Copilot for Microsoft 365 from Telstra

[*on-screen text*

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.

But at Telstra

we don’t use metaphors

to tell you

how to make

your business thrive.

Instead,

we give you experts

who understand

efficiency in business and technology.

(simple really)

Because

we get you

&

we get your business.

So connect with us.

Secure your business.

And empower yourself

and your team

to succeed

*no ladder required

Telstra

]

My role at Telstra is the Data and AI executive. That means looking after all data and AI at Telstra from the data engineering, the platforms where our data is, how it moves around, how it's used, how it's accessed safely and securely. And then put to work in reporting in AI, in insights, as well as all of the responsibility for ethics in AI as well. AI really sprung upon everyone in the public consciousness in 2023, but we've been preparing for years for it at Telstra.

And that means that we've been looking at where our data is, simplifying and modernising our data ecosystem, looking at what our AI capabilities were so that they were, we were building reusable assets and really getting everything kind of ready. So that when it came time to use data or to build more AI, then we're in a much more simplified state to really go after it.

We haven't finished that journey by any means, but we've done a lot of work migrating to public cloud, decommissioning our legacy systems, really protecting and securing our data along the way and then building machine learning capabilities and which has grown now into our AI capabilities. That all sounds like, you know kind of a little bit intangible, but a great example of where that all of that pre work has played out is an AI knowledge management tool we've launched called AskTelstra. And that is in the hands of our agents and our frontline staff.

That really enables them to search Telstra's knowledge in terms of our products, our procedures, our pricing, all of that kind of stuff to be able to help create a much more seamless customer experience when they're dealing with customers. So instead of having to go and look up you know lots of different systems or do different searches within Telstra's knowledge management and go and find the you know, the procedure manual or the pricing manual being able to go and find those really being able to use AskTelstra in a generative AI kind of way. So, it's like a chat facility instead being able to build that quite quickly. We built that in five weeks to get it up and running and another five weeks to really train it and start and start working with it.

That really relied on us having done all of that hard work over years to get our data migrated into the public cloud, sitting on Azure, getting Azure Machine Learning Factory working so that when Open AI came along, we could plug it in and run quite quickly with that straight away. So it doesn't mean that we've done, we've finished all of that work, the simplification and modernisation and making that data safe and accessible at the same time. But what we've done so far has meant we've been able to move quite quickly with AI.

There's been a lot of challenges with the security around data and AI especially with the great opportunities that there are with AI right now as well as really concern around risk and what's going to happen with AI. Some of the great stuff that we've done over years has been really getting our risk and ethics framework in place so that we can play that out with every AI opportunity that comes along. Getting our cyber security in place so that the AI that we're working with is within our ring fence, within our firewalls really working inside Telstra using our own data for within our safe and secure kind of space.

So when new opportunities come along, we are really assessing them for what you know they we can go fast on them if they're within our built environment that means you know what we've migrated to public cloud already on Azure. All of that is kind of in place cybersecurity checked. You know what we know that that's all in a safe place. So we can run fast at that. When new things come along brand new opportunities come along then then we have the frameworks in place to be able to go after them. But it does take a bit it does take a bit longer because there's so it's everything is moving so fast and changing so quickly. But we're really, we're really proud of well you know the foundations that we've done in terms of the simplified modernised landscape. What we've migrated to public cloud and how that's all secured and how we secure and protect our data but then make it available in a really safe and secure way to go to work.

[*on-screen text*

AskTelstra

A generative AI knowledge management tool solution to help our frontline teams. It enables them to search our extensive internal knowledge bases quickly and provides a streamlined customer experience as well as great employee experience.

All Microsoft – its built on Open AI, on Azure ML Factory and on Azure public cloud.

Tired of endless searches?

Not the answer you’re looking for?

AskTelstra

]

Telstra is really well positioned to guide customers through this process because we're doing it for ourselves at the same time. So when I go and talk to Microsoft or other organisations, then I'm always looking for the person that is doing this themselves inside Microsoft.

Not just the people that are as well as not, you know, and the people that are, you know, selling it and bringing the best knowledge of Microsoft to us. I want to find the people inside Microsoft that are doing it for themselves. And at Telstra, that's me. And I work really closely with Telstra, Purple, Quantium Telstra and other parts of Telstra to be able to make sure that the lessons we're learning are being shared with all of our customers. But also what Telstra Purple people are seeing is we are learning from as well, really engaging in that ecosystem.

