Enabling Telstra’s Progressive Technology Transformation

Telstra is best known as Australia’s leading telecommunications company. But it’s been an essential part of our evolution that we are also one of Australia’s largest technology companies. The distinction is critical when it comes to how we approach our future and the way we use ourselves as a launchpad for products and services we can deliver to our customers.

For a long time, we have pushed to be early adopters of leading-edge technology inside the organisation. We continually look at how we can pick up and productise what we do internally to offer the same capabilities to our customers.

On our current T25 three-year strategic mission, we have set targets to move approximately 90% of applications to the public cloud and to enhance 100% of our key business processes with AI by FY25. As part of achieving this, we have combined our IT, Data and AI, and product teams into one – a process that has shifted a traditional ‘cost centre’ into an innovation engine for ourselves and our customers. Everything we create today is built API first, designing, building, and exposing capabilities as reusable, consumable building blocks.

We have learned that achieving real transformation requires more than technology. It requires leading ourselves to lead others. A business should be fully engaged with the advanced technologies they want to deliver for their clients. To achieve this, we have undertaken a cultural transformation, working in agile at scale and democratising the technologies we use. We only get deep value from AI enablement if our people are using the tools in daily workflows throughout the organisation.

With our API led approach, this means everyone becomes a publisher of capability, and anyone inside the organisation can consume and build upon each other’s innovation. We also offer some of these capabilities to our industry ecosystem partners – device manufacturers, developers and ISVs, SIs and MSPs so they can leverage our advances to innovate even further.

So, what has this approach achieved so far? Our team loves to show off what they’re doing internally, so we have great examples of where we are delivering better experiences for both customers and our employees.

Internally we have built an AI-enabled Telstra knowledge base, Ask Telstra. Using generative AI, Telstra team members can search the company’s extensive internal knowledge bases quickly and easily for information, receiving AI-generated responses to queries in a simple search interface. The technology helps answer customer queries more quickly leading to better interactions. 

In customer experience, 79% of service interactions across consumer and small business are now performed digitally. We have 7.8M customers engaged via digital platforms, with 5.6M participating in our digital loyalty program with an engagement rate of 76%.

AI is embedded to enhance these customer experiences, with our frontline staff having access to a generative AI tool we call One Sentence Summary, which offers a short summary of recent customer interactions and transactions. This means the next agent can read that and quickly pick up where things left off, saving the customer from having to repeat themselves. We also use AI to improve recommendations for what customers could spend their points on through our loyalty program.

Our AI and API led approach is also delivering deep benefits to the Telstra network. We are using AI and software to secure our infrastructure and our customers. As part of our Cleaner Pipes initiative, we are applying AI and machine learning to help identify and block millions of malicious scam texts, calls, emails, and websites before they reach our customers mobile phones. We’re helping to block 10M scam calls, 11M scam SMS, and 280M scam emails on average, every month.

We also use AI to monitor long term weather predictions and assist in natural disaster planning. What assets are likely to be impacted? What equipment and teams should be moved to staging locations to restore infrastructure and support local communities?

Our API first capability also allows us to reconfigure our network dynamically to reroute traffic and add bandwidth and quality of service into places that need it because of outages or increased bandwidth needed for emergency services and added call volumes.

We are embedding our AI expertise into our products - with our first five AI products available to our customers, CoPilot in our Microsoft Cloud offerings, Scam Indicator for the financial services sector, AI Spatial Insights for the retail and local government sector, Sustainability Manager for sustainability and environmental management and AI embedded in our Contact Solutions products.  Our Quantium Telstra data and AI practice is guiding and supporting customers who are starting to embrace AI in their business.

Sustainability is another area that we are driving technology innovation. Our own path to halving absolute greenhouse emissions by 2030 (from a FY19 baseline) means replacing old tech with more efficient technologies.

We're helping empower our customers to track, record and report their environmental impact with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. It starts by understanding their data capabilities necessary to achieve their sustainability obligations and we will help bridge any data gaps by offering solutions that can digitise their physical environment with Australia’s largest IoT network.

In 2021, we commissioned a study from Deloitte Access Economics to see how our own carbon emissions help Australian people and companies to avoid wider emissions. It found that in 2021, every million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions we produced helped our customers to avoid 2.8 million. By 2030, we estimate that we will enable customers to avoid 6.9 million tonnes per tonne of our carbon dioxide equivalent omissions.

Telstra today is a proud example of delivering on Industry 5.0. This ‘5.0’ shift is about taking the automation and efficiency of Industry 4.0 and adding the lens of resiliency, sustainability, and human centricity. We are living it every day for ourselves, and we will deliver it for our customers.

Our focus today is to create amazing digital experiences, to empower Industry 5.0, and to enable a more sustainable future. We are proud of how we are using data, AI, cloud, and an innovation culture to make Telstra a driver of a more secure, resilient, and sustainable future for all Australians.