On 10 July 2026, e& Group, the Abu Dhabi-listed conglomerate formerly known as Etisalat, agreed to sell its entire 16.21% stake in Vodafone Group for $5.95 billion. e& told the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange the sale would “sharpen its strategic focus on core businesses.” As of Apollo’s snapshot on 15 September 2026, e& Group’s own job board carried exactly one open role worldwide: an ICT Infrastructure Enterprise Solutions Architect position in Dubai. e& UAE, the operating subsidiary that actually staffs the UAE’s phone shops and mobile network, had six. Now, we accept that there may be extenuating circumstances. e& may be using headhunters for technical roles rather than advertise publicly, or its infrastructure team may already be fully staffed. Retail jobs also turn over faster than technical ones everywhere, which can explain some of the UAE gap. However, none of that explains a global telecom parent with a single open technical role worldwide. A company that just freed up $5.95 billion to concentrate on its core telecom business is, by its own hiring, doing almost none of the hiring a core telecom business does.
e& is an extreme case, but not an outlier. Across 29 operators with usable Apollo data, retail and sales roles make up 32.1% of open postings (2,005 of 6,254). AI and machine learning roles make up 3.2% (201 of 6,254), roughly a tenth as many. The unweighted average across all 29, each counted once regardless of size, is 28.3% retail and sales against 1.9% AI and machine learning. This isn’t Verizon, AT&T and Orange (40% of the pool between them) skewing the result. Twelve of the 29 operators posted zero AI or machine learning roles at all.
Titles undercount AI hiring. The real spread is basic AI literacy, not specialist roles.
To conduct our analysis, the first step was to sort every posting into one category from its title. We gave AI/ML top priority, so a posting mentioning both “AI” and “sales” counts as AI. That makes 3.2% generous, not conservative: folding the entire software/data/cloud category in as an upper bound still only reaches 9.3% against 32.1% for retail and sales.
Focusing narrowly on so-called “AI jobs” is misleading, though. The OECD’s June 2026 policy brief on AI and skills puts a number on how much of the workforce actually needs deep AI skills, not just AI awareness. Per an older OECD report, fewer than 1% of workers need advanced AI-specific skills such as programming or model development (Green and Lamby, 2023), the figure the brief itself still relies on. AI/ML job titles are that 1%. The OECD brief reports that what’s actually spreading through ordinary jobs is digital skills and the ability to use, analyze and interpret data, not a title change. A posting for a store manager or an account executive that lists comfort with AI tools in its qualifications never shows up in the AI/ML column above. The 3.2% figure measures how many jobs are all about AI. It doesn’t measure how many now need some AI-adjacent skill to do at all.
Cox Communications’ 92.9% retail-and-sales share is the highest in the panel, on the smallest sample (n=14). Cox is privately held, sits outside MTN Consulting’s public-company workforce panel, and was acquired by Charter Communications in August 2026. Its independent hiring has a shrinking shelf life regardless of the mix. One interpretation: when a company is in the process of being acquired, they still need to hire front-line sales staff, but often hold off on management hiring. AT&T (70.6%) and Bell Canada (62.2%) are the two next-highest, both large consumer operators with extensive owned retail. Singtel (6.4%) and KT (6.2%) post the highest AI/ML shares in the panel. KT’s sample includes one title using AX, the company’s own internal shorthand for AI Transformation. We caught it and excluded it anyway: AX is KT’s internal shorthand for AI Transformation, not a term an outside reader would recognize as AI, so counting it would have inflated KT’s AI share on a technicality.
AT&T cut headcount 17% since 2022. Verizon cut 23%, but added some back by buying Frontier.
Both of the two largest US carriers have cut deeply since 2022. Per AT&T’s Corporate Responsibility KPI page, global headcount was 160,700 in 2022, 149,900 in 2023, 140,990 in 2024 and 133,030 in 2025, a decline of 27,670 employees, or 17.2%, over three years. That baseline already excludes WarnerMedia, Vrio, Xandr and Playdemic: AT&T’s 2022 annual report classifies all four as discontinued operations, divested before the 160,700 figure was tallied, so the decline isn’t a spinoff artifact.
Verizon’s decline is just as steep. Per MTN Consulting’s Telco Workforce Tracker, 2Q26 edition, confirmed against Verizon’s own 10-K and earnings releases, total employees fell from 117,100 in 2022 to 89,900 at the end of 2025, a 23.2% drop. Verizon’s fourth-quarter 2025 release ties the cut to $2.156 billion in full-year severance charges. Headcount then jumped to 99,600 by the first quarter of 2026, not from a hiring rebound but from the Frontier Communications acquisition, which closed 20 January 2026 and added Frontier’s roughly 13,000 employees. By the second quarter, the combined company was back down to 97,600.
e& Group’s single open role is a good illustration of a broader trend. Across the panel, telecom’s job boards are still actively looking for store staff and account managers. These roles are far more prominent than the AI engineers the industry keeps talking about in its earnings calls. AT&T and Verizon are proof that the industry can shed a fifth of its workforce without any of it showing up as an “AI jobs” story. Both companies point to efficiency and technology in their earnings calls. Neither has posted the AI hiring to match the cuts. Insights GenAiTelco
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