Hey —
Verizon just announced its third wave of layoffs in less than a year — and the cuts aren’t happening because the company is struggling. They’re happening because CEO Daniel Schulman is chasing $5 billion in cost savings while AI handles more of what people used to do. If that sounds familiar, it is: tech went through this same pattern in 2023–2025. Now it’s telecom’s turn, and banking and aerospace aren’t far behind.
The good news? A new benchmark report just measured AI skills across 88,000+ enterprise employees and found only 13% can effectively work with AI agents. That’s either a terrifying stat — or a wide-open door. Depends which side of it you’re on.
Today: Verizon’s $5B cost-cutting marathon hits another milestone, while healthcare keeps adding jobs at a record pace and agentic AI postings boom 280%.
In This Issue:
- 🔥 The Big Story: Verizon’s third layoff wave — and what it means beyond telecom
- ⚡ Quick Hits: 4 major market moves from this week
- 🏢 Companies Hiring: 5 remote-first companies actively building right now
- 🎯 Career Signal: Agentic AI job postings grew 280% — and most don’t require a CS degree
- ✅ Quick Win: The resume trick that signals AI literacy before anyone reads a word
🔥 Verizon’s Third Layoff in 8 Months — and This Time It’s Reaching Every Industry
Record revenue couldn’t keep 4,000 Cisco employees off the restructuring list last week. Today it’s Verizon’s turn.
The headline. Verizon notified employees this morning that another wave of job cuts is underway — its third major reduction since CEO Daniel Schulman took over in October 2025. The first wave, in November 2025, was the largest in Verizon’s history at 13,000 jobs. A second round followed in May. Today’s cuts target the CXO organization, with estimates suggesting 8,000–10,000 additional positions still need to go before Schulman hits his stated goal: $5 billion in operating cost savings for 2026. The company closed its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications earlier this year and is leaning heavily on AI to handle customer interactions, fraud detection, and support — functions that historically employed tens of thousands of workers at carriers.
The bigger picture. This isn’t a struggling company cutting to survive. Verizon still generates over $130 billion in annual revenue and just completed a major expansion. These cuts are about restructuring the operating model for a world where AI handles service calls at a fraction of what people cost. Schulman is essentially rewriting what “running a telecom company” looks like — and it rhymes exactly with what JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon said on the bank’s Q2 earnings call two days ago: AI “will eliminate jobs,” and JPMorgan has already cut 30%–40% in some divisions using attrition, redeployment, and early retirement instead of headline-grabbing announcements. The roles disappearing aren’t niche. They’re in customer experience, field operations, and corporate functions that exist at virtually every large enterprise in America.
Why this matters: Tech ran this playbook first. Now it’s moving into telecom, banking, and aerospace. If you work in customer-facing or operational roles at any large company, the timeline for your industry’s version of this restructuring just got shorter. The best move? Build your value around what AI makes irreplaceable — not what it makes cheaper.
Source: Verizon Investor Relations | JPMorgan Q2 2026 Earnings
📊 Stat of the Week
13% → The share of enterprise employees who are “Accomplished” at working with AI agents, per Workera’s 2026 AI Skills Benchmark — drawn from 88,753 assessments across professional services, pharma, finance, and U.S. government. That gap is the single largest skills hole in the enterprise right now. And it’s yours to close first. (Workera 2026 AI Skills Enterprise Benchmark)
⚡ Airbus Workers in Spain Strike Over RTO Demands and Pay
About 3,000 Airbus engineers in Spain have been on strike since July 1 — and they’re not done.
The Independent Union of Aviation Professionals (SIPA) called the action at the Getafe plant near Madrid, citing two main grievances: wages that trail inflation, and stricter in-office attendance requirements tied to Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury’s push for 4 days on site starting September 2026. About 3,000 of the plant’s 9,000 workers have joined the action, which is scheduled to run through the end of July. CCOO, a second major union, is now threatening its own indefinite strike after September 7. French unions at Airbus’s Toulouse headquarters held a separate one-day work stoppage in June.