So we all learn together and we can all progress. I think that's really mandatory at an inner space that's changing so fast. So if you are on the journey with AI like we are, then I really encourage you to speak to people, find people that are doing it as well, find people that are experts in it and ask lots of questions. And Telstra is here like we are doing this for ourselves and we are here to talk to you. So come and talk to us.

[TITLE: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos 

Your Business optimised Customer Roadshow 

Increase Productivity with Microsoft AI] 

JAMES NATION-INGLE: My name is James. 

I look after the go-to-market for the Microsoft practice here at Telstra and Telstra Purple. 

I'm joined today by Shane, who's one of the chief architects at Microsoft, Glenn, who's our Head of Workplace and Digital Technologies Strategy at Telstra and Telstra Purple, and Dom, who's the Head of Sales for our new Microsoft Practice. 

[SLIDE: Our panel] 

We're gonna have some fun today. As I said, we're gonna keep this relatively light. The session is about AI. Now, everyone's having AI hammered down on top of them right now. This is gonna be no different. We're gonna talk about a few different AI aspects. 

What I find about AI these days is when we're piloting things and when we're doing things at Telstra, I'm finding this AI stuff that we're doing that is present to me as a user all the time and stuff that's happening in the background that I'm like, 'Oh, actually there might be some AI in the back of that.' And these two sort of paradigms are really interesting as a user because I actively see some things that help me and then I passively see some things where I go, 'hmm, maybe something's happening in the background there that's helping me and I don't know it. And that's OK, and I'm starting to accept that as a user. 

What I'm gonna do though now is I'm gonna set up the demo later. Like every good magic trick, I'm gonna set up the demo later. So, where's my M365 admins? Got any techs here? I know you've been in that world. 

I'm gonna show you a couple of things. Just to set the scene, can I get the screen changed over here? Because you're gonna see some practical demos as we go at the end of the session. This is my PC. Hopefully, everyone's got one of these. 

Who's seen this picture before? Yeah, there's my admins. Awesome. 

So, what I wanna do is show you some of the things or set up some of the things that are AI in the back of some Microsoft technologies at the start. And I'll show you how I'm practically gonna use them later on. I want you to see me as a user. I want you to see that in my licenses and apps. So, for those of you that don't know, this is the M365 admin portal, and these are the licenses that I've got that allow me to do things. 

I want you to see a very specific and special license so that I can set this thing up properly, and that is the Teams premium license. So, this is one of the first licenses in Microsoft that had AI in it. So, we can accept that I'm a user, and I have some AI technologies in the back. 

Now, what I'm gonna do throughout this session is - because these sessions are not being recorded up here - I'm gonna use my little Polly mic. I'm gonna set up a Teams meeting to run in the background of this session while everyone's talking. I'm gonna use this mic and a Teams meeting, so I'm gonna grab. So, you can see my little Teams meeting. I'm gonna go meet now and start the meeting. I'm gonna hit record and get the transcript as these guys are starting to talk. And later on, I'm gonna use the transcript and AI to do some fun things, and you'll see a practical application of some of the bits that we're gonna talk about today. 

Now, without further ado, can I get you to switch that back over? Without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Shane from Microsoft, and he's gonna talk to you about a bit of an update on what Microsoft's doing with AI. 

SHANE BALDACCHINO: Thank you, James. What an intro. Just by show of hands here, who uses Azure OpenAI? We've got a few people. Awesome. Who's had a bit of a play with the SDKs and things of that nature? Are there any builders in this room? Hands. There's another one there. Does anyone like my t-shirt here today? Does anyone know who this is? We're off to a start. So, a bit of an update. 

[SLIDE: Microsoft Cloud in the era of AI] 

So, look, as we enter this era of AI, there are three critical things in the Microsoft Cloud that enables, I guess, AI for any organization here. Today I want to step through these three aspects here. 

Firstly, look, AI, you've probably seen, as James just mentioned before, it is being sprinkled all over our product sets. You've probably seen the memes out there - AI on this, AI on that. But it is about accelerating productivity and creativity of people here. I'm moving across here to be on frame. There we go. Small stage. 

Second, look, we're delivering tools and services that you need to build your own intelligent apps. So, the ability to build your own copilots, the tooling, to not only leverage our copilot but to be able to build your own. 

JAMES NATION-INGLE: Whispers - what's a copilot? 

SHANE BALDACCHINO: What's a copilot? 

