6 minBusiness
Verizon CEO Predicts AGI Within 18 Months, Warns of Decade of Upheaval
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman told a Detroit business audience that artificial general intelligence could arrive within six to 18 months, followed by quantum computing and humanoid robotics, and announced a $70 million worker training initiative.
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman predicted that some form of artificial general intelligence will arrive within the next six to 18 months, warning that the pace of change will overwhelm the institutions built to absorb it. Speaking at the Ford Pro Accelerate event in Detroit in conversation with Fortune's Diane Brady, Schulman said the AI models in use today are the weakest that will ever exist.
«The models that we see today are the worst models we'll ever use in our lives,» Schulman said. «Every two months, there's a step function change in the power of the models. I think we get to some form of AGI in the next six to 18 months. I think it's right on us.»
AGI refers to systems capable of reasoning and performing broadly across domains rather than excelling at narrow, discrete tasks. Schulman's timeline places it far sooner than most corporate forecasts, and he layered further milestones on top of it. Two years after AGI arrives, he said, the world will enter what he called the era of quantum, which he described as «everything today times 1,000.» By 2030 or 2035, he expects a capable form of humanoid robotics.
«We've got a decade of intense change ahead of us,» Schulman said, framing the shift as a compression of a century's worth of progress into five to 10 years. He argued that the usual mechanisms for absorbing technological change — training systems, labor markets, corporate restructuring and public policy — will not move fast enough to keep pace.
«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. «I think you'll see the collapse of the 21st century in the next five to 10 years.» Asked to clarify, Schulman said he meant that «progress we would have made over 100 years will happen over the next five to 10 years.» He added, «I don't think we can really imagine how powerful the technology and how fundamental it will be.»
The disruption will reach Verizon itself, Schulman said. The company has more than 250,000 employees and contractors and will need to move from a workforce organized around «very defined roles and functions» to a «much more fluid organization.» He acknowledged that the transition will not automatically benefit everyone. «Everybody's job is going to shift,» he said. «I don't think everybody will land just magically in a better place per se.»
Schulman pointed to a $70 million Verizon initiative announced the previous week to fund training for American workers, including free AI instruction and partnerships with local organizations on career development, extending beyond the company's own employees. He urged corporate leaders and policymakers to plan for difficult outcomes rather than assume the labor market will adjust on its own. «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,» he said.
Other executives on the panel described constraints that may slow any wholesale replacement of human labor. PG&E CEO Patti Poppe said an increasingly digitized grid will still need field workers who combine physical skill with technological fluency. She described a PG&E worker being lowered by rope from a helicopter onto a transmission tower in mountainous California, and said the same crews will have to master sensors, remote-edge computing and predictive systems that flag risks before they cause outages or wildfires. «I'm still going to need those people,» Poppe said. «Somebody's still going to have to connect that wire to the pole.»
Dave Regnery, CEO of Trane Technologies, compared current anxiety about AI to fears that greeted the personal computer four decades ago, saying the commentary is «identical.» He said Trane uses data and AI to run heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems according to how buildings are actually used rather than their original design specifications, improving efficiency by roughly 15% over baseline. With about 30% of all energy consumed by buildings and roughly a third of that wasted, he argued the technology creates demand for technicians who can install and service sophisticated systems rather than simply eliminating jobs.
Chris Nelson, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, described a similar transition on construction sites, where the company has developed AI-enabled autonomous drilling robots that use digital construction plans to bore holes for racks in data centers and other projects. The machines are designed to take over repetitive physical tasks, not to replace the electricians and skilled tradespeople needed to finish the work.
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