The news: At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Google is framing agentic AI as a growth and efficiency lever for telecoms facing flat revenues and rising network costs—not as a workforce reduction switch. The messaging follows market anxiety after Block cited AI-driven efficiency in cutting 4,000 jobs.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” said Angelo Libertucci, Google Cloud’s telecom head, per Light Reading. “Our immediate focus in the short term is to help reduce operating expenses by driving AI-powered network automation and intelligence.”

Google pointed to its own scale—nearly $403 billion in revenues and roughly $2.1 million from each of its 190,000 employees—as proof that high automation can drive productivity without a layoffs narrative.

Zooming in: Google is positioning Gemini as a “reasoning engine” that sits at the center of enterprise data and operations. The company cited its own highly autonomous backbone network as a key example.

• Its agentic solution has helped reduce customer complaints by 25% YoY for Bell Canada, per a Google blog post.
• Google Cloud’s full-stack offering, including chips (TPUs), servers, and AI agents, presents a unified platform that’s also interoperable with third-party models like Anthropic’s Claude.

Major operators including Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone are already customers.

Implications for marketers: Google’s solution isn’t purely telecom automation—it’s the normalization of agentic AI as embedded infrastructure, which can be replicated across various industries.

Digital twins and predictive simulations, initially applied to networks, can easily extend to campaign performance modeling, churn prediction, inventory planning, and demand forecasting. 

“We’re also a very open platform, so it doesn’t mean you have to use Gemini,” Libertucci said. “We have a lot of customers that are taking advantage of our stack and doing great things with Anthropic.”

For marketers, the ROI story can focus on running a smarter, more reliable organization through reducing waste, improving customer experience, and protecting revenues. In industries already under cost pressure, like telecoms, that positioning—and not job cuts—matters.

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