Look, a copilot, realistically, I think in layman's terms, James, is an AI helper to help you do more, to remove a lot of that heavy lifting in your day-to-day workflow here. So, I think I was having a chat with Glenn earlier before. I do a lot of programming in C++ of all these languages, and I think I'm pretty adept at that. 

[SLIDE: A copilot for every Microsoft Cloud experience] 

But by leveraging tools like GitHub Copilot, I'm often learning new tricks and better ways to help me to be more effective. 

So, a bit of a segue into GitHub Copilot, we announced this about a year ago, and the innovation has just been incredible. Last week, I was on stage somewhere in Sydney and was talking about GitHub Copilot of all things there, and over 40% of code checked in to GitHub in 2023 has been AI created, which is an amazing statistic here. So, it is about enabling you to ultimately change that value proposition from low to high to allow your people, your staff to be more productive. It's enabling people to unlock that creativity, productivity from things like GitHub Copilot through to the more office-based applications to be more productive and creative. These days there are copilots for things like dynamics, so enabling you to increase your productivity in your organization. 

[SLIDE: Empowering every organisation with Azure AI] 

Quickly, I wanna just talk about how these intelligent apps are enabling organizations to do more here. So, as you can see here, look, we've got Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Machine Learning, Azure AI infrastructure. And I kind of like to think of this stuff as a bit of a layer cake. 

There is a lot of buzz today around things like OpenAI. Azure OpenAI is just one of the AI services that we offer. But look, there are other services like speech to text, vision services. OpenAI is amazing in so many ways. These large language models are not just great at doing one thing. They're great at doing lots of things. 

However, for things that are more specific here, for example, you might be doing image recognition. There are higher-order cognitive services that may be better suited for your needs here. And again when I say the words like TensorFlow or Caffe and PyTorch, etc, like that, then you've got offerings. Like Azure machine learning to be able to leverage those models directly. 

[SLIDE: Azure OpenAI service] 

So, look, in summary here, Azure is incredibly comprehensive in this space here. But look, in spending time with organizations around Australia and New Zealand, we typically see four distinct use cases. And I'll get into a few specifics. 

But look, content generation. I was gonna make this a little bit personal. I was sitting on a panel of a hackathon just recently, and I don't know about you, but if you go out for dinner or something like that, you're probably gonna look at the reviews of a restaurant. Well, if you get a bad review, particularly when there's no reply, it doesn't look great. So, the winners of this hackathon created AI solution that would generate content for social media responses, things on like Yelp and so on, Google, to automatically respond in the tonality of the organization against negative reviews. 

So, that's kind of like one example there. On the summarization piece here, you think about law firms, New Zealand based LawVu as an example, they create software for lawyers and in-house legal teams. 

You might have... A lot of us here have probably bought houses. Imagine if you've got a section 32. Do you actually read it? Do you wanna know what the summary is? Well, OpenAI is a great example of removing that heavy lifting to be able to get to that summary really quick. Cogeneration. 

As I mentioned before, I'm writing some C++, you might be doing something else. It could be creating that arm template to deploy your stack on Azure or coding in general here. And I think the last one is really interesting, that semantic search side of things. How do you extract that needle in a haystack? You may have things like Azure Cognitive Search. You may have an Elasticsearch stack out there, which is great for in-memory search, but how do you extract value in that? So, semantic search is fast becoming that new paradigm. 

We've got a logo here of CarMax. And I love this example here. And you can look at this on the Microsoft website. So, CarMax, if you're not familiar, they're a US-based secondhand car dealership where you can purchase a car online, and I think you can return it in 30 days or something like that. So, with thousands of reviews on their website, how do you get the summary of what people think of these cars here? So, they're leveraging Azure OpenAI to provide summarized views of specific models, what the pros, what the cons are and so on. Again, this is just one use case here. There's a few more logos on screen here too, which you can read off the Microsoft website. 

[SLIDE: Microsoft Cloud runs on trust] 

So, look, a lot of the questions I get asked often is, hey, what's the difference between Azure OpenAI and OpenAI? I can leverage GPT-3, 5, Turbo or GPT-4 or other models. What's the difference? And I think it comes back to - we've got this thing here, Microsoft Cloud runs on trust. And that is the truth. Everything we do is built on trust. Security is job zero here, and responsible AI is a core ethic for us here at Microsoft. 

