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Optimising your business can be a tricky business. The path to success is full of speed bumps, hurdles to jump, mountains to climb. Whilst you look for low-hanging fruit, windows of opportunity, the ladder to success.
[Images of people using tech in different industries].
But at Telstra, we don’t use metaphors to tell you how to make your business thrive.
[Images of people using tech in different industries].
Instead, we give you experts who understand efficiency in business and technology. Simple really. Because we get you and your business. So connect with us. Secure your business and empower yourself and your team to succeed. No ladder required. Telstra, Your Business Optimised. Kerrie-Anne Turner, Group Owner and Executive, Marketing and Commercial Steering, Telstra Enterprise.
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KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Hello and welcome to 'Your Business Optimised' online. I'm Kerrie-Anne Turner, and I am excited to be with you today.
Now, as the name suggests, today is all about optimising your business. It's the culmination of a nationwide roadshow where we brought together the best partnerships to discuss how the AI and security landscapes are changing, how we work and optimise your business.
But what exactly do we mean by optimisation? It's a pretty broad statement. In its purest sense, optimisation is making the process of something as effective as possible. And for Jemena, one of the country's largest utility providers, optimisation was about building the foundations of smart electricity meters to transform how they took readings. They partnered with the Telstra Purple Experts to create IoT-powered metering solutions. From devices in the field to a single source of truth, Jemena has the connected device management, data visualization, and analytics together in one platform. Now, this enables near real-time readings, which quite frankly gives crews a lot of time to work on their incredibly critical tasks. It also takes customer service to the next level, all while maintaining worker safety in the field, which we know is critically important. Jemena invested a significant amount of time and resources to achieve their goals, but we know for some of you watching today, optimisation may simply be running your workplace more efficiently and effectively with simple AI enhancements.
For others, it could be about ensuring faster, more secure connectivity. But here's the problem: understanding the need to innovate and optimise and then making it all happen isn't always simple. Legacy systems, operational constraints, skills, availability, or just simply finding the capacity in a hectic business environment are just some of the challenges that you are facing. And that's why we're here today to show you the opportunities, the opportunity that technology is, in fact, unlocking and to help you create a path forward.
Here's what we learned during our time on the road with our customers, our channel partners, and our technology partners in Microsoft, AWS, and VMware. Group executive Telstra Enterprise David Burns, aka my boss, he spoke about the importance of environmental and social governance and the role optimisation plays in creating a more sustainable business.
[QUOTE APPEARS ON SCREEN]
[“All Telstra Enterprise mobile plans and mobile broadband plans are now certified carbon neutral under the governtment’s Climate Active program, at no extra cost to your business.”]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: He highlighted Telstra's business goal to reduce our own emissions by at least 50% by 2030 and how we're helping our customers deliver and report on their own ESG strategies. Now, according to a Deloitte report on enabling positive climate action, Telstra enabled customers to avoid 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 in 2021. Now, just to put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of taking 820,000 cars off Australian roads. It's pretty big and it really shows the power of what can be achieved when we all align towards a common goal.
[IMAGE OF TWO VISY TRUCKS APPEAR ON SCREEN]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: For example, a few years ago, packaging solutions provider Visy partnered with Telstra to migrate its on-premise information storage infrastructure to a cloud environment. Now a couple of years later, they asked us to optimise their cloud infrastructure. This required Telstra to integrate multiple cloud computing and storage environments across Azure, AWS, and Telstra into a single network architecture. Now over time, both cloud transformations did improve the performance of Visy's applications and reduced its data centre-related emissions and energy usage by up to a whopping 80%.
Now, transformation of this scale really isn't possible without the support of our incredible partners, and that's what we did at our roadshow. We brought together Microsoft and AWS and explored optimisation in two very different ways.
[Image: ‘Digital debt is costing innovation’ from Microsoft Work Trend Index, May 2023]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Microsoft delivered us the world of possibilities when it comes to AI and automation. Did you know that for all the hours we spend in PowerPoint, scrutinizing Excel spreadsheets or typing Word documents, just 43% of that time spent in the office suite is actually on creative problem-solving? 43%. So, there's an immense opportunity to improve how we spend our time at work, and having something called a copilot taking care of those tedious tasks will allow us to really jump through into our full potential. We'll hear more from our panel shortly on what copilot really is and how it can benefit your business.
Now, successful innovation and optimisation do need a solid foundation. Now with ransomware twice as likely as a natural disaster to impact your data and security, AWS showed us how security and data recovery practices really do underpin optimisation. You'll hear more about how security enables optimisation in just a moment.
Now, I don't want to give away too much, but in the next hour, we're going to bring you the best of our roadshow. Firstly, our panel of experts will discuss what optimisation means when we talk about AI, automation, ESG, and security. And we're going to have an incredible special guest, former British Royal Navy aircrew officer, nutritionist, and high-performance coach Paul Taylor is going to share his story of how you can build resilience in high-pressure situations and optimise your own performance. So stay tuned for that one.
Now, before we get started and to get a little bit inspired, I would really like to share a short video about how we helped an incredible Australian production team producing a feature film called 'Blueback' Stay connected and optimise their work between filming out in remote Western Australian locations and the editing studio.
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[TITLE: Supporting remote film production. Telstra’s Mobile Broadband Solution.]
TARA BILSTON: There's no way that we would be able to film out here in Burma without the connectivity that we have because it just would be so slow. Communication would be too slow. The film just wouldn't work.
[James Grandison, Producer. Video of camera on a cliff with ocean behind. Images of people editing video.]
JAMES GRANDISON: The remote technology system that's been put in place by Telstra has been a huge help to this production because we've got some unique challenges around the location we're in being quite remote and a somewhat limited communications base. Having the remote technology in place means that our various departments and various bases for where we do our operations all within a very sort of patchy environment for communications. The remote technology has brought all that together and meant that we could communicate effectively between departments.
[Christopher Reig, Digital Imaging Technician]
CHRISTOPHER REIG: Where Telstra has helped us has been to connect our sets, connect our locations, connect everything that we are working on, so that way we're not in dark spots throughout our work day.
[Lien See Leong, Costumer Designer]
LIEN SEE LEONG: We are trying to become sustainable and eco-friendly. You still need to be able to download the documents that you need, whether it's a call sheet or for us in particular, costume or the costume breakdowns. In order for us to continue to try and save the environment, we need to have that technology behind us.
[Robert Patterson, Executive Producer]
ROBERT PATTERSON: Telstra has enabled us to meet the sustainable screen's sort of ethos of the production through the fact that we use a paperless production methodology. So all call sheets, excerpts of the script, and lots of other documents, maps, other things are all issued electronically. So the fact that we all have great reception, great data, we can access those materials either from our accommodation or while we're traveling to and from locations or on location simply by looking at our phones or other devices. We're probably as remote as we could ever be in any location. And the fact that it's been a seamless experience really shows that this can work. This model actually works.
