AT&T Is Directing Some Help-Desk Managers to Relocate or Face Layoffs

AT&T CEO John Stankey made waves this month when he told employees in a memo that the company is shifting to a “market-based culture” that requires employees work closer together.

Since then, Business Insider has learned that AT&T is consolidating 22 internal help-desk centers into six locations — and affected managers get two weeks to decide whether to move or lose their jobs and get severance. Unionized workers will be allowed to remain at their current office in a different customer-service support role.

The consolidation of so-called centralized support desk workers, who largely assist other AT&T employees, follows a playbook the company has used repeatedly since 2023 as it upgrades its tech and cuts legacy costs. The changes also come at a time when corporate America, especially the tech sector, is embracing a hardcore culture that emphasizes performance metrics, time in the office, and a renewed sense of hustle.

Two managers shared details of the plan to shrink the help-desk sites to six locations with Business Insider. In a statement, a company spokesperson declined to comment on the number of centers that would remain, but confirmed that the company is reducing work locations across the business unit.

The spokesperson said the move is unrelated to Stankey’s take-it-or-leave-it memo, which was his frank response to an internal survey that found employees reporting lower engagement at work.

However, one AT&T manager told Business Insider that they understood the department’s leadership was speeding up the timetable for the help-desk consolidation because of the Stankey memo, instead of taking a couple of years to carry it out.

A choice for employees

The plan, the same manager said, involves moving managers to sites in Atlanta; Mesa, Arizona; Miami; Orlando; Richardson, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about how many workers would be affected.

One of the managers, who is facing an out-of-state move hundreds of miles away, shared an email with Business Insider in which the company said they would be required to cover their own moving expenses. They feel like they don’t have a choice about relocating their family.

“Without my income, we’re not going to make it,” the person said.

A half-dozen employees across the company told Business Insider that department leaders were told this month to devise “action plans” to address concerns raised in the recent employee survey about where and how AT&T operates.

AT&T’s spokesperson said the relocations will help the company optimize its workflows. “It reflects ongoing strategic shifts across our call center operations to colocate similar work functions and improve efficiency, consistency, and teamwork,” the spokesperson said.

Several corporate divisions have gone through similar phases of shedding satellite offices in favor of larger, centralized hubs.

The company made headlines in 2023 when it said some 60,000 managers would be assigned to nine metro areas, down from 300 locations across the US. Stankey told Bloomberg at the time that around 9,000 people would face relocation decisions.

The reduction in office footprint was followed by a mandatory five-day in-office schedule that was phased in this year.

These relocation orders, coupled with the RTO mandate, have resulted in some teams shrinking by half, according to internal data reviewed by Business Insider.

Streamlining the business

Internal figures from last year, seen by Business Insider, show the impact of relocation orders on a division under CTO Jeremy Legg called AT&T Technology Services, or ATS, which employed around 10,000 workers in the US in 2023.

ATS’ consolidation meant moving from some 95 “non-strategic” locations — where a third of ATS employees were based — to offices in the Seattle, New York, Atlanta, and Dallas areas. Of the 318 ATS managerial workers who received notification to move during the first wave in 2023, about half declined and left the company.

Companywide, AT&T employed more than 160,000 workers at the start of 2023, according to its annual report. It started this year with about 141,000. Chief competitors Verizon and T-Mobile had about 99,000 and 70,000 employees, respectively, at the start of 2025.

Legg said last week at a KeyBanc tech conference that as AT&T incorporates more software and moves away from its legacy hardware and support systems, it could cut costs.

“If you have 100 central offices, you may be able to only have the gear in 30 or 40 of them,” he said. That means physical infrastructure and labor costs go down, Legg said.

The spokesperson said the latest relocations are not related to AI. They come at a time, however, where AT&T — like many firms — increasingly relies on the technology to streamline its business.

Stankey said in a January earnings call that the company expects to save $3 billion in running costs by further integrating AI.

CTO Legg said at the KeyBanc conference that his division has begun loading trouble tickets into AT&T’s generative and agentic AI frameworks for review.

“It now recommends what the fixes are and can write the code to do the fix,” he said. “Should we just go ahead and automate that? We’re still human in the loop there, but these are major, major changes.”

They’re changes investors appear to support. AT&T shares are up around 27% in 2025.

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