you questioned, you said, that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg. What are some early like what are some of the early takeaways from that and what a companies need to do to reskill workers who are affected by you know, whether they're in customer service or some other area that's affected by AI.
Yeah. Well, first of all, we're training everybody inside the corporation. We do week long events now and that can be from some people have don't even know you know, the right prompts to go use and how to use basic chatbots, two being able to gin up agents. You know, we have a whole AI tech stack that we are now implementing, most of which will be done next month in July, all of it finished by November. But you just you
have to move quickly. You have to train. You know, we have seven thousand people in this reskilling that have already applied for that. But as I mentioned, I think our responsibility is to work with government. I'm spending a lot of time down in DC to think about how we take our resources, maybe the resources of fortune five hundred as well. Think about it, if we're putting fifty to one hundred million into it and you multiply that by you know, my peer set, and then what government
can do. You can have a lot of money going into thinking about reskilling, retraining, and how to really utilize AI as hopefully a force that kind of unleash the best parts of humanity, as opposed to a force that you know, could add a lot of stress into our democracy.
Speaking of powerful tools briefly in our last few seconds, i'd like you were at a time recently joined They don't even know that recently joined project Project glass Wing. Given your background in cybersecurity, give us a sense of now that you've had a chance to get in there and test it, how powerful is it?
What does it do?
Should we be afraid of it?
Well, you should always be concerned about cybersecurity. I mean it is existential. Everything we do is controlled by software. You know, the elevators you go in, the planes that you uh, you know, board, your financials, everything that. I don't know how much money you have in your pocket right now, but you know it's probably not a lot. And all of your wealth is digital in some ways, so I think, and you know, a consumer has their identity stolen every two seconds, so I think cyber is
existential for us. Mythos, which we've been working with as part of the Glass Wing, is a tool that can identify a lot of elements that might not have been seen as critical, but when you link them together, they become a critical infrastructure. I think that needs to be repaired. Mythos is very pow powerful. It's enabling us to identify
vulnerabilities but also fix them quite quickly as well. But it's also forcing us to think about, you know, how we ingest third party vendors into our network, and how we everything needs to be patchable remotely, like within the next couple of months eighty five percent of everything done in our network. Instead of taking multiple hours or days to figure out what's going on, it'll we will identify it in minutes, go right to the element, and fix it autonomously. Lightning Round.
If the government continues to designate Anthropic a national security threat, given its concerns about how its tools are used in defense, how problematic is that for you as a company.
We have access to it, So I would say Mythos at a headstart, but all of these models catch up very quickly. I think open Aiyes model around cyber is extremely powerful as well. And as I mentioned, you know every two to four months, you know, these models double in strength and capacity. So I think Mythos was a real good look at what the capabilities of these models
can do in specific functional areas. And I'm glad because we do a lot for the critical infrastructure of the United States and Mythos is going to help us protect it.