[Image: Netgear Orbi]
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[TITLE APPEARS ON SCREEN: Penel Session, Optimise transformation and smarter partnerships. Paul Nicholls, Head of Workplace and Digital Transformation, Telstra Purple. Mary Hodson, Head of Microsoft Practice, Telstra Purple. Oliver Welch, Head of AWS Practice, Telstra Purple]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I just love that Blueback story, and I cannot wait to see that film come out. And it looks just so beautiful, too, so keep an eye out for it.
Now, during the road show, we spoke about the convergence of technology, innovation, workplace experience, and business optimisation. Across every event when we were presenting and when we were speaking to our customers, a couple of consistent themes emerged from our sessions. We're seeing three big opportunities driving change.
The first is artificial intelligence and automation, particularly in the workplace setting. Workplace behaviors have really shifted dramatically over the last couple of years, and let's face it, skills and talent are at a premium, and having the right systems and processes in place to support your human capital has really never been more critical.
The second opportunity is security. It must be front of mind. And as we embrace the potential of AI and automation, we need to set the right foundation to enable this innovation in a safe and secure way. Robust user-centric security backed by disaster recovery policies really does inspire confidence and maintains business continuity in the face of ever-rising threats.
Now, finally, the third opportunity we see is in ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance. We all know Australian businesses are committed to reducing their impact on the environment. As David Burns mentioned while we were on the road, we're supporting our customers through technology by providing the technical skills to consolidate and automate environmental monitoring and reporting.
Today, we'll dig into these a little bit more. And to do just that, I am joined by three of Telstra's smartest minds: Paul Nicholls, Head of Workplace and Digital Transformation at Telstra Purple; Mary Hodson, Head of Microsoft Practice at Telstra Purple; Oliver Welch, Head of our AWS practice at Telstra Purple. Now, welcome, everyone. I'm thrilled to have you on the panel and feeling a little bit intimidated. These are some of our smartest minds.
Now if you have any questions, please pop them into the live Q&A, and we will do our best to answer them. And if we don't get to them in time, we will certainly follow up.
So, to get us started, brains trust, I'd like to talk a little bit about automation and AI and its impact on workplace experience. Look, it's a hot topic at the moment and one that was barely even in the public consciousness like six to nine months ago. It's just such a nascent technology at this stage, but its potential is truly immense.
But how do we navigate our way to this vast ocean of opportunity? Recently, a few weeks ago, many of us were with our customers at the Gartner IT Symposium, and it was all that anyone was thinking about.
But before we begin, I am going to do a little bit of audience engagement, and we're going to gauge the temperature in the room. Now, you'll see a pop-up on the sidebar of your browser. We're going to do a little bit of a poll. The question is, is your business actively exploring AI and automation to improve operations? So please go ahead and answer that, and we'll come back to you in a moment. But Mary, I'm going to head to you first because this is such an exciting topic. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft Research found out that a whopping 57% of the time spent in the O365 platform was spent managing information and communication that doesn't actually matter.
How do we automate news artificial intelligence to really get that time back?
MARY HODSON: Yeah, it's amazing when you see those stats. And I think we spend so much time in meetings and managing those information flow, it can be really challenging to have time for innovation and strategic thinking. The promise of AI is essentially to really lift the burden of some of those administrative and repetitive tasks. And as Satya from Microsoft says, the new generations of AI will remove the drudgery of work and really unleash creativity. And I'm really excited to see about where that can take us.
Now, Microsoft last week just released their general release date for Copilot in November, and so it's really exciting to see how we can start to see Copilots pop up in some of our office applications.
[Image appears showing ‘Artificial Intelligence as a Copilot for work’]
So if you think about some of the examples that that will bring, it could be summarizing meeting actions at the end of a meeting. It could be helping us draft email responses, creating or summarizing lengthy Word documents, and also really easily generating charts and PowerPoint presentations with ease. So we can spend more time actually sharing that information and capturing the insights and actually pulling all of that info together.
And in addition to that, for a more flexible approach, they also have Azure OpenAI. And so we've actually used this internally within Telstra with our Ask Telstra app. This is something we've enabled for our frontline teams within Telstra and our Telstra stores and it gives them the information about Telstra products and services so that they can service our customers more effectively. So, it's amazing to see the application. In our roadshow session as well, we also showcase the art of the possible with creativity in using Azure OpenAI and so be sure to see those sessions if you haven't already seen them. Really, the possibilities are limited by our imagination, and it's really got the potential to increase productivity, also giving time back to people's day, and who doesn't want time back in their day, Katie?
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Oh, absolutely Mary. What's really interesting when you talked about a moment ago about the drudgery, getting rid of the drudgery and unleashing the creativity, honestly, I'm sold, but I am a little more sold on Ask Telstra and how we're using AI ourselves. And I know we'll talk a bit about that a little bit later on.
So, Paul, I'm going to pop across to you. This is amazing, but I really want to see the rubber hit the road here. I'd love some examples of how we're helping customers and how this is playing out with our customers.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Yeah, I'd love to, Katie. Look, I'm genuinely excited about the Copilot-type AI utilities that are becoming broadly accessible to us. A great example is GitHub, which our software developers are using. So, Copilot for GitHub to allow software developers actually to be much more effective and spend more time on those creative problem-solving situations with customers rather than the administrative tasks. Some of their research around how GitHub copilot uses a benefit is 96% of those users said they are faster at doing repetitive tasks. 88% said they felt more productive in that environment.
I think the other thing is, you know, we are going to see those copilot-type tools and utilities really help us cross-train people like we've never been able to do in the past. Take an industry like utilities, for instance, where we're seeing the prevalence of advanced IoT sensors, data analytics fundamentally change how companies are operating. Sydney Water, for example, who provide water recycling wastewater across 5 million residents in Sydney and the Illawarra region and manage about 50,000km worth of pipeline. They've, over the past six years, been deploying up to 26,000 IoT sensors across their network and that's to allow them to fundamentally transform how they operate, moving from a situation where they're relying on residents and councils to call and say, "I've got a bit of a smelly out the front of the house or there's a burst water main." So moving from that to actually those IoT sensors and data being able to use predictive analytics and that data to identify leaks and faults in the network. In the future, we'll see residential smart metering coupled with AI also shift then with the ability to provide advice to residents on how they can more efficiently use that precious water.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I'm really interested in getting your team to help me with a bit of a copilot at home. Is that on the horizon yet or is that just not there yet? I'm actually going to think, I'm not going to think the same way walking along the pipeline, the water pipeline, that's not far from my house as we walk through the bush in the local area where I live. So I'm going to be thinking a little bit differently about how technology is used to manage that infrastructure.
