Dive Brief:
- AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches announced he will retire at the end of the year, departing from the company and closing “one of the most meaningful chapters” of his four-decade career, he said Wednesday in a post on his LinkedIn profile. The Dallas, Texas-based telecommunication provider tapped company alum Jennifer Biry as his successor, with Desroches to officially step down on Dec. 31, according to a securities filing.
- Biry is slated to join the telecom company, where she previously spent 20 years in numerous roles, as its deputy CFO effective July 9, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. She will succeed Desroches in the top financial seat on Jan. 1, 2027.
- “AT&T played an important role in shaping my career,” Biry said of the appointment in a Wednesday post on her LinkedIn profile. “The opportunity to return to the company at such a pivotal point in its transformation is a full-circle moment that truly feels like coming home.”
Dive Insight:
The company did not provide compensation details for Biry as deputy CFO or as Desroches’ successor in its Tuesday filing.
Desroches’ total compensation for 2025 hit about $13.6 million, including a base salary of $1.2 million, stock awards of $8.5 million and non-equity incentive plan compensation of about $3.1 million, according to AT&T’s proxy statement filed March 23.
Desroches is retiring after a long career spent at numerous iterations of AT&T and related entities — first joining Time Warner Inc. in 2008 as its senior vice president and controller, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He held various roles throughout the next two decades at the media and entertainment company, including as CFO for Warner Media, before AT&T spun out that business and combined it with Discovery Inc. to create Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. With the merger, Desroches stepped into the top finance seat for AT&T in April 2021.
Looking back at his career, Desroches thinks of his professional life not simply in terms of roles or titles, but in chapters, each “shaped by change challenge, and the opportunity to help navigate moments that mattered,” he wrote Wednesday.
“Along the way, I’ve learned that progress isn’t linear. It takes discipline, resilience, and at times, the willingness to make difficult decisions in service of something bigger and longer term,” Desroches wrote on LinkedIn. “Some of the most defining moments of my career came in those periods of transformation — when the path forward wasn’t always clear, but the conviction to move forward had to be.”
Desroches’ successor Biry — also an alum of Warner Media — is seeking to put her own career lessons to use as she rejoins AT&T. Biry is stepping in as the telcom company’s deputy CFO after serving four years in the dual capacity of CFO and chief operating officer for computer security McAfee.
McAfee named Experian alum Brian Herb to succeed Biry as its finance chief, CFO Dive previously reported.
Her time leading both the finance and operations team at McAfee gave her a “front-row seat” for software and cybersecurity innovation, she said on LinkedIn, “deepening my appreciation for how rapidly technology is reshaping the world.”
The lessons learned from McAfee also “fit perfectly” with AT&T’s goal of building out “future-ready networks,” she said. In recent years, the business has focused on expanding its “converged connectivity” strategy, a combination of its 5-G wireless networks and fiber networks. In March, the company announced it would commit $250 billion over a five-year period to build out the largest network and improve connectivity across the U.S.
The business saw strong growth for connectivity in its first quarter for 2026, with 45% of its home internet subscribers also choosing its wireless products, according to its most earnings report. For its first quarter, AT&T reported income from continuing operations of $4.2 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $11.8 billion, according to the company’s earnings results published April 22.