Pop the term 'responsible AI' into your favorite search engine, and you'll see Microsoft will appear right up at the top there. You can read our responsible AI principles. But I think the summary, the main difference between OpenAI, the native versus Azure OpenAI, it's the same large language models running on our end. It's not altered in any way. However, we're running a copy of OpenAI's model on your behalf in a private way. You can access it via a private endpoint, but most importantly, we will not leverage or store the prompts - so the questions that you ask - to further train OpenAI's model. So, if you pop in, maybe, Samsung and OpenAI into your favorite search engine, you'll probably see some examples of where things have kind of gone wrong. So, look, protecting your data is top priority for us. 

Now, I did a senior demo just before James. You had the OpenAI portal up. And, look, you've got the ability with Azure OpenAI to easily ingest your data. So, not only can you leverage these large language models, you can leverage these large language models with the context of your data in your organization, be it from flat files, in-memory search engines, and so on. 

So, look, this has just been a bit of a whirlwind here.  

[SLIDE: AI Innovation] 

But look, there is a lot happening in the Microsoft Cloud regarding AI here. So, we've got three months on screen here. Obviously, we don't have the rest of the year. But, look, we're just at the beginning here, the infancy. The Microsoft Cloud is releasing on average five updates, five updates feature changes per day. 

Now, one of the things I would say, if your world is Azure, and I hope it is, pop into your favorite search engine 'Azure Heat Map', and what you're gonna get is a page that's gonna come back and it will rather than parsing our blogs, our RSS feeds of what's happening on our platform, it's a Heat Map based on certain topics. And the topic that shines brightest at the moment is Azure AI. So, we are releasing the greatest propensity of updates on our platform there. So, look, we're incredibly excited about this. I hope you are as well. 

And look, with that, I'm gonna pass the baton over to Glenn. 

Thanks, Glenn. 

GLENN CARMICHAEL: Thanks, mate. 

That's a one for you. 

Hi, my name is Glenn. I'm from Telstra Purple. So, Telstra Purple is a part of Telstra. 

[SLIDE: What does AI mean for customers?] 

We're professional services, part of the business. So, we've got people that are designers, developers, data scientists, people that do implementation of contact centre and things like that as well. 

So, what I want to talk about today is what exactly does AI mean for customers.  

[SLIDE: The opportunity of AI. How Telstra Purple can help] 

Now, we've been talking about AI a lot over the past sort of six to 12 months. There's a lot of tools out there. They're all really, really cool, really, really exciting. But they are just that. They're just tools. They're something that enable people to do something that previously they weren't able to do, or they make it easier for them to be able to do it. 

I've got an eight-year-old that's using ChatGPT to help him write an app that keeps track of the Pokémon cards that he's got and the Pokémon cards that his friends got that he would like to get from his friends, which is genuinely impressive because being able to have a conversation and get that code back and debug conversationally, going, 'Oh, that didn't work.' And it apologizes. It's like, 'Oh, I'm very sorry. How about you cut and paste this in? And that should work just fine.' 

So, some of the stuff that we've been talking about, we're talking a lot around generative AIs, and that's quite a narrow band of the full spectrum of what potentially AI could talk to. I'm gonna talk a bit about generative AI, but one point I do wanna make is that there's this stacking effect that we were talking about earlier. 

There's other variations and formats of AI. You can stack generative AI tools, but there's other productized AI services that you can put on top to extract additional value, particularly as a business customer. 

So, things that I'm gonna talk about. The first one is the democratization of AI. This is largely been brought about by Microsoft's significant investment, particularly in the business space in OpenAI. But I'm gonna talk a little bit about sort of where things have come from and where we think they're going. 

Then we're gonna talk about how we see that AI is gonna change work. And then we're gonna talk about how businesses can take advantage of some of the changes that we see coming. 

Talking about the democratization of AI. Everyone here - like quick show of hands - everyone's played with ChatGPT? Yeah. Fantastic. It's amazing. People freak out when the computer can do things that you can do. And I get that. But now we've kind of moved past that initial surprise phase and we're into, well, how can I get this to do more for me? And it's not just in generating text. Has anyone had to play around with like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, these image generation tools? 