So, Ollie, I'm going to head over to you, and it's OK to call you Ollie. We've known each other for a little while. Everyone calls me Katie, by the way, so if you're wondering where that's coming from.
OLIVER WELCH: Well, in simple terms, there is lots of security considerations, and that's with all new technologies that we're deploying here. But one of the ones that really comes to mind when we're talking about data and AI is about data privacy and protection because we are going to be working with quite sensitive data and ensuring that we've got the controls in place to protect those assets that we have will be super, super critical.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: So, I just want to kind of double-click on that a little bit. The Gartner IT symposium, they referenced that 96% of their customers that were surveyed did not have what they called AI-ready data. So that's a little bit alarming and concerning. So I want to kind of dig in a little bit on that and get your thoughts on the relationship of data, security and AI.
OLIVER WELCH: Absolutely. And look, with all new technologies, it's all about starting with what is the business problem that we're trying to solve and data and AI is no different with that. And AWS and Telstra Purple have great methodologies to support us as organizations to do that, and it's called the Walking Backwards Approach. And Paul, remind me the design-led thinking that we do through the digital squads over there. And what that does, it enables us to identify that business problem before we go and investigate and start looking at all of the different data sources that we might need. So once that business problem has been identified, that's when we can start to classify what type of data we will need access to as part of it then we can put the controls around it to ensure that it's safe and we're delivering the outcomes for our customers.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Thanks, Ollie. That was really interesting. I like the concept of human-centred design and almost working backwards, which was super exciting.
[Image of poll appears answering ‘Is your business actively exploring A.I and automation to improve operations?’]
So we're going to actually jump to the poll now and have a quick look. And I'm taking a look at the poll and actually, my live data is not feeding in at the moment to my poll, so I'm going to come back to that in a moment, but I am very keen to understand how you're actually, whether you guys are data ready or AI ready and is part of your strategy. OK, I've got it coming through. Actually 54%, yes, we're exploring it as a business. Amazing. So, you're all thinking about it. It's really interesting.
So, OK, we're going to jump onto topic number two and it's a nice segue there into security. And I really want to talk about security because it's all good and well to leap into the potential of better work experiences and optimisation. However, whilst we should encourage innovation through data, AI and automation, we really do need to assess the risks. So, I do want to do another quick poll. So, I'd love your insights on this. In Australia, how often does a data breach occur? So, I'd love you to answer that, and we'll come back after this panel set of questions and see if you got it right.
So, Oliver, I'm going to stick with you, and I'm just going to talk about a quick couple of questions.
Now, we did talk about the implications of security. I'm really keen to understand how AWS actually and practically enabling us to build securely when it comes to transforming our enterprises.
OLIVER WELCH: So the AWS platform is secure by design. However, along with the platform, there's 300 plus security tools that organizations can leverage to improve their security posture. However, with choice comes complexity, so it's super important to understand how we apply these controls to the appropriate applications and data set.
[Image appears on screen shwoing AWS and Telstra logos. ‘Working together to help make Australia the most cyber secure nation in the world by 2030’]
Now, AWS have a framework, it's called the Well-Architected Framework Review, and this is super critical for supporting organizations with remaining compliant. It's made up of six pillars of architecture best practice of which security is one of those.
Now, when do you use it? I think that's a good question, too, is it's not something that you'll deploy and run that framework once because we know workloads change over time and adapt. So we recommend that they're built into the design phase right at the beginning, they're used when we're delivering out the tests and dev environments and also into production. And finally, every six months we should be running this to make sure that we're maintaining compliance. So, if you're out there and you haven't done a Well-Architected Framework Review or a WAFR, please reach out to your AWS and Telstra Purple Team. We'll be here to support you.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I love that. I love us really getting into the mindset that security is truly intrinsic, and it's not a once-and-done approach. So absolutely reach out if you are thinking about really ensuring you have best practice security.
So, Mary, I'm going to pop into you now and have a quick question.
It's not just about security; there is a lot to focus on with security, but we also know that Microsoft acknowledged that we need people to do this, and we are potentially facing into a significant skills gap, and that cliff is fast approaching. In fact, we heard that by 2030, that we're going to need 1.2 million more people in tech-related jobs, which is a big number. So, what are Telstra Purple and Microsoft doing to tackle this challenge?
MARY HODSON: Yeah, thanks, Katie. And those numbers are staggering. I think probably where we need to start thinking is that not everyone follows the same technical pathway into the technology industry as many of us have in our careers. And in fact, some of the most inspirational tech evangelists that I know actually started their careers very, very differently. A great example of that is with our own founder of the power factory within Telstra, and this is our low code power platform application that was actually started by one of our field workers. And he had an idea about generating applications that would help the field workers in the field do their jobs more effectively by having the information they needed at their fingertips. He went to a building app in a day program which was run by one of our partners and set about developing his own low-code app that is now turned into a platform that is used across all of Telstra whereby people can submit requests for new applications. It's governed and managed accordingly as well. And so, Nathan did a fantastic job but didn't have a technical coding background. And so it's just amazing how the technology has evolved to really enable people from all sorts of career pathways to join the tech industry.
Now some of the work that we're doing in Telstra Purple with the Telstra Purple Academy, we've partnered with Yirigaa, which is an Indigenous organization, and they provide opportunities for Indigenous people and people with diverse backgrounds to come into the technology industry by providing training and mentoring opportunities for them. Microsoft are also really passionate in this space, and so they're doing some work with the University of Technology in Sydney to develop new graduate certificates in business applications. So, giving people from different courses and backgrounds the stepping stones to get into the technology industry. And within Telstra, we've also recognized that digital literacy is something that we all need to face into. It's no longer just a technology issue; it's an issue for everyone, and so we have programs such as the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative, and we also have a data and AI Academy that we're kicking off. And so this will give our people the skills they need to leverage the technology, really understand how to use it to make more informed decisions. But with the technology changing so rapidly, it's something that I think we all need to make sure that we're keeping forefront and finding ways to leverage that in our day-to-day.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Oh, I love it. And I love Nathan's story. You know, this is how we get incredible talent to enter the tech space. And I think, Mary, when you and I started in tech, it probably wasn't super cool, but it is so cool now. So looking forward to 2030.
