Key Topics Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Deploying highly secure and trustworthy artificial intelligence to deliver measurable value.

Click through to learn about our 2025 impact in action.

Our Approach

AT&T has been a pioneer in AI for nearly 70 years, since the foundations of the technology. Today, we apply machine learning and other AI functions to increase network efficiency, reliability and security — helping to protect our customers and improve our logistics. We enlist generative AI (GenAI) to make it faster and easier for customers and employees to get answers to questions and solve problems.

Our internal AI Policy and AI Guiding Principles ground our employees in our overall AI strategy and the dos and don’ts for creating, deploying and executing AI at AT&T. We also continue to study ethical questions about AI with the goal of using it in the safest, most inclusive way. Our AI Principles are:

By People, for People: We incorporate human oversight into AI. With people at the core, AI can enhance the workforce, expand capability and benefit society.
Responsible: We act responsibly and build appropriate frameworks to design, develop and deploy AI in a transparent and controllable manner.
Secure and Ethical: We are grounded in ethics, safety and values at every stage of AI, including our privacy principles and security safeguards.

Additional policies that support our responsible use of AI are our:

AI Copyright Policy, which helps to ensure compliance with all applicable copyright laws. The policy prohibits copyright-infringing uses in our acceptable use terms and provides a process for rightsholders to submit complaints of non-compliance.
Supplier Artificial Intelligence Requirements, which helps to ensure any AI used by suppliers protects AT&T data, maintains full transparency and human oversight, and adheres to responsible, secure and ethical development practices.

AI Governance Structure

AT&T governs AI models that are developed and deployed within the company through centralized oversight, mandatory risk processes and clear accountability at every stage of the AI lifecycle. Our governance structure connects Board-level oversight with executive leadership and cross-functional experts who guide AI strategy, policy and deployment.

Board of Directors: The Board of Directors receives regular reports on innovation and responsible technology matters from executive leadership, including updates on AI strategy, major initiatives and emerging risks. The Corporate Development and Finance Committee of the Board has oversight of the company’s technology evaluation, development and implementation. In addition, the Audit Committee of the Board receives regular reports on responsible technology and emerging risks.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO): Responsible for the technology platforms supporting all AT&T business units, including network transformation, cybersecurity and the technology foundation for AI solutions. The CTO also has management responsibility for new product development and the Chief Data Office (CDO), ensuring that AI is embedded strategically and securely across our products, services and operations.
Chief Data & AI Officer: Reporting to the CTO, the Chief Data & AI Officer leads the company’s vision for data-driven innovation and AI advancement, setting enterprise standards for responsible data and AI use and aligning AI initiatives with our AI Policy.
CDO Team: Oversees the strategic vision of data, analytics and AI across the company, including both traditional machine learning and GenAI. The CDO maintains AI governance frameworks and partners with business and risk organizations to operationalize AI policies.
Data + AI Governance Council and Review Board: Established by the CDO, the Data + AI Governance Council and Review Board provides company-wide oversight of our AI strategy and risks. The Council includes senior leaders across technology, legal, security, privacy, compliance and business segments. Functions include setting policy to help ensure alignment with our AI principles, privacy commitments and security requirements, reviewing high-risk AI use cases prior to production deployment, and overseeing AI training programs required for employees to access and use AI tools.
Chief Compliance Office: In 2025, to reinforce this foundation, the Chief Compliance Office (CCO) created a new global AI regulatory readiness program that provides a structured approach to assessing new AI legislation, classifying regulatory obligations, and aligning firmwide controls to global frameworks. The CCO helps to ensure that AI systems, solutions and models are auditable, transparent and compliant across jurisdictions. This strategy helps to ensure responsible AI remains aligned with evolving regulatory expectations, complements our ethical commitments, and strengthens traceability, documentation and oversight across the AI lifecycle.

Centralized Risk Oversight

Under this governance structure, we manage AI risk through a single, enterprise-wide AI risk management framework that applies consistent standards and controls to every AI initiative. This centralized approach gives teams one clear process to follow, so they can move quickly while maintaining strong safeguards for safety, security and privacy.

When developing AI solutions, customer and employee privacy is a top priority. We have a standard process that clearly outlines the actions teams must take before an AI solution can be developed, tested and deployed to help ensure responsible and safe development and keep sensitive and personal data protected.

As new use cases move through the approval process, our risk mitigation sub-team, comprising compliance, security, legal, privacy, HR and supply chain experts, provides feedback to ensure responsible use of data sources, model methods and security controls. Before deployment, the use case must adhere to any risk mitigation conditions identified as part of the approval process.

We maintain a centralized AI use case registry for approved initiatives, tracking every production deployment across the company. This inventory allows us to maintain an up-to-date view of how AI is being used across AT&T aligned with our AI Guiding Principles and AI Policy.

Centralizing AI risk oversight and connecting it directly to our governance structure helps teams deliver impactful AI solutions at scale, with consistent safeguards designed to protect our customers, our employees and our network.

Employee Skilling

We recognize that AI is transforming the way work gets done, and we are committed to ensuring these technologies enhance, not replace, our workforce.

At AT&T, AI is deployed to improve productivity, strengthen decision-making and free employees to focus on higher-value work, which makes training more important than ever. We continue to invest in skilling programs that help employees responsibly and confidently use AI tools.

Through Ask AT&T Academy, we provide employees structured learning paths to help them understand and apply Ask AT&T, our internal GenAI tool, in their daily work. The Academy includes foundational, intermediate and advanced learning paths.

To help ensure employees know how to responsibly use AI, we require all employees to complete our “Ethics, Requirement and Policies in AI” training course before they are allowed to access our internal GenAI tools. The course includes the AI Guiding Principles and our internal AI Policy.

