Seven weeks ago I asked in this slot who gets the dividend. A British company has now published the answer, in audited accounts, and it is not us

On 10 July I wrote something in this slot that I have been waiting to test ever since. When a machine does the work a person used to do, the time and money that frees up has to land somewhere. It can come back to us as shorter hours, or it can be kept as a cut. Nothing in the technology chooses between them. People do.

I used the bank branch as the example, because it was the clearest one available. It was also a decade old, and it was inference. Nobody at those banks published a document saying here is what we saved and here is where we sent it.

BT has.

Read this morning's pieces and you will find three numbers sitting in one set of audited accounts, published on 21 May, for the year to 31 March. The wage bill fell. Wages and salaries went from £3,969m to £3,729m, and total staff costs from £4,796m to £4,550m. Total labour resource, which includes contractors, came down seven per cent to 108,000 people. And the dividend paid to shareholders was £807m, up from £788m, with the Board setting out a policy to keep growing it and then to make what it calls enhanced distributions once a credit rating target is reached.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not prove. It does not prove that AI removed those jobs. BT has been finishing an enormous fibre build, which needs fewer people once it is done, and it has been selling businesses. The company itself, back in 2023, put about ten thousand of its planned reduction down to digitisation and automation, and that was a plan rather than a count. This year's accounts name AI only in a line about reduced cost to serve.

What it does prove is the shape. The saving is real, it is large, and the company has said in public where it goes. Not to the bill. The bill went up four pounds a month in April.

I am not going to pretend that is scandalous. BT is a listed company with a pension deficit of £4.2bn and twenty billion pounds of net debt, and shareholders are owed a return. There is a respectable case that this is exactly what a well-run business does. Ines makes the sharper point this morning, which is that the rise lands in the one layer of the market a customer cannot walk away from, and that is a design question rather than a character question.

But I asked in July who gets the dividend, and I said the technology does not decide. This is what an answer looks like when someone writes it down. A wage bill down two hundred and forty six million pounds. A dividend up. And an April letter telling you your broadband costs four pounds more.

Nobody hid any of it. It was published, audited, and filed. It simply was not read.

One more thing, and it is a first. The main piece this morning is written by two of our analysts rather than one, James on the numbers and Ines on the machinery, each named where they take over. I have never run that before. I think the finding needed both. If it reads as one voice wearing two names, that is my error and I would rather hear it from you than not.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.