The RTO fight isn’t a tech-only story anymore. Aerospace, government, and professional services are all discovering that mandating 4 days in-office doesn’t end the conversation — it starts a new one. See the breakdown →
JPMorgan Q2 Earnings: Dimon Says AI “Will Eliminate Jobs” in Banking
JPMorgan reported blowout Q2 2026 earnings on July 14 — then CEO Jamie Dimon used the call to say the quiet part loud.
Dimon told analysts that AI “will eliminate jobs” across banking, particularly in risk, fraud detection, marketing, note-taking, and document processing — areas where JPMorgan already runs nearly 1,000 active AI use cases. He said the bank has already reduced headcount by 30%–40% in some divisions, using attrition, redeployment, and early retirement rather than headline rounds. Goldman Sachs is reportedly running the same playbook. The approach keeps the layoff announcements off the front page while still achieving the same outcome: a smaller, AI-augmented workforce.
Finance is engineering a quiet headcount reduction. Watch the hiring data, not the press releases. Get the details →
Amazon’s 30,000-Job Cut Is Still Rippling Through the Job Market
Amazon cut 30,000 corporate jobs since October 2025. Six months in, many are still searching.
A review of the job market impact from this week shows the former Amazonians flooding a market that was already absorbing thousands of ex-Big Tech workers from prior rounds. Healthcare IT, AI startups, and smaller companies are picking up some of the talent — but the saturated market means workers who would have landed new roles in weeks two years ago are now competing for months. Amazon meanwhile has accelerated hiring in lower-cost countries, and continues investing in AI systems to handle functions that previously required large US-based teams. The company’s January 2026 layoff announcement described it as “ensuring the company can move fast and serve customers.”
In a saturated tech job market, specialization beats breadth. One high-demand skill — particularly an AI-adjacent one — is worth more right now than five general ones. Read the full story →
Healthcare Is Running in the Opposite Direction
While tech and telecom restructure, healthcare is posting its strongest hiring numbers in years.
Monster’s Q2 2026 Market Report (released July 13) confirmed what labor data has been showing all year: healthcare is carrying the U.S. job market. The sector has added more jobs since January 2025 than any other sector in the economy — driven by ambulatory care, outpatient clinics, and home health aides. 1.42 million open healthcare roles remain unfilled. Nurse practitioners, medical services managers, and data-driven care coordinators top the fastest-growing list. The structural driver: all baby boomers will be eligible for Medicare within the next few years, and healthcare utilization jumps sharply in that age range.
If you’re pivoting industries, healthcare IT, health data analytics, and digital care coordination are sectors where remote roles exist and demand outpaces supply right now. Dive deeper →
🏢 Companies Hiring Right Now
Five companies actively building remote-first teams — regardless of what the layoff headlines say.
Shopify — eCommerce Platform, Fully Remote (Digital by Design), Hiring Across Engineering, Product, Commercial, and Design → Shopify runs on a “Digital by Design” model — work from wherever you’re most effective, with roughly 3 in-person meetups a year. Active hiring across software engineering, commercial sales, growth marketing, product design, and finance. One of the strongest remote-first cultures in any major tech company. See open roles
GitLab — DevSecOps Platform, All-Remote Globally, 2,500+ Team Members → GitLab pioneered all-remote work and still runs it at full scale across 65+ countries. The company builds its platform on its own product and hires across engineering, product, security, customer success, and marketing with async-first culture built in. See open roles
Stripe — Financial Infrastructure, Remote-Friendly Globally, Hiring Across Engineering, Sales, and Risk → Stripe builds the financial infrastructure for the internet and consistently hires globally for software engineering, product partnerships, technical program management, GTM, and risk roles. See open roles
Atlassian — Team Anywhere, Fully Remote, Hiring Across Product, Engineering, and Design → Atlassian’s “Team Anywhere” policy means full remote flexibility for most roles. With Jira, Confluence, and Trello used by millions of teams worldwide, active hiring spans engineering, product, design, and customer experience. See open roles
Figma — Collaborative Design Platform, Remote-Friendly, Hiring Across Engineering, Product, and GTM → Figma builds collaborative design tools used by teams at every major company. Active remote hiring across software engineering, product design, growth, and customer success roles. See open roles
Know someone between jobs? Forward this section — it might be exactly what they need.
