There was a time when customer service meant waiting on hold while someone named Bob from Chicago, Illinois read step-by-step instructions on how to unplug your modem and pray.

But over the past year or two, a new buzzword has been creeping into corporate boardrooms (and employees' nightmares)... a term called AI agents, digital workers designed to automate everything from customer support to sales, all in the name of "efficiency." Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Bob hasn’t been replaced yet… but this morning’s report is moving us a lot closer.

I don’t know if you remember anything (other than the word “tariff), but last summer Verizon rolled out a huge AI upgrade, partnering with Google to embed an assistant into the workflows of its 28,000-person customer service team. The pilot started in July 2024, and by January, it was running at full scale. And now Verizon’s bragging that they’ve seen a 40% increase in sales from the same team.

Not because the AI talks to customers directly (yet) but because it sits behind the scenes, guiding reps in real time. It suggests answers to tricky questions, pulls up the right documentation, and nudges them toward cross-sells and upsells with alarming precision.

Built using Google’s Gemini large language model and trained on 15,000 internal Verizon documents, this assistant can spit out recommendations faster than any human could Google it. So instead of an agent fumbling through eight different tabs and outdated PDFs, they’ve got a digital whisperer in their ear serving up specific instructions.

“We are doing reskilling in real time from customer care agents to selling agents,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, Verizon’s Consumer CEO, at Google Cloud’s annual Vegas conference. The difference in strategy is key. While companies like Klarna have gone the Skynet route (laying off actual humans after bringing in AI) Verizon insists it’s not trying to replace workers. They say it’s about making people more effective.

But make no mistake, this is part of a much bigger shift. At the same conference, Google announced its Agent Development Kit, a set of tools to let companies build AI agents with under 100 lines of code. And yes, that’s as easy and dangerous as it sounds. The kit joins Agent2Agent, Google’s new standard to let different agents work together.

It’s no secret what the goal is here… to turn AI agents into the backbone of modern business. From writing code to managing customer support, marketing, HR, and sales (Google’s banking these tools will be everywhere). And with Alphabet spending $75 billion this year on infrastructure to support that vision (including custom chips, subsea cables, and cloud capacity), they’re not exactly dipping a toe in.

And Wall Street is noticing. Verizon’s 40% sales bump offers the kind of real-world ROI investors have been craving after months of generative AI hype. It's the difference between another ChatGPT demo and something that actually moves the revenue needle.

But let’s not pretend there’s no downside. If a tool can make one employee do the work of two, it’s only a matter of time before companies start asking themselves why they’re still paying for both. (Especially when the AI doesn’t ask for health insurance or steal office snacks.)

If your job involves following a script, entering info into a CRM, or doing anything that ends with “...is there anything else I can help you with today?”... you might want to start thinking about what you can do that an AI agent can’t.

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Stock.News has positions in Verizon and Google.