Hey, Paul, I'm going to jump back to you. And you're obviously working very closely with our customers to help safeguard them as they embark or execute or even finish their digital transformation journey. I'd love to hear some incredible examples of some of that work that you're doing with our customers.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Well, KT, with the kind of rapid adoption of technology and those technologies being increasingly integrated through distributed supply chains, etcetera, the cyber security landscape is continually shifting. Take the IT and OT ecosystem. So OT being the operational technologies that control and monitor things like pumps, conveyor belts, fridges, etcetera, those networks used to be segregated, but now because we actually want to pull the data from both sets of systems, we're seeing convergence across them. So think of the Sydney water example where we've just added 26,000 additional connected devices into an ecosystem that increases the threat landscape that Sydney Water are having to deal with.
Take the retail sector, for instance, where over the last 2000 years, innovation has looked like moving from the abacus to a cash register to an electronic cash register. Over the last five years or so, we've seen massive shifts forward in transformation in that space with integrated digital supply chains, smart gates, video analytics, and connected fridges all requiring connectivity, and then a strategy around how you manage and govern the data that's used across them to run your business.
Woolworths, for instance, has chosen to kind of keep segregation between the IT and OT networks, but they have to do and they're doing that to help with their security posture. But they need to be able to take that data across systems and so spend a lot of time thinking about policy, governance, and how we manage the data across both. And so many businesses, including our own, are really looking to turning our attention to how do we get that next level of policy, governance, and controls around that data ecosystem.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: It's definitely a complex landscape ahead of us, but I am so excited to have Team Purple and AWS and Microsoft working with our customers along the way. Makes it super exciting.
Alright. We're going to jump back to the poll and I'm going to have a quick look in Australia, how often does a data breach occur?
[Image of poll appears showing ‘In Australia, how often does a data breach occur?’]
I wonder how many of you got that right? A good portion of you got that right, eight seconds. Every eight minutes, I should say, in Australia, there is a security breach, 76,000 reported breaches to the Australian Signals Directorate. So, that just tells you how big a challenge the security landscape is.
Now, the third opportunity we're seeing is environmental, social, and governance. Last year we published a report by Deloitte Access Economics, which identified that businesses and customers adopting technology like cloud computing, IoT, telematics, and smart agriculture could reduce their operations emissions by up to seven times. With this in mind, I'd really like to take our discussion with the panel to focus on some real-world examples.
Now, I've got another poll for you, and I'd love you to participate in that. Does environmental, social, and governance form part of your organization's IT strategy? We'd love to hear.
Now, while the team are watching us at home or in their offices or on the moon because we are all working flexibly these days, the third topic, Mary, I'm going to come straight to you. I'm really, really interested to see an example of how, you know, stepping into the workplace and driving workplace experiences is delivering for optimisation and sustainability strategies.
MARY HODSON: Yeah, well, I think over the last few years, obviously we've seen such a move towards collaboration applications that enable people to work from anywhere. We're really fortunate at Telstra; we've been able to do that for a really long time, but I think we've seen that reduction in non-essential travel as a result, but also support for people to work from outside capital cities, which wasn't really a thing that was done much before. When we look at also the trends around migration to cloud, it can be really difficult for organizations to maintain on-premise data centers with heating and, sorry, cooling and power in a net zero way. And so that's where both Microsoft and Telstra have really strong commitments in this space.
When we look at our commitments to go net zero, which was a number of years ago for Telstra, we've also put in commitments by 2025 to have all of our power actually delivered by renewable energy. So at the moment, we leverage a lot of carbon offsets so the power purchase agreements that we have in place will enable us to get there by 2025, which is pretty amazing. And then there's further commitments by 2030 to further reduce those emissions and Microsoft had made commitments to go actually negative by 2030. So with that, it just enables our customers to be able to leverage technologies in such a way that enables them to offset their emissions. But we're also starting to see within Telstra Purple customers asking us on how do we help to capture the data around how we're using technology internally. And so there's a lot of technologies that we can use such as sustainability manager which we've deployed in Telstra that help our customers to track their emissions. And so there's a lot of things that we can do to really help our customers navigate the complexity around ESG.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I think we sometimes forget that the cloud is metaphorical, right? It does require heating and, sorry, cooling and power, I should say. We don't want to heat a data center, do we, Paul? That would that would be dramatically bad. So, you know, we forget about that and we forget that that's where we can truly add value relative to our bottom line. So, that is incredibly exciting so thank you for sharing that.
So, Ollie, I'm going to pop back to you. Now, we know that a secure environment is critical to enabling solutions like cloud optimisation to work. I'm really keen to hear about some of the recent successes that you and your team have delivered for our customers.
OLIVER WELCH: Yeah, perfect. No worries, KT. So look, we talked about a lot of examples where we've got frameworks that really support us with adopting technology, whether it's the Well-Architected Framework Review, the working backwards or the human-centred design kind of aspect.
In every business or every problem needs to have a business case before you go to solve it. So, this particular customer we've worked with and we work with all their key stakeholders to go, right, here is a current state legacy data centre that you're in and they wanted to explore the future and where should they be going with that. So as part of that business case, we were able to identify that the AWS platform was going to deliver them the outcomes that they were looking to deliver out of that business case.
The second step that we go through on our process is a discovery of that existing environment. What that discovery does is enable us to identify that current state and the future state and what are the gaps and the processes that we need to address to be able to get you to that place. Now because we had already identified with the business the direction that we needed to go, we could fast forward into the adoption of leveraging the secure AWS cloud platform to stand it up in days and weeks instead of weeks and months. So I think if there's anything to take away from it is with adopting any of the new technologies, security has to be brought into that discussion and let's build that in right up at the front. Let's assess, you know, build out that business case, assess where you are and then let's accelerate that adoption of the technology.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I loved the fact you talked about security and human-centred design as one. If you hadn't enabled that human-centred design and you said something, and I'm not quoting you verbatim here but you talked about the fact that is the technology going to enable the business outcome. That doing that at the beginning of the process but not only doing that at the beginning of the process to get an incredible outcome for our customers, you actually had an ability to react when something had occurred and there was already a challenge in the system.
So I loved you sharing that story and I can't wait to hear more of those stories from our customers.
Paul, I'm going to throw to you. Now Telstra purple is the glue that works with our partners and of course our customers to bring together digital transformation for our customers and helping them embrace the technology that we've described today. In the discovery and assessment stages of many of the projects that you do, I'm fairly keen to hear some of the common themes that come out from customers during that process.