🎯 Agentic AI Jobs Are Exploding — and Most Don’t Require Engineering
Agentic AI job postings grew 280% year-over-year, reaching roughly 90,000 U.S. listings with an average salary of $190K, per Stanford’s 2026 AI Index. But the biggest emerging category isn’t engineers — it’s AI-augmented workers in sales, HR, operations, and customer success who can manage outcomes across humans and AI systems. Box, McKinsey, and Google are already creating new job titles around this: “AI workflow manager,” “AI deployment specialist,” “AI-augmented account executive.” These roles require no code. They require the ability to set clear intent, direct AI agents, and own outcomes. Workers building those skills right now are positioning for roles that didn’t exist 18 months ago — and that average $190K in salary, per Stanford’s 2026 AI Index.
🧠 Skill-Building Reads
Three resources worth bookmarking before the week slips away.
Stanford 2026 AI Index — Economy Chapter: How AI Is Reshaping the Labor Market → The most comprehensive annual data set on AI’s economic impact. Agentic AI job postings grew 280% year-over-year. AI skills now appear in 2.5% of all U.S. job postings — up 297% from a decade ago. Packed with charts on which skills are growing fastest and what companies are actually hiring for. Free to read. Read it →
Workera 2026 AI Skills Enterprise Benchmark: What 88,000 Assessments Reveal → The most concrete dataset on the agentic AI skills gap across 88,753 enterprise assessments. Only 13% Accomplished in Agentic AI before training; targeted upskilling moves Responsible AI from 25% to 81% Accomplished. Know what enterprises are measuring and where the gaps are widest before your next job interview or performance review. Free download. Read it →
Anthropic 2026 Labor Market Impacts Study: A New Measure and Early Evidence → The most rigorous mapping of which occupations AI is actually affecting vs. just theoretically exposed. Computer programmers (74.5% covered), customer service (70.1%), and data entry (67.1%) are most exposed. Hiring into the most exposed professions has slowed for workers aged 22–25. Required reading if you’re making any career decision in the next 12 months. Read it →
✅ Quick Win
Put “AI Tools” in your resume’s skills section before you do anything else this weekend.
It takes 30 seconds and it matters more than most people realize. In a market where agentic AI job postings have grown 280% and 87% of workers who use AI say they treat AI output as a starting point (not an answer), hiring managers are skimming for AI fluency signals before reading the rest of your resume. A specific line like “AI Tools: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity (research, drafting, workflow automation, coding assistance)” works significantly better than generic. The more specific you are about which tools and what you use them for, the more it reads as fluency — not name-dropping. That’s the difference between getting screened in and getting screened out.
What we’re watching: Whether Verizon’s third round triggers similar announcements from AT&T and T-Mobile; whether the Airbus Spain strike spreads to other European manufacturing sites when the September 4-day-on-site mandate kicks in; and whether JPMorgan’s quiet attrition playbook becomes the banking industry standard through the rest of 2026.
🎯 The Market Has a Two-Speed Problem — and It’s Getting Harder to Ignore
Telecom, banking, and aerospace are restructuring fast — not because they’re struggling, but because AI has fundamentally changed what it costs to run large operations. Meanwhile, healthcare is quietly absorbing more of the U.S. workforce than any other sector, and agentic AI job postings are growing at triple-digit rates. The common thread isn’t which industry you’re in — it’s whether you’re building skills that sit on the right side of the AI divide. Verizon cutting costs by leaning on AI for customer service, and JPMorgan doing the same for risk and fraud, isn’t a signal that jobs are disappearing across the board. It’s a signal that certain types of jobs are disappearing, while adjacent, AI-fluent versions of those same roles are growing — with agentic AI roles averaging $190K and growing at 280% per year. The 13% of enterprise employees who can effectively work with AI agents aren’t just luckier — they started earlier. That gap is closeable, and you can close it before your company needs to restructure around it.
For verified remote jobs across every sector and AI tools that sharpen your resume and cover letters, RemoteHunter.com is where to start.
Until next week — keep building.
— The RH Team 🤙
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