The saga over AI and job cuts among telcos continues with Australia’s Telstra the latest to agonize on the subject and issue contradictory messages. At first, it appeared to associate AI with the 550 redundancies it has just proposed, but then insisted this was not the reason. Telstra then said the jobs lost were in its enterprise division, which has been performing poorly and would have happened without AI. Meanwhile, some telcos have been complaining ironically about skills shortages hampering their deployment of AI for automation and cost efficiencies. This was picked up in a survey by the website telecoms.com, which identified a general skills shortage in AI, resulting in a small pool of AI researchers and engineers being able…