Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said artificial general intelligence could arrive within the next 18 months, a timeline that would put the technology's most disruptive phase closer than most corporate planning cycles assume. The prediction from the head of one of America's largest telecommunications companies adds a prominent voice to a debate that has mostly played out among AI researchers and startup founders.
Schulman's warning is not just about technology. He said the rapid advancement toward AGI could reshape industries and may necessitate significant workforce reskilling, while also redefining how businesses operate day to day.
What AGI means for the workforce
AGI refers to a system that can perform any intellectual task a human can, rather than the narrow AI that powers recommendation engines, chatbots, and fraud detection today. If Schulman's 18-month window is right, the skills that companies have spent the past decade hiring for could be obsolete before many of their current strategic plans expire.
That puts reskilling at the center of the corporate response. Schulman did not detail specific programs or timelines, but the implication is that employers can't treat worker retraining as a periodic human resources exercise. It would need to become a continuous operation, because the gap between what AGI systems can do and what employees are trained to do may close faster than any traditional education pipeline can respond.
For a company like Verizon, which employs tens of thousands of people across network operations, customer service, and retail, the stakes are concrete. A technology that can handle complex reasoning tasks could automate portions of each of those functions. The question is not whether jobs change, but how quickly and whether the workforce is prepared.
Business operations would be redefined
Schulman also said AGI advancement could redefine business operations. That's a broad claim, but the practical meaning is straightforward: if a single system can handle analysis, planning, and execution across domains, the departmental structures that most large companies rely on start to look arbitrary.
Companies have already been experimenting with generative AI to draft documents, write code, and summarize meetings. AGI would go further by chaining those capabilities together without human direction at each step. That shift would pressure executives to rethink not just which tasks get automated, but how decisions get made, who approves them, and what middle management is for.
Verizon itself has been integrating AI into its network management and customer service operations, though Schulman's comments were about the broader trajectory of the technology rather than a specific product announcement.
The 18-month clock and what it changes
Eighteen months is an unusually short horizon for a prediction of this magnitude. Most corporate forecasting cycles run three to five years, and AGI timelines from researchers have typically ranged from a decade to several decades, with plenty of disagreement. Schulman's estimate puts him on the aggressive end of that spectrum.
If he's right, the window for preparation is already closing. Reskilling programs that take two years to design and deploy would arrive after the technology they're meant to address. Business process overhauls that require multiple budget cycles would face the same problem.
The other possibility is that Schulman is wrong, and AGI remains further out. But even a mistaken 18-month prediction can change behavior. When a CEO of a major public company says the ground is about to move, suppliers, competitors, and investors tend to plan as if it will.
Schulman did not say what Verizon would do differently in response to his own timeline. That's the next question the company will face, from its workforce and its shareholders alike.