PAUL NICHOLLS: Yeah look, I think Mary touched nicely on kind of the environmental dimensions of ESG. If we think about how generative AI plays into ESG as a framework, it certainly comes into the social and governance aspect. So around social, we're concerned with how to protect and respect data and privacy for both our employees and customers, how we ensure and develop responsible supply chains, how do we improve and implement our ways of working and what that means to our people. And then on the governance side, you know, a lot of the conversations around how we adopt AI in a way that effectively aligns with risk management frameworks ideally updates them because they're not fit for purpose as they would be today. How it impacts ethical business practices, regulatory compliance, etcetera and so the conversation with many of our customers is around how do we effectively and responsibly leverage AI? That's probably how do I start doing it quickly and effectively and how do I do this in a safe and sensible manner, including how I keep my stakeholders, board executives across what's doing, how we managing risk, etcetera around that overall environment.
And so at Telstra we believe that we must be actively experimenting with AI and across the business and so that's a very different shift for, you know, what we've probably thought of in the past. So active experimentation across AI in the business but we've done that by providing a framework to do so as well inside Telstra. To help our customers, we've created an AI adoption service which actually looks at many of those dimensions and this service is based on our own experience and that of our technology partners who we have spoken about today and I'd say those experiences are kind of iterating every single day at such a fast-moving environment. And a little bit like Ali spoke to taking a human-centred design approach to adoption means that you're not just looking at the technology aspects but you're considering employee experience, customer experience and how that all flows through into governance policy etcetera, to ensure you're ready to operate more effectively.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: I love it. And Mary, I'm going to leave the final word to you in 30 seconds or less. This isn't just, you know, futuristic. I'd love you to just share and wrap up and let our audience know how are we using and developing our responsible strategies to AI but managing that with experimentation as well but doing that responsibly.
MARY HODSON: Sure KT. Well, within Telstra we've recently enabled Bing Enterprise and Azure OpenAI which is a sandbox environment that we can use for many different use cases in addition to the Telstra knowledge base. And I think when we look at how we're adopting that internally, there's kind of three things that our data and AI team have called to action for all of our leaders in the business and the first one is to really make it personal. So start to incorporate this into your day-to-day work and start to leverage the technology. The second is to look for opportunities and make it your business to look for opportunities within your teams on how you can start to look for process improvements generating use cases with AI and the third part is around strategy. So make sure that you're building this into your strategy so that you've got a plan to incorporate AI. And so that's how we're incorporating that within Telstra.
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Well, thank you, Mary. I loved you sharing that and thank you to all of our panelists. Incredibly wise advice in an emerging and evolving technology space. I don't know about you but I'm so impressed with this panel and the brain trust has just blown me away today. Now we've given you a taste of the opportunities we're seeing and how organisations are optimising their operations and we know that every organisation is its own stage of the journey but one thing is clear, no matter the industry or location, there's a lot of opportunity to transform your operations and optimise your business. If you want to learn more about what we've covered today, please visit our content gallery. A link will be sent to you after this session.
Now we've run out of time for your questions but we will get in touch with them and answer you directly as well.
[VIDEO STARTS]
[‘Your Business Optimised’. Telstra and Telstra Purple logos appear on the screen]
[VIDEO ENDS]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Now speaking of optimising, I am really excited to hear from our next presenter. We've been talking about optimising in a business sense but optimising is also about preparing yourself to perform in pressure situations and make the most of the mental and physical tools that you have at your disposal. Now, let me introduce you to our keynote speaker, Paul Taylor, a former British Royal Navy aircrew officer. Paul is an exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and neuroscientist who is currently developing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Newcastle. Paul has a proven track record in leadership management and dealing in high-pressure situations through his former roles as an airborne anti-submarine warfare officer and a helicopter search and rescue crew member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air arm and has undergone rigorous combat survival and resistance to interrogation training. I reckon we could all do with the resistance interrogation training sometimes. Today, Paul will explore the human stress response and how developing stress fitness equips you to adapt and respond to the challenges life throws at you.
Please welcome Paul.
[‘Build resilience and optimise your future self’, ‘Paul Taylor’]
[‘Paul Taylor’, ‘Exercise Physiologist, Nutritionist and Neuroscientist’]
PAUL TAYLOR: Thanks, KT. So I'm here to talk about stress fitness, and I got very interested in stress when I went through combat survival and resistance to interrogation training in the military, but now I've turned into a bit of a geek. So I'm currently doing a PhD in psychology, focusing on stress fitness, and so I'm going to talk, I've got 25 minutes, so I'm going to get straight into it.
[IMAGE: ‘Stress-fit’ points to four images. ‘Shift the thermostat, know thyself, optimise your brain, eat a low hi diet’]
I'm going to talk about four different things. The first thing I want to talk about is know thyself.
[IMAGE 1: person with tape measure around waist]
[IMAGE 2: person with head in their arms sitting on floor]
[IMAGE 3: image of hand surrounded by pills]
[IMAGE 4: ‘addition’ highlighted]
So I'm going to start with the problem statement. We are currently the most overweight, most depressed, most medicated, and most addicted cohort of adults that there's ever been yet life has never been so good.
We have it easier than all of our ancestors yet we are going through what we can only describe as a twin physical and mental health crisis, and a lot of it is to do with stress.
And recent research has really revealed the impact that chronic stress has on our brain and throughout our body and how it contributes to all of these chronic diseases.
[Image: image showing how stress impacts physiology]
And so a quick introduction to your stress response system, you'll see it on the screen here. On the top left, you'll see that when your brain is stressed, it activates your sympathetic nervous system. That's the very fast-acting nervous system, and it and it kicks off or it triggers the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline from your adrenal glands, but then if that stressor is prolonged or severe, something called your HPA axis activates, and that results in the release of cortisol.
Now, the godfather of stress is a guy called Hans Selye and he thought that with chronic stress what happened is we reduced our ability to produce cortisol and that's when we got stress-related illness. We now know that's not the case. We keep pumping out cortisol, and that's when it has a really damaging effect on us.
[IMAGE 1: image showing impact of stress on the brain]
[IMAGE 2: screenshots of four articles showing impact of stress on the brain]
So the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio was first to show in his lab that when you become stressed, it's all about a part of the brain called the amygdala. So it's responsible for processing strong emotions, and when it senses a threat or stress, it can actually secrete chemicals out that shut down your frontal lobes, that thinking, planning judgment part of the brain, and he called this amygdala hijack. Basically, your amygdala says to your frontal lobes, talk to the hand. I'm in control of this brain, and this is when we lose it.
