How media and telecom companies deploy AI

Findings

What the media and telecom profiles show

1. Verizon and Vodafone Group are the 2 media and telecom companies with a business return they credit to AI since May 2025: Dan Schulman said deploying AI in Verizon's network had brought more than $200 million of energy savings (Apr 2026), and Vodafone Group credits GenAI coding tools with a 12% productivity increase across its software development lifecycle, with more than 5,000 developers using them (May 2026). Verizon's other large AI figures are a target and a sales line: the more than 70% cut in software vendor support costs Schulman named is a target (Apr 2026), and Verizon AI Connect, which sells fiber routes, power and space to companies building AI infrastructure, reached about $4 billion in signed contracts with revenue starting in 2027 (Oct 2026). No company in the sector reports a firm-level figure for AI's financial effect.

2. Telecom carriers fold AI into wider cost programs without giving AI's share: T-Mobile US credits its planned $1.3 billion of savings in 2026 and $2.7 billion in 2027 to digitalization, AI and simplification together (Feb 2026), AT&T counts AI as one unquantified lever in a $4 billion annual cost-savings target for the end of 2028, and Verizon has not separated AI's share of its $9 billion 2026 cost program or of its more than 13,000 job cuts. Vodafone Group's CFO Pilar López called AI one of the key drivers of its opex savings targets without giving AI's share (May 2026), and Vodafone has not attributed its about 11,000 role reductions since FY24 to AI. AT&T's Andy Markus has given return multiples of about 2 times (Jan 2026) and 5 times in free cash flow (Mar 2026), both with no dollar base or method. Charter Communications says AI already benefits its P&L without giving a figure (Mar 2026), and does not credit AI with the more than $1 billion of savings it expects from combining with Cox Communications (Sep 2026). Comcast likewise does not credit AI with the billions it expects from its cost transformation, its fourth-quarter charge of more than $1 billion or the nearly 1,000 layoffs in its WARN notices (Nov 2026).

3. Telecom and cable companies run AI in customer care across millions of contacts, and report it as workload rather than cost: T-Mobile US says its AI voice agent served 32% of postpaid contacts, AI chat contained 78% of chats and Expert Assist was used in 74% of frontline interactions (Q2 2026), and that human-handled care calls fell 55% since 2021 (Oct 2026); Comcast says service contact rates fell about 20% and more than 30 million service interactions were removed in 2026 (Oct 2026); Verizon's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience handles most inbound consumer calls and chats (Aug 2026); and Vodafone Group's TOBi and SuperTOBi assistants, built on Azure OpenAI, handled about 60 million customer conversations a month (Nov 2025), with SuperTOBi resolving more than 70% end to end (May 2026). Charter Communications has LLMs guide its service, sales and retention calls, and Chris Winfrey said the tools cut handle time and repeat calls without giving figures (Mar 2026). AT&T's care agents are credited with about $150 million of annual savings only in an undated Google Cloud case study quoting Mark Austin, a figure AT&T has not published itself.

4. Telecom and cable companies use AI to run and plan the network: T-Mobile US says its Customer-Driven Coverage tool directs all capital spending, about $10.0 billion of cash capex in 2026 (Oct 2026), and its self-organizing network made more than 30,000 antenna adjustments during Winter Storm Fern (Jan 2026). Verizon's closed-loop automation made more than 70 million network configuration changes autonomously in 2025 (Jun 2026), and Dan Schulman described 85% of network domain issues as on track to be fixed autonomously (May 2026). Vodafone Group's Zero Touch Operation cut mean time to repair by 43% (Nov 2025) and resolves more than 70% of network issues automatically (May 2026). Comcast's AI checks 30 million network devices every hour to tune in-home WiFi (Sep 2025). Comcast and Charter Communications both put GPUs at their network edge: Comcast has about 200 edge sites able to host AI GPUs for its Nvidia trials (Mar 2026), and Charter said it was activating compute across more than 1,000 edge data centers, with Cast AI, HP and Hydra Host as commercial partners (Sep 2026).

5. Netflix builds its internal AI on its own models and infrastructure: a recommendation foundation model, the MediaFM content model and an AI Platform that post-trains open-weight LLMs and serves them on vLLM inside its production environment (Jul 2026). AT&T routes employee requests through its own AI Gateway to OpenAI, Anthropic or open-weight models such as Nemotron, Llama and Gemma, which handled about 40% of employee requests (Aug 2026). T-Mobile US built IntentCX with OpenAI on systems it now builds and owns instead of vendor software (Oct 2026), and Verizon assembled a 4-layer AI stack from vendor components in 2026 with Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. Vodafone Group builds its assistants and agents on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Foundry and Google Cloud's Vertex AI, and uses different language models within the same use case (May 2026). Charter Communications builds its frontline tools in-house, including SpectrumGPT in its agent front end, buys developer and agentic AI from AWS (Nov 2025), and took on Cox's Gemini-based care agents and Claude-based sales agents when the 2 companies combined (Aug 2026). Comcast builds its network AI and buys care AI from Google Cloud, Cresta and Sierra, and Disney gives staff tools from Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, Anthropic and Cursor alongside its own DisneyGPT.