So, genuinely, genuinely cool and really impressive. And the thing that's blowing my mind is how quick they are improving. Like I've been in the technology industry for a really long time and the speed at which these things are getting from frankly a bit shit to incredible. You look at DALL-E from 12, 18 months ago and they were pictures, but compare it to the photorealistic and gorgeous artwork that it's able to churn out today. It's a lot of fun actually. If you go back and you search 'DALL-E improvement over time'. Lots of people have kind of done experiments where they've done the same prompt over time and sort of laid it out as a comic strip. And you can kind of see just like melted weird hands, weird pupils through to like gorgeous images. And it's kind of fun to see like where additional training and everything went into those models. It's really, really cool. 

And we're at now with video where we were at 18 months ago with photos. And so, you can sort of see that acceleration curve. The video, though, is still... If you'd like some nightmare fuel, if you would like to not sleep tonight, can I recommend just go to your favorite search engine and look up 'Will Smith eating spaghetti AI video'. It is horrifying. Genuinely horrifying. 

So, these things are getting really good, really, really fast. And it's super exciting. Hearing about the copilots and bringing them into more than just GitHub. Bringing copilots into Office 365. This is what we're talking about when we're talking about the democratization of these tools, particularly in a business context. 

Because copilot for GitHub, it's been around for just over 12 months now. A little while. It's not new and it's an amazingly powerful tool. It allows our developers and our developers at Telstra Purple use it all the time. It's a way for them to optimize and automate what they do. They are more efficient, they are more effective, and they can do less time actually working, which everybody wins. So, they're a really powerful tool. 

But the reason that they've been able to do that so well for so long is because developers have got this superpower that normal people haven't historically had. They can talk to the computer in a language that the computer understands. They can communicate their intent to the computer very, very clearly. 

And so, what these new tools in the copilots that are coming allow us to do is it allows us to communicate our intent to the computer in our chosen language, whether that be English or something else. And so, it's effectively taking human languages and turning them into programming languages. 

So, what this means is that developers are able to do that with GitHub. But I'm a designer by trade, so I'm obligated to hate and be bad at Excel and spreadsheets, and I live up to that. But what that means is that now I just have to tell it what I want the spreadsheet to do because I've always had that. I've always been like, I know what I want it to do, but if I go and search what formula to use, my brain will explode. But now, if I can describe what I'd like Excel to do to the spreadsheet, it can do that. And that's the thing that's quite different. 

So, it's taking that ability to articulate your intent to the machine and driving that efficiency and automation gains that we get and giving it to everybody because everyone can punch in those prompts. So, more people with those skills, more people with that power, that's gonna make a huge difference to the productivity of our workforce. 

[SLIDE: The opportunity of AI. How Telstra Purple can help] 

So, talking about how AI will change work. To be honest, I don't think that it will. I think that it has. If you look, there's a number of different surveys that have been done. IT Brief Australia is the most recent one, 83 now. 83% of people have used AI at work in some way, shape, or form in the last six months. That's more than four out of five people that have had a crack at this. And of those 83%, 81% believe that it saved them and their company time. They believed that it was beneficial in that way. In about the same amount, believed that it helped their company develop more innovative and creative work. So, that's really cool. 

But only a little over half thought that it was on par with human outputs. And this comes back to that original analogy of these are tools. You as a human can have different levels of mastery of using those tools. You can give it a pretty rubbish prompt, and you'll get some pretty rubbish outputs, and then you're gonna have to finesse those outputs. You're gonna have to use your human ability to massage that and turn it into something good. 

You can spend the time and have a bit more mastery of the tool and generate a much better prompt. Maybe you have to do a little less massaging at the end, but that human element is still critically important. Is that why there's jobs for prompt engineers these days? Well, yeah. The prompt engineer at SXSW was the fastest-growing job title that they had. So, from year on year, the largest leap from people not existing to, hey, this is a job type now. 

Whether or not prompt engineer is a job in the future, there's no prompt engineers in the room, is there? No. Good. Look, the way that you type search terms into your search engine, the way that you type that is not the way you would normally write. Like you know how to enter keywords and work the machine to give you the results that you want. That is something that is not natural. It's something that you've learned over time. It's a learned behavior. I think that that will be true of the way that we write prompts. 

People will learn what priming the AI is, they will learn how prompting works, and that will become kind of a baseline skill. It will become an expected skill, which brings me to my next point. So, adapting and adopting AI in how you work that is going to be essential. It's gonna be table stakes. It's not gonna be like, look, we're doing AI, we're different, we're innovative. It's gonna be like, we're doing AI. We haven't fallen behind. And that's gonna happen really, really quickly. 

