What’s up with… Steve Jarrett, Amdocs, Telefónica

• Orange’s departing AI chief heads to Anthropic
• Amdocs is slimming down again
• Telefónica completes edge datacentre roll out

In today’s industry news roundup: Steve Jarrett, who has stepped down as head of AI at Orange, is joining Anthropic; the latest job cut round at Amdocs has reached Israel, according to reports; Telefónica has all 17 of its new edge datacentre sites up and running; and much more!

This week, Orange announced Usman Javaid as its new AI chief, replacing Steve Jarrett (pictured above), who is leaving for pastures new. Well, those pastures are the green fields of Anthropic, according to a LinkedIn post from Jarrett. After seven years at the French telco, Jarrett will join the Claude AI developer in August in a role that will see him remain in the French capital, helping Anthropic “to better adapt our products to the needs of the European and African market,” he wrote. Jarrett sat down with TelecomTV at MWC26, outlining some of the recent AI successes the company has seen, including generating more than €300m in value from data and AI in 2025 – you can watch the interview here. The departing AI exec used his LinkedIn post to thank several Orange executives, including CEO Christel Heydemann, and his team, and promised to reveal more about his new role at Anthropic in the near future.

Amdocs has started its latest round of job cuts, which could see thousands of staff laid off from the telecom and media software and professional services giant in the next few months. In late May, Israeli business news site Globes reported that the vendor was set to cut up to 10% of its workforce, up to 2,900 staff, as part of a restructuring programme initiated by the company’s new CEO, Shimie Hortig, who took over at the end of March this year. Now, according to CTech, the headcount reductions have started in Israel, where the vendor employs about 4,000 staff, though it’s not clear how many of those staff could lose their jobs. In May, Amdocs reported fiscal second-quarter revenues, for the three months to the end of March, of $1.17bn, up by 2.2% year on year (at constant currency exchange rates), while its operating income of $182.9m was down 7.5%. Amdocs is expecting its full year revenues (at constant currency) to increase by between 2% and 4% in the current financial year, which ends in September. 

The Amdocs headcount reductions have been a talking point on the show floor at DTW Ignite 2026 in Copenhagen, which is the key event each year for the telecom software sector. AI is at the heart of pretty much all of the presentations, discussions and demonstrations at the show, but there’s also plenty of talk on the sidelines about what kind of impact AI will have on the OSS/BSS sector vendors as AI becomes increasingly integrated into their product development and support processes. The general view is that the trend will result in job cuts at most of the sector’s players. For its part, Amdocs is gearing its strategy and portfolio more towards helping telcos become more AI native and earlier this year unveiled its vendor-agnostic agentic operating system (aOS).  

Meanwhile, Amdocs has announced a number of new deals and engagements. Three Scandinavia has selected the vendor as a strategic partner to “support parts of its ongoing business and digital transformation across Sweden and Denmark. The programme is focused on simplifying and modernising selected customer engagement and commerce capabilities, supporting more consistent and efficient operations across the Nordic markets,” noted Amdocs in this announcement. It also noted the successful deployment of Store Genie, its agentic AI-powered customer service solution, for PLDT Home, the wireline and broadband division of Philippines telco PLDT. “The deployment transforms customer engagement and service operations across PLDT Home’s nationwide sales and service centres and builds on the successful rollout of Store Genie at Smart Communications, the wireless subsidiary of PLDT, announced earlier this year, where the solution is already helping modernise retail and frontline operations through agentic AI-powered automation and intelligence,” stated the vendor.

And Amdocs said it had successfully completed a live AI-RAN field-validated blueprint in collaboration with 1Finity and Supermicro. “The blueprint demonstrates how AI-assisted optimisation can improve network performance and efficiency, optimisation, and anomaly detection; while cloud-native operations simplify deployment and upgrades on a unified AI and RAN platform designed to support future edge AI services,” noted Amdocs. The deployment comprised an Open vRAN architecture running 1Finity Open vRAN software on Supermicro ARM-based 1U servers equipped with Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips deployed on Red Hat Openshift. “The end-to-end setup brings together 1Finity radios, a 5G standalone core and commercial devices in a fully integrated, end-to-end multivendor environment, demonstrating seamless connectivity and reliable performance. Amdocs leverages deep network systems integration expertise to enable cloud-native, AI-driven RAN orchestration and optimisation on the next-generation GPU-accelerated infrastructure. The capabilities were then codified as a network workflow in Amdocs aOS… enabling global CSPs to deploy and scale capabilities simply and flexibly,’ the vendor added.

Telefónica says it has completed its deployment of 17 commercial edge computing services for Spanish businesses. Back in late January, the operator announced that it had begun converting its old copper exchanges into edge datacentre nodes, distributed throughout the country. The telco completed its copper switch-off last year as part of its plans to offer a “modular platform of sovereign digital services to help its customers – including government agencies, infrastructure providers, large companies, and small and medium-sized enterprises – assess, protect, operate and evolve their essential digital assets,” Telefónica Espana president Borja Ochoa said in an announcement. Telefónica added that the cities where its edge nodes have been activated will “benefit from open, differentiated and interconnected infrastructures capable of providing large computing and data storage capacities at the edge” and more locations are expected to be added in 2027.

UK retail giant Tesco is reportedly considering re-entering the consumer broadband market more than a decade after it sold its previous offering to TalkTalk. Tesco already operates a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) – Tesco Mobile – running on joint venture partner Virgin Media O2’s network. With around 5.8 million customers, it is one of the UK’s biggest MVNOs. But, according to the Financial Times (FT), citing sources “familiar with the matter”, Tesco has held initial talks about offering broadband services over VMO2 and Nexfibre’s fibre networks. In a statement published by the FT, Tesco Mobile said that as part of “the normal course of running our business” it had “regular conversations with potential partners about opportunities”. “We currently have no plans to launch into the broadband market,” it added.

The European Commission has given the green light for Liberty Global to buy Vodafone out of their Dutch joint venture, VodafoneZiggo, for €1bn. The regulator said it had found no competition concerns with the deal, which will see Liberty form a new company, called Ziggo Group, in which Vodafone will retain a 10% stake. The deal was announced in February and will also see Liberty Global’s Belgian operation, Telenet, operate under Ziggo Group, which is expected to be listed in Amsterdam next year. According to Liberty, the buyout of VodafoneZiggo – which was created as a joint venture in 2016 – is expected to be completed in July.

Two major industry bodies representing Australian communications companies have voted unanimously to merge into a single entity. The Australian Telecommunications Alliance (ATA) and the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, two bodies that have each represented the telco industry for more than 30 years, will combine under the current operations of the ATA by 30 June 2026, after the merger was approved by members at general meetings held by both organisations. ATA CEO Luke Coleman said the merger will help strengthen the telecommunications sector at a critical time for Australia’s digital economy and position the industry strongly for the future.

– The staff, TelecomTV