But what happens with chronic stress over time and especially workplace stress, the research has shown that it drives structural and functional changes in the brain. And how we know this is by putting people in brain scanners, imaging their brain and then following them up for a period of months or years. Ask them about the amount of stress, particularly workplace stress, and then seeing what changes in the brain. And what we actually see now is the amygdala hypertrophies, it grows bigger. Just as if you were to train your biceps lots, they grow bigger. The same happens with your amygdala. This means that your brain develops a negativity bias, so you start to subconsciously scan the environment for stress and threat, and you linger on it, and at the same time, your frontal lobes shrink. That thinking, planning judgment part of the brain shrinks because stress kills off neurons in the frontal lobes, and they are the same brain changes that we see with anxiety and depression. And this is the very strong link between stress, anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
[IMAGE: diagram shows the milk, moderate, strong, and chronic impacts of stress on the brain]
What we now know that happens in the brain is that it's all about the intensity and the duration of stress. So we know that mild stress is actually good for us, and anybody who's ever had a job that was really boring will know that performance wasn't good. We need stimulation, arousal, a bit of stress to get us interested, and we actually now know that moderate stress is good for your brain because it helps to drive learning and synaptic plasticity, the ability of your brain to adapt and get better. But it's when that stress becomes strong and particularly strong and chronic that it starts to kill off neurons in the brain and stops the development of new neurons, which is clearly not what we want.
[IMAGE: four charts show impact of stress over time]
Here this is recent research that basically shows if you look in the top left, that's a normal adaptive response to challenges and intermittent stresses where our cortisol levels wax and wane and it starts to become problematic. If you look down in the bottom left is when we have this chronic stress and over time we release more and more cortisol, we get into a state of hypercortisolemia, and we know then that with chronic stress over years, if you look in the top right here what happens is eventually your adrenal glands become overworked and they wave the white flag, and you then have an inability to produce cortisol, and that's not good because it means you have no energy, you can't get up, and this is the same that we see with people with trauma over years. Clearly, we don't want that unregulated long-term stress.
[Image: two screenshots showing academic articles. ‘Resting-state heart rate variability after stressful events as a measure of stress tolerance among elite performers’ and ‘Common features in overtrained athletes and individuals with professional burnout: implications for sports medical practice’]
So I think we need to look at elite performers to be able to glean some tips from them. So I'm going to talk about elite athletes. It's a pretty landmark paper that showed the very strong connections between athlete overtraining syndrome and corporate burnout, and you can see here, this was a number of years ago.
[IMAGE: ‘common symptoms of overthinking and burnout’]
There are a huge amount of similarities in both populations. Their working capacity, performance impairs, they get tired, they get irritable, they have sleep disturbances and sickness, they have cardiovascular changes. We now know the bottom two, that's the same as well.
We know from recent research that our hormonal changes and activation of inflammation. So it is almost identical, and we need to learn the lessons of elite athletes.
[IMAGE: model of athlete training. ‘Increasing intensity, duration and frequency of training]
If you look here, this is a model of athlete training and way on the left, this is undertraining. They're not doing enough; they're not getting enough stimulation. Then they go into acute overload, and then the optimal form of training is what we call overreaching. This is where the athlete gets loaded up in volume and intensity for a short period of time, and it can burst them through a plateau and improve their performance. But if they get that wrong or they don't have enough recovery, they go into overtraining syndrome, and that's the same analogy for us.
And if we think about it, athletes train most of their time and perform a little bit, but we are performing most of our time in business and training very little. And most of the improvements in the world of athlete training and performance in the last decade have not been through training methods; it's recovery.
[IMAGE: diagram of vagus nerve]
So it's really key that we're recovering effectively, and this is where I want to introduce you to your vagus nerve. The 10th cranial nerve is called the wandering nerve, and it connects the brain to all of your visceral organs, and it is responsible for recovery.
That sympathetic nervous system, it's like a seesaw. The opposite is the parasympathetic, the rest and digest, and we can actually measure it. It's to do with the tone of your vagus nerve; we call this vagal tone. You have high vagal tone; it means you are recovered. Low vagal tone, you're not recovered.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article: ‘Resting-state heart rate variability after stressful events as a measure of stress tolerance among elite performers’]
So let's look at some of the really recent research from Special Forces soldiers. So these are people going for selection, for officer, the hardest course in the world, and what they found is that they tracked these guys.
[IMAGE: diagram showing autonomic nervous system pre-event, intra-event, and post-event]
They looked at their autonomic nervous system, and they found that the elite of the elite, the people who pass selection at baseline, they had higher parasympathetic activation, they had higher vagal tone. They had suppressed sympathetic activation, but as soon as they knew that a stressor was inbound, that switched very, very quickly. Their sympathetic activation got turned on super quick and it stayed high during the stressor, but as soon as the stressor was gone, boom, it flipped over, and they went straight into recovery. Anxious people get activated very quickly, but it stays elevated even after the stressor is gone.
[IMAGE: diagram showing stress fitness, ‘low stress fitness’, ‘moderate stress fitness’, and ‘high stress fitness’]
So this then leads into my definition of stress fitness which I'm doing for my PhD, and I've defined this with my PhD supervisor, Eugene Edman. It's the malleable ability, which means changeable or trainable, to engage, maintain, and extinguish the stress response and then to flexibly adapt to physical and mental challenges and/or advantages to enhance tolerance and/or performance.
So you'll note there's a psychological component and there's a physiological component, and it's not about resilience. It's not about bouncing back; this is resilience 2.0. Will you become better because of exposure to that stress? And it's like, I'll use this continuum because everybody gets the physical fitness continuum. You can be low fitness, moderate, or high, but you have to work to get there, and it's just like this. You've got to work if you want to have high-stress fitness, and you stop doing the work; your capacity to handle stress is going to get eroded. So let me talk about some things that we can actually do to optimise our brain and our stress fitness.
[IMAGE: diagram of vagus nerve]
So again, this is about the vagus nerve, and it now shows that we can train the vagus nerve. We can actually modulate it, and one of the best ways of measuring this is heart rate variability.
[IMAGE: chart showing heart rate variability]
Most people think, say, I have a resting heart rate of 60 beats a minute. Most people think that it's metronomic, it's one beat a second. What we now know is that that's the case just acutely like today; it means that I'm not recovered from a really hard workout or a stressful day yesterday. We know that if my heart rate variability is low, if it's metronomic over the period of a couple of weeks, that I'm getting stress overloaded, and then if it's low for months, it's one of the best predictors of an impending heart attack.
[IMAGE: screenshots of articles relating to physiological adaptations]
And so all the executives I work with, I get them to measure their heart rate variability. So let's talk about training it.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘The Effects of High-Intensity Interval Training vs Moderate-Intensity Continuous Training on Heart Rate Variability in Physically Inactive Adults’]
One of the most important things that you can do is high-intensity interval training. This improves heart rate variability in everybody, but the great news is if you're not that active, it has an even bigger impact on your heart rate variability, and the reason why exercise is so powerful is that it controls our gene expression.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Exercise Controls Gene Expression’]
Every time you exercise, there are three waves of positive gene expression, and the first and most important is the activation of stress response genes.