So, the example that I can give you is people understand what AI is capable of. And if you look at any industry, people even outside of that industry have a pretty good idea of what tools are standard and best practice for that industry. So, like you're sitting down with your accountant and your accountant is taking notes on pen and paper and you ask them openly just out of interest, what accounting platform are you using? Do you use MYOB? Do you use Xero? Like, what do you use? If your accountant turns around and goes, no, I don't like any of that. I like to print out the forms and do it in my head. I do it with pen and paper. I'd be concerned. I'd be concerned about the accuracy and effectiveness and probably the efficiency of his work because I know that the best tool for the job is available to him and he's choosing not to use it. So, I'm probably not gonna use that accountant. And it's not limited to knowledge workers. You employ a builder to come and build your house. You've got your slab poured, you're building out the framework. Now, none of us are probably builders, but you probably know that the best or most efficient way to nail a frame together is to use a nail gun really quick. Really easy. If you walk out and he's hammering nails in, you ask him, hey, why aren't you... Why aren't you using the latest, most modern tool for the job? And he goes, I just like doing it this way. It's like, well, I'm paying for your time and that takes ten times longer, so I'm gonna find a new builder. So, people's expectation of what tools you are using in your business matters and people's expectation that you are using AI in your business is coming really, really quickly as table stakes. It's gonna be standard. And so, this isn't something where you can pull everybody into the boardroom and go, cool, we're gonna have an AI training session and we're gonna be an AI company. This is moving so quickly that you need an approach to adopt this and then you need to be assessing and understanding what are the advancements in the technology and how can I roll that into my business. Which brings me to how businesses can take advantage. 

[SLIDE: The opportunity of AI. How Telstra Purple can help.]  

So, I think that using things like copilots, using stuff that's off the shelf, really, really powerful and an amazing first step. 

It's that vertical piece, that next level where you're starting to think about building things that are specific to your organisation that require a higher fidelity or accuracy or greater precision about the information that you're presenting it with and that you're asking it to feedback to you. 

So, lots of organisations have got different ways of doing this, but a bunch of our Telstra executives recently had the opportunity to go to America in a study tour and they spent some time at Microsoft. I got to read the outputs of that study tour. Actually, I fed it into ChatGPT and said, give me a summary, but I read the summary of the outputs of the study tour. 

And I loved the way that Microsoft was encouraging their teams around coming up with ideas of how to use AI in their business. So, they've got their guardrails, their frameworks that come down from the top level, and then they're encouraging these green shoots within their business. And as ideas come up that are gonna generate significant value in their organisation, they can choose to nurture and fertilise and grow those up. 

So, these kinds of implementations, these kinds of custom versions of AI, this is something that Telstra Purple can help with. 

So, are we gonna be low on time?  

JAMES NATION-INGLE: Whispers- Keep going.  

GLENN CARMICHAEL: How long have I got?  

JAMES NATION-INGLE: Whispers- 2 minutes 

GLENN CARMICHAEL:  Okay cool, you did this (shows 6 fingers in the air). And I was like, I have six minutes. Like, its terrible communication. [Audience laughs] 

So, Microsoft's approach to this is really, really cool because they've got those guardrails, that framework, and they've published that framework of like ethical AI use and implementation. It's really good. I know that the Microsoft guys said, go look at it, but I'm telling you to go look at it too, and I don't work for it. So, it's genuinely good. 

So, Telstra Purple can help you with the implementation and the development of those things. 

So, I wanna finish up on just like a story about a customer interaction that I had recently. I had the opportunity recently to have a chat with the CTO of my local Council, which was really interesting. It was actually we were playing golf. But just a few weeks beforehand I'd been searching on their website. 

I'd been trying to work out - we want to do some landscaping out the front, and I wanted to find out if I was allowed to put my letterbox on the nature strip. Now, I notice in some parts of the suburb that seems to be a thing that people have done. And in some parts of the suburb it doesn't seem to have happened. And I was like, well, what's the rules? Like, how do I find that out? So, I went searching on the website and couldn't find anything. It was not particularly well structured. Terrible AI. I'm not gonna tell you which Council, by the way. I know. Terrible information architecture, but it took me down this rabbit hole. 

So, I found the Zendesk instance that had some stuff, but not the stuff that I was looking for. Then I found like a public-facing SharePoint instance that also had some stuff, but not the stuff that I was looking for. Eventually, I downloaded a PDF that allowed me to search within it to find the answer to my question, which was no - no, you can't. So, it took me a long time. 

