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Verizon CEO Dan Schulman urged Fortune 100 leaders to follow his company’s lead in retraining workers laid off amid AI disruption by pooling together funds and collaborating with the public sector.
“My goal is to work with other Fortune 100 CEOs,” he said on Wednesday at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. “For all of us to put in 20, 25, 30 million dollars. Combine all of that and work also with the public sector in figuring out what we do where workers are displaced.”
In November Verizon had unveiled its $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund for ex-employees after announcing 13,000 layoffs, a month after Schulman started as CEO. He said in a memo at the time that he intended to “work with other companies and the public sector to address the opportunities and challenges in a world where technology will impact all of us.”
“How do we retrain them? To what do we retrain them? How do we make sure that people can embrace the skillsets that are necessary with all the tools that are out there,” Schulman said during his interview. “We need something akin to what was the Manhattan Project, but around AI.”
“How do we work as a society, an economy, as a democratic governance structure, when you have all of this change that’s going to be going on — and as rapidly as you can imagine,” he said.
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Schulman, who retired as PayPal CEO in 2023, said he turned down Verizon twice before agreeing to take the CEO job.
“I was a reluctant CEO coming in. I was very, very happily retired,” he said.
A veteran telecom exec, Schulman had been a Verizon board member and, since 2024, lead independent director. He took the CEO job “out of a sense of loyalty,” he added.
Verizon is a sponsor of Semafor World Economy. Dan Schulman made his comments in an unsponsored editorial interview.