Verizon CEO Dan Schulman launched a $70 million (M) program called Verizon AI Skills for America on 23 September 2026. “Companies, working closely together and with the public sector, have a responsibility to invest in people with the same urgency they invest in technology,” he said.
But this program is aimed at the thousands of workers laid off by Verizon. The company has not publicly aimed any of the $70M at the roughly 97,600 people who still work there. It last put a number on training its own staff in 2023, and it was small: the equivalent of about 1% of capex. Verizon has stopped publishing that number since. By Schulman’s own yardstick, Verizon is leaving out the people it already employs.
Verizon aimed every dollar at outsiders or people it laid off
Verizon split the pledge in two. It committed $50M in new money to job seekers, early-career professionals, displaced workers, educators and small businesses, with course content from IBM, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera and OpenAI. The other $20M is a Reskilling and Career Transition Fund for departing workers, which Verizon created on 20 November 2025, when Schulman told staff it would cut more than 13,000 jobs.
Verizon’s announcement does not mention training current employees. It names no headcount target and no timeframe for the $50M. The program reads as a public-facing campaign: Verizon as the helper for those displaced by AI, but not necessarily for the people still doing the work.
Verizon stopped reporting what it spends training its own staff
Verizon used to publish what it spent on those employees. In its 2023 ESG report, Verizon put employee learning and development at $173.8M that year, including more than $20M of tuition assistance used by about 4,700 employees. That works out to about $1,650 per employee.
Since then Verizon has gone quiet. In its 2024 Responsible Business Update, the most recent, Verizon discloses none of five standard workforce measures, according to a September 2026 MTN Consulting review of the full report. The five are new hires, turnover, training hours, training spend and participation in reskilling programs. Training hours are a standard indicator (GRI 404-1) under the Global Reporting Initiative framework, and many of Verizon’s peers publish them.
Measured against Schulman’s own benchmark, technology spending, Verizon’s 2023 training budget was small. Verizon spent $18.8 billion (B) on capex that year, according to MTN Consulting’s Telco Workforce Monitor. The $173.8M training budget was 0.9% of that. For every dollar Verizon spent training its people, it spent about $108 on networks and equipment.
AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone publish how they train staff for AI
AT&T, Verizon’s closest US rival, still reports these numbers. In 2025 it invested over $89M in training, and more than 147,000 employees completed 5.8 million hours of it. It launched an Ask AT&T Academy to teach staff its internal generative AI tool and gave 20,000 employees Microsoft Copilot licenses. AT&T’s level of training investment is even lower than Verizon, as a percent of capex, but at least it publishes the data.
European telcos report AI training for their own staff in the same way. Deutsche Telekom says 30,000 employees outside T-Mobile US acquired AI prompting skills in 2025. Vodafone says 1,947 employees were upskilled toward agentic AI in the year to March 2026, and that it spent an average of €352 per employee on training.
A community skills pledge is not an HR budget, and Verizon almost certainly still trains its staff. But it stopped publishing the figure while its rivals kept going. The only training money Verizon quantifies publicly is directed at outsiders and people on their way out.
An expensive workforce is the one most worth retraining
The case for training existing staff is strongest where each employee costs the most. Verizon’s all-in labor cost per employee ran $155,400 a year over the four quarters to 2Q26, nearly double the $79,900 average across 40 telcos in the Americas tracked in the Monitor. A 1% productivity gain across Verizon’s $15.2B labor bill would be worth about $152M a year, close to its entire disclosed 2023 training budget.