But I was playing golf with the CTO of my local Council and we got to the third hole. We kind of chatted about what we do and everything, and the conversation turned to AI, and he's like, yeah, there's just not a use case. I was like, are you... I told him the story about the letterbox. He was like, yeah, it's pretty rough. Not much we can do about that. What are you talking about? Like, we can train or we can use all of this unstructured data and we can help you to unearth information that is stored within all of these different places in a much better way. In fact, we could set it up so that somebody could conversationally interact with it. And he thought that was pretty cool, but pretty uncomfortable with putting that in front of his constituents, in front of people like me that are asking questions. But the idea of somebody that works for the Council being able to take a call and understand my question, and they're two days into the job, they're just as good at finding the information that I need as somebody that's ten years into the job, that's really, really powerful. 

Now, that, until I had a really great conversation is where the story ends. I was like, cool. AI did a thing. We're having that conversation with the customer. 

We're gonna move that forward. 

But then I had a chat with Emmett, who works with me at Telstra Purple. He's our Head of Contact Centre. 

And he's like, yeah, but they're still typing the query in. Like, you know that we have these other products and tools that can sit on top of that. 

So, if we're doing sentiment analysis and we're listening to what's being said, why does the human need to generate the prompt? 

So, you can have an AI generate the prompt that searches the database and surfaces the information, and so the two humans can have a conversation and the information that is pertinent to that conversation. 

So, I just spat at you. The information that is pertinent... there wouldn't be any water for the front row. I'm sorry. 

So, the AI is generating a prompt for the LLM to surface that information so the two humans can have a really natural conversation with the relevant detail being presented to that person that's working for the Council. 

So, that is an example of some of the really cool and amazing stuff that is possible when you take just those productised things and you just start to stack on some of that more precise stuff that is specific and unique to your business, your use case, your data, and it's all stored securely using Azure. 

With that, I'm gonna hand over to Dom. 

DOM JOHNSON: Thank you. 

GLENN CARMICHAEL: Thanks, mate. 

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE) 

JAMES NATION-INGLE: While Dom is doing this, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stop the meeting that was said before so that the transcript has a time to for me to grab it and use it. 

Dom is gonna talk to you about our new Microsoft practice. 

Cool. 

DOM JOHNSON: Hi, everyone. 

So, Glenn, earlier just talked to you a little bit about what Telstra Purple is. 

Who's here has worked with Telstra Purple? 

Show of hands? 

Few of us. 

Who here knows what Telstra Purple do end to end? 

Few of us. 

So, maybe I can break that down from a Microsoft standpoint. 

Ten minutes. 

Thanks, Adam. 

I'll try and make it five. 

GLENN CARMICHAEL: Did you do like this or something? I was like, yeah. Clarity, gestures. 

No, it was good. 

DOM JOHNSON: Thanks. 

So, our Telstra Purple Business. We're a professional services company of Telstra and we are there to, in our practice, bring our customers complete clarity in adopting Microsoft Technologies across the entire stack end to end. 

So, I have a few of my teammates standing right behind the room there, including my boss. So, hey, Mary. 

And so, our role is to help you adopt the Microsoft technology. So, case in point, Microsoft Azure. Who here leverages Cloud today? I'm assuming I see a few hands there. 

Absolutely. 

So, taking applications that were legacy or building new applications and deploying them at scale, deploying them at speed. Telstra Purple has done that for numerous customers around the country with some terrific case studies. Particularly one that I'm absolutely proud of is the work that we've done inside of Ambulance Victoria in the past, where in the midst of the pandemic, the government came to us and said, hey, we need to track all of the ICU beds across the country in real-time. Within one week, our digital teams and our infrastructure teams got together and launched that. So, every first responder, every person that was required to have a deep understanding of what's happening around the country when it comes to hospital beds was able to ensure that they knew that information. 

So, we then have Azure infrastructure as a big, big play for us as well. So, whether it's taking workloads... Sorry, there was a bit of guitar playing behind me - taking workloads that was legacy in an on prem data centre into the public cloud, whether it's Azure Native, Azure infrastructure as a service, or on Azure VMware Solution, we play in that space also. 

Who here leverages the Power Platform stack in their organisation? If you actually go to Bing and type in 'Microsoft Power Platform', you'll see a case study, a video that comes up where Microsoft did a case study on how we use it internally. Does anyone here know that story? No. 