Mitigating Energy Impacts

One key area of focus is managing the environmental footprint of advanced computing and AI. The growing use of AI raises important questions about energy consumption, and we are taking steps to manage these impacts responsibly. As part of our strategy, we are increasingly using small language models, which require significantly less compute power than large models, reducing associated energy and water use while still enabling high-value AI capabilities.

We also use AI-powered tools to better understand and optimize energy use across our operations, from data centers to cell site aggregation hubs. In parallel, we conduct detailed analyses to assess the energy implications of AI adoption, including cloud workloads and the technologies needed to support future demand. AI in our network further enhances efficiency by optimizing energy consumption, predicting equipment failures before they occur, expanding cell site sleeping, and strengthening overall reliability. For more on our energy efficiency approach, see our Energy Management issue brief.

Impact in Action

Working on What Matters: Our 2025 Impact in Action

We deploy AI where it delivers measurable business value, both internally and in the products and services we provide to customers. These AI models are continuously learning and improving, optimizing customer outcomes and company processes. In 2025, AT&T’s approach to AI reflects our overall strategic transformation, with AI embedded across every facet of the business. We continue to scale investment, supported by executive leadership, with a clear focus on measurable returns. This evolution has shifted AI from isolated use cases to a foundational role in operations, product development and customer experience. AI is no longer just a technology initiative; it is a core driver of efficiency, innovation and sustainable growth for the company. Some examples of impact:

Customer-Facing AI Uses

Fighting Spam: AT&T ActiveArmor® uses machine learning and the scale of our network to detect and block or label more than 2.5 billion illegal robocalls per month, reducing unwanted and potentially harmful calls for millions of customers.
Preventing Fraud: Advanced fraud-detection models use AI to identify suspicious transaction patterns as they emerge, helping to prevent fraudulent activity and saving millions of dollars each year.
Reducing Equipment Downtime and Energy Use: Network operations teams deployed advanced AI through a Network Foundation Model (NFM) to optimize energy use and predict equipment failures before they occur. This enhances network reliability and performance while supporting cost efficiency and sustainability. The NFM is trained on network data to accelerate energy‑saving actions like cell site sleeping and energy anomaly detection. Learn more in our Energy Management issue brief.
Improving Customer Service: In customer care, GenAI-powered tools help customer service teams handle inquiries more effectively and efficiently, improving overall service experience and reducing average call times. GenAI assists in summarizing customer interactions, freeing our customer service agents from those administrative tasks.

Internal AI Uses

Increasing Productivity: We equip employees with Ask AT&T, our internal GenAI platform, to help improve personal productivity.
Boosting Efficiency: Our AI-assisted software engineering teams are demonstrating measurable quality and efficiency gains, including a 23% reduction in development cycle time and an 80% decrease in code‑quality issues identified through static analysis.
Strengthening Supplier Oversight: Our GenAI-driven contract analytics tool improves accuracy, transparency and efficiency in managing supplier agreements. With natural-language search, metadata filtering and human-reviewed AI summaries, the platform strengthens contract oversight and supports our broader commitment to responsible, well-governed AI in the supply chain.
Promoting Data Integrity: AI supports our data inventory, metadata management and data classification processes, helping us maintain an accurate understanding of the datasets we manage and the governance structures that apply to each.
Delivering Legal Services: AT&T LegalEdge is a new Center of Expertise (COE) within the AT&T Legal Department dedicated to delivering high-quality legal services at scale with advanced technologies and GenAI. The COE combines experienced attorneys and legal professionals with cutting-edge AI tools to deliver faster, higher-quality and more cost-effective legal services, without compromising quality or the trusted relationships that define AT&T’s Legal Department.

Through 2025, the scale and impact of Ask AT&T continue to grow. The platform generated an average of 27 billion tokens, roughly equivalent to 20 billion generated words, every day. We also achieved top rankings in industry benchmarks including Text-to-SQL benchmarks, which measure how accurately AI can translate everyday questions into database queries, making it easier for employees to access and use data without specialized technical skills. At the end of 2025, AT&T held the top spot in the world on the BIRD-SQL leaderboard.

Lastly, GenAI has helped us achieve greater cost savings across the organization. Our investment in GenAI helped to contribute to our overall $1 billion in total cost savings in 2025. We expect AI to continue to contribute to our $4 billion cost savings commitment by the end of 2028.

Advancing AI for Career Development

Beyond foundational skills, we are also using AI to open new career paths and development opportunities for our employees. In 2025, we expanded our Ask AT&T Academy training program to offer job-specific AI training for employees focused on communications, data analysis, project execution, leadership and advanced technical topics. We also developed and offered applied GenAI courses for management employees and supervisors, teaching them how to use AI tools to build and enhance their end-of-year reviews.

In addition to Ask AT&T, 20,000 employees received a license to utilize Microsoft Copilot in 2025. To support their upskilling, we launched multiple Microsoft Copilot learning tracks with trainings on how to use Copilot across Microsoft 365’s suite of applications.

We also implemented a new ambassador program in 2025, The GenAI Collective, bringing business unit GenAI leaders and early adopters together to support their colleagues. Ambassadors receive training on AT&T’s GenAI tools, strategy and roadmap, and share that knowledge with their colleagues at monthly Lunch & Learn events.

Driving AI Education for America’s Youth

As we prepare our own workforce for an AI-powered future, we are also investing in the next generation of talent. AT&T was one of the inaugural signers of the White House’s Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education. By signing, we pledge to make AI-enabled educational resources available to youth and teachers. Learn more about our efforts in our Digital Divide issue brief.