[IMAGE: diagram showing three types of genes released across time]
These are magical little proteins called heat shock proteins that get released in response to the stress, and they get inside your cells and they actually fix damage. But then they trigger another wave of gene expression called your metabolic priority genes that make your entire ecosystem of cells function better in your body and your brain, therefore improving your health and performance.
And then we have a third wave, your mitochondrial enzyme genes, that's a bit of a mouthful.
Think of your mitochondria, they're like the batteries or the powerhouses of your cells but look at the timeline of changes here. It lasts for 24 hours.
[IMAGE: screenshots of four articles showing connection between brain performance and exercise]
So the big take home is if you have limited time to exercise, it's not about doing two one-hour sessions or three half-hour sessions, try to do a short burst of high-intensity interval training every day, and then you will get permanent improvements in your gene expression.
The other thing that's important about exercise is it has a huge positive impact on our mood, and all of the research shows that exercise is actually more powerful than antidepressants.
And the reason is that every time you're exercising, you release endorphins but you also release your monoamines. If you look in the bottom left, these are three neurotransmitters serotonin, which is important for mood and sleep. Noradrenaline, which is important for mood and focused attention, and then dopamine, which is important for goal-directed behavior and motivation.
So every time you're exercising, there's this neural symphony of neurotransmitters that are released that make your brain function better and enhance your mood and protect you against the damages of stress.
[IMAGE: chart showing connection between cortisol and time]
And the last thing I want to talk about with exercise is this study which basically compared people undergoing a stressful event. So this is Msrp test, it's 30 minutes of a stress battery, known psychological stressors that elicit a reliable cortisol response. And as you can see here, they compared fit active people versus unfit inactive people and the fit people had much more reduced cortisol responses to psychological stress.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Stress and the neuroendocrine system: the role of exercise as a stressor and modifier of stress’]
So what I want you to understand is that exercise is not just a stressor, it's a modifier of stress. The fitter you get, the more able you are to handle other types of stress like psychological stress. Every time you're exercising, what you're doing is you're activating this stress response system globally. You're training it to activate and then to turn off.
[IMAGE: screenshot of three articles and diagram showing box breath]
And another great way that we can use to turn it off is breathwork. And so there's lots of types of breathwork that work. Two of my favourite, box breathing used by US Special Forces soldiers when they're on patrol to control their arousal. Now, if you know anything about Special Forces guys you know they don't do fluffy stuff. They do stuff that has been demonstrated to give them a performance edge but for me, even better than that is resonant frequency breathing.
This is a breathing rate that connects your lungs to your heart and your brain and it reduces your blood pressure, reduces your heart rate and enhances your heart rate variability and that for most people is about six breaths a minute. So it's a ten-second breath cycle but the breath out has to be longer than the breath in. So ideally you breathe in for four seconds, you breathe out for six and actually do it through your nose because what you realize is that when you breathe in a big breath through your mouth, you activate the upper part of your thorax but when you take a big breath in through your nose, you activate this lower part, that diaphragmatic.
And most people don't realize there are neurons in your brain watching every single breath and when you chest breathe it activates the stress response.
And we know that people are stressed, they do more chest breathing. So that slow nasal breathing is really key.
[IMAGE: diagram showing zone 1 and zone 2 phycological adaptations]
Now, I just want to talk for a minute about psychological adaptations and I'm just going to give you a little taste because of time here.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘Challenge or threat? Cardiovascular indexes of resilience and vulnerability to potential stress in humans’]
So there's a couple of things I want to talk about and one is the language that you use when you are presented with potential stressors. So we know that if something is announced, if you view that as a threat, say it's workplace change and you're thinking about all the bad stuff that might happen and whether you're going to have a job, that threat response activates cortisol whereas if you view the same stimulus as a challenge, it activates your fight or flight response which is more adaptive.
So the language that you use in your own head to your peers and especially to your kids when they're faced with potential stressors is absolutely critical.
And my time in the military, I don't think I heard the word stress once. I heard the word challenge a lot and sometimes a massive challenge that we have to lean into but that is the sort of language we need to use.
[IMAGE: blue circle ‘zone 1’ inside larger orange circle ‘zone 2’]
And then some great advice in this area came from the stoic philosopher Epictetus who about 2000 years ago said that everything in your life is in two zones, Zone one and two.
And according to Epictetus Zone one is the stuff that is within your will or within your power or as we would say, within your control.
And if zone two is everything else and Epictetus said that zone one is to do with our belief systems what we choose to be afraid of but particularly the thoughts that we choose to linger on our behaviours, our actions, and especially how we choose to react to our circumstances.
Everything else is zone two, what people think about you, what they say about you, the past and the future. And if we think about mental health, we've talked a lot about this and depression is a lamenting on the past. Anxiety is a strong concern about the future but in both cases we bring the past or the future into the present tense and that's when it creates difficulties.
[IMAGE: blue circle ‘zone 1’ inside larger orange circle ‘zone 2’]
Epictetus said you have no business in the past, in the future, all you have is a series of present moments and he said that when you're faced with challenges, you must focus on that which you can control: zone one and refuse to invest your energy in what you can't control.
So practically, when you've got things that are stressing you out or worrying you, it's right up here. Get a page and put a line down the middle right zone one on the left and zone two on the right, and make sure you're focusing your energy on the stuff that you can control.
[IMAGE: ‘Shift the thermostat’, image of sauna and shower]
Now let's talk about some more physiological stuff we can do, and this is about shifting the thermostat.
[IMAGE: screenshot of article ‘The effect of cold showering on health and work: a randomized controlled trial’]
So this is about cold showers, which generally gets a bit of a groan when I talk to people about this, but I read this research paper about seven years ago, and it convinced me to have a cold shower at the end of my normal shower every day for the rest of my life, and I haven't missed one yet. Basically, they took a bunch of people from a workplace and randomly assigned them into two groups. Group A who did their normal shower, group B who they asked to turn it to cold at the end for a minimum of 30 seconds. They measured their health, their sickness, and their absenteeism and followed them for a year, and at the end of the year, the people who had the regular cold showers had a 29% reduction in sickness and absenteeism. Now, that is pretty bloody impressive.
So, I need to introduce you to my little dude.