So, we are one of Microsoft's biggest consumers of power platform on the planet. And it's a great story. 

When you have a moment, go check it out through your favorite web browser. 

But effectively what happened was there was a situation where our engineers and our people that were servicing all of our towers, exchanges, our pits, they had... 

We have about 2,000 of those people around the country. 

And what they had to do was leverage about three or four different applications, ten different spreadsheets to surface information together. 

I'll fast forward a little bit and just say we built a Power Platform application using our power apps. We surfaced that into Microsoft Teams. All of a sudden, we ended up saving millions of minutes within the business, improved employee sentiment, but also gave executives the visibility that they needed to... 

Am I going robot? 

No. 

Gave executives the visibility that they needed to get the information that they wanted under their fingertips as well. 

So, I'm getting the wind-up, which I thought I had ten minutes. 

Play me off, Johnny. 

Look, to fast forward, we have tremendous capabilities in Azure Power Platform, security and frontline workers in our practice. We have people like Glenn, people like James, my wonderful staff at the back of the room, that can sit down with you and understand what the business problems that you have are, what are the ideas that you are trying to build, trying to take out to market? If you've got that million-dollar idea to save $1 million, to make $1 million, or to change the lives of people in your organization or outside of them in the world, we take a design thinking approach into everything that we do all the way from infrastructure through security, through to frontline work. 

And so, reach out to your client partner in Telstra or to one of your digital BDMs and we will get that conversation started and help you with the adoption of AI by putting brilliant people like Glenn in front of you to have that conversation. 

So, thank you so much for your time. 

JAMES NATION-INGLE: Cheers, Don. 

Thanks, man. 

Can I get you to switch the thing back over? 

Now, one of the things I get asked a lot is, will AI kill creativity? 

And so, what I wanted you to do... 

So, you've seen today present AI, so copilot, something that we know about. 

That's something that's gonna help us a lot actively. 

And then the OpenAI stuff that uses your data in the background securely that we talked a little bit about ChatGPT. 

This is the engine that we're playing with now that allows us to get the ChatGPT look and feel. 

I'm gonna show you under the covers of the OpenAI studio, which is this one up here. 

Now, what everyone... Everyone's probably seen a few of these in their time. 

Meeting with James Nation-Ingle. 

These things. 

This is my meeting prompt. 

Cool. 

So, I've got that. 

I'm gonna drop... 

I'm gonna use the text. 

I'm gonna drop this into the AI so that it knows it. 

What I'm gonna do to show that it can help with creativity is that this meeting summary, 

I'm gonna ask it to write us a song and then I'm gonna play this song for you. 

So, I will go, "write me a song using the following text summary." Cool. 

So, it's gonna start writing me a song. 

There we go. 

So, we're writing a song now. 

Oh, everyone's had a go at this. Anyone that ever played an instrument? 

As soon as they saw ChatGPT, they're like, yeah, I'm gonna get it too. 

I'm gonna be a star. 

So, what does a song need next? 

I need some chords. 

Glenn, what I might get you to do is start chucking some prompts into me while we do this, and for me while we do this. 

So, we need some chords. 

So, can you ask it to... 

Cool. 

It's written a song. 

Can you go back to the top of the song? 

Let's have a quick look. 

It's cool. 

You're in the text box anyway, so if you just write, "make the song two verses in the key of G major with a chorus." 

[GLENN CARMICHAEL] For the chorus? 

[JAMES NATION-INGLE] With a chorus. 

[GLENN CARMICHAEL] With a chorus. 

[JAMES NATION-INGLE] Not for the chorus. 

Oh, let's do this. 

I'll kick the thing. 

Cool. 

Everyone hear that? 

(JAMES PLAYING ACOUSTIC GUITAR CHORDS). 

Cool. 

So, this is how creativity can work with AI. 

So, quickly I can go. 

So, we've got G, C, and back to G. 

And we can go, In the era of AI, Microsoft Cloud takes flight, boosting productivity and shining a new light. 

So, this is cool. 

We got some basics yet. 

Now, I'm feeling my creative juices. 

Can you ask AI to turn it into... 

Use the same song, turn it into a 12-bar blues. 

Put it in the key of E. 

Put it in the key of E. 

So, we can go. 

12-bar blues, baby. 

Real time now. 

In the era of AI, Microsoft Cloud shines bright, Boosting productivity got in through the night, Built-in AI for each solution, A co-pilot in flight, Github Dynamics, