Apple Halts Plan to Cut 5,000 AppleCare Jobs for AI Agents

Apple drew up a plan over the summer to lay off about 5,000 AppleCare support workers and replace them with AI agents, then shelved it, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports via MacRumors. The company has "put those plans on hold indefinitely" and is "no longer currently looking to take such a step."

The underlying tech is already deployed. A generative AI assistant now answers Apple's 1-800-APL-CARE line, walking callers through troubleshooting before handing off to a human rep. What paused was the headcount decision meant to follow it. Gurman's framing is that Apple believed "AI-powered phone and web agents could take over some of the responsibilities performed by the employees who would have been let go" — and then decided, for now, not to act on that belief.

The pause arrives less than a month into John Ternus's tenure. The 51-year-old succeeded Tim Cook on September 1 after Cook's 15-year run, and his opening weeks have brought smaller cuts in other corners: "roughly half a dozen directors" in middle management, engineering programme managers inside the hardware group over the past two weeks, and small reductions on Siri, Vision Pro, AI software and Fitness+. Divisions that had been led to expect budget and headcount increases in 2027 are being told those are off.

Bloomberg does not spell out why the AppleCare cut was pulled back, and the reporting is single-sourced. It lands in a busy stretch for Apple coverage on our end, following recent pieces on the Vision successor reportedly "on life support" and OpenAI's complaint that the ChatGPT-in-Siri deal "persistently underperformed" — three Apple stories inside our Apple tracker in the same week.