[IMAGE: person in shower with shocked facial expression]
This is Oscar, and he looks like this for a couple of reasons. Number one, we were just back from Bali. He doesn't normally have that in his hair, but secondly, he has this expression on his face because he's about three seconds into a freezing cold shower in the middle of winter in the Mornington Peninsula in southern Victoria when it does get cold for all the Queenslanders and Sydneysiders. Now, before anybody phones child protection services on me, the reason that he was in that cold shower is that I read the research paper, and I got into the shower that day, and I thought to myself, I've got to do this right. This is pretty compelling, and I'm standing in the shower, and I'm just about to turn it to cold, and I said, 30 seconds. And just as I'm about to turn it to cold, this little voice came in my head and went, Hold on a minute, it's winter. This is your first cold shower; you don't have to do 30 seconds; just do 15. And I'm rather embarrassed to admit publicly that I gave in to my little weak inner voice, and I thought, right, 15 seconds, and I turned it to cold just as Oscar happened to walk into the bathroom. So he walked into the bathroom. I let out a squeal, and he's kind of looking at me going, what are you doing dad? And I'm like, I'm having a cold shower, buddy, and he said, Okay, what are you doing that for? And I couldn't really think of anything at the time; I just went because it makes you tough.
[IMAGE: person in shower with shocked facial expression]
He went, Oh, really? And I got to the end of my 15 seconds, and he said to me, how long did you do, dad? And I said, I did 15 seconds, and he said, get out, I'm going to kick your ass. So I got out, and Oscar got in, and I said, right mate, turn it to cold. And I waited; I had my phone timing myself. I waited for about three seconds, and then the cold water hit, and I took this photo. So this is Oscar three seconds in, and this is Oscar 30 seconds in. Check out that focus, and he just kicked into box breathing which I had taught him for competing in karate but didn't think to use. Then he got to 30 seconds, and I said right mate, you're done. And he stopped the shower and he walked out like this and he went, loser. So we started this little competition which has culminated in ice baths, but that's not the point; here is the point.
[IMAGE: diagram showing benefits of cold and heat exposure]
If you look at the bottom here, here are all the things that happen, and there's at least 40 research papers on this slide. You get huge improvements in metabolic health whenever you regularly expose yourself to cold water. You get improvements in mood, you get more mitochondria in your muscles, in your fat, your antioxidant defense system improves, but it turns out if you turn the thermostat the other way and you do regular saunas, you get lots of similar benefits, and the key component that is present in heat exposure, cold exposure, and exercise are stress response proteins. So this is about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable through vigorous exercise, cold exposure, heat exposure; that is what trains your stress response system.
[IMAGE: ‘eat a low hi diet’, image of brain with knife and fork]
For the last few minutes, I'm going to talk about nutrition because that's really important. And look, there's lots of diet wars out there, and my view on this is anybody who tells you that there is one diet that we should all be eating is either demented or they're trying to sell you something or they're a member of a cult; it's one of those three things. We now know different people have different genes, and the optimal diet for different people is different. However, there's one rule that I have created that crosses all of those different diets, and it's the low HI diet, and HI stands for human interference. Here's how it works. If you're looking at a piece of food deciding whether or not you should eat it, just look at it and think if you can see that it has been alive recently, it is either grown out of the ground, off a bush, come off a tree, run around on four legs, or swam recently and is minimally interfered with by humans, eat it. It's fine; don't worry about the bloody fat, carbohydrate, protein; that's the worst thing we ever did. However, if you're looking at a piece of food and you're going Mr. Krispy Kreme donut, I don't remember seeing you running around on four legs, then it's in your treat food.
[IMAGE: 80 and 20 divided in a circle]
So this goes with the 80 over 20 rule, and most people get that. Roughly 80% of stuff that goes in your mouth on a daily basis should have been alive recently, minimally interfered with; the other 20% is your treat food, and enjoy your treat food. If it's chocolate, if it's ice cream, buy the best damn quality that you can afford, right?
[IMAGE: diagram of NOVA classification of foods]
Now this is linked to what we call the Nova classification of foods that came out of a university in Brazil, and it classifies foods as raw and minimally processed, that's my lower HI. Then you have processed culinary ingredients that you cook with, and then they have processed foods, things like canned fish, canned vegetables, artisan breads, yogurt, cheese; that's okay. It's the ultra-processed foods and drinks, and most people get most of them sausage rolls, pies, and chocolate ice cream, but there's things like breakfast cereals and supermarket brands that are in them, and it turns out that this stuff is really damaging for us.
[IMAGE: four screenshots of academic articles relating to processed foods]
And the worst five countries in the world for consumption are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; in all of those five countries, more than 50% of all calories consumed are ultra-processed foods, and it's killing us and it's killing our kids. What we now know when they compare you look at the two studies on the bottom, when they compare countries that eat about 20% like Spain, France, and Italy, when you get to 30%, you increase your risk of every form of cancer and every form of cardiovascular disease by more than 10%. And you increase your risk of depression, and what most people don't understand is that when you're stressed, your body robs your brain of nutrients to create stress hormones. That's when you need a high nutrient density diet, and we're eating crap lots of the time.
[IMAGE: four screenshots of academic articles relating to processed foods]
And the paper in the top right shows that people who have 50% or more calories from ultra-processed foods have a whopping 62% increased risk of all-cause mortality.
[IMAGE: emoji of frowning face]
So this is about eating real food, and I need to sum up with the bad news because I'm a realist and I have to give you the bad news. And the bad news is that no one is coming ever, seriously, no one is coming to sort you out. No one is coming to move you up that stress fitness continuum. This is all about you and the choices that you make every day. So hopefully, I've given you some knowledge and a few different choices that you can use straight away. Thank you. So if you're interested, that's my podcast, that's my book, that's my website. Thank you.
[VIDEO: ‘Your Business Optimised’. Image of Telstra and Purple logos]
KERRIE-ANNE TURNER: Thank you so much, Paul. I tell you what, I'm very impressed with Oscar's stress fitness, and you've taken us through so many incredible tips to help raise ours. Now, you've given our audience a lot to think about but that does bring us to the end of today's broadcast. It's been informative, inspiring last hour and I hope that you've taken away some very practical steps to help optimise your business but optimise yourself as well.
We've learned that robots are not here to take our jobs, but they can be a co-pilot to help us take back our time and put our valuable energy into important tasks. We've learnt the immense possibilities afforded to us by AI and automation, but it must be underpinned by solid security and disaster recovery. And we've learnt that far from being a cost to the business, ESG can be a chance to drive value to the bottom line.
If you'd like to view any session recording from the roadshow, remember to visit our content gallery and that will be sent to you after today's session. If you're ready to take the next step, our Telstra Purple, Microsoft and AWS Practice are offering exclusive discovery sessions to our attendees of the roadshow and this broadcast. Simply click the request callback button on the right and let us know how we can help you on your journey.
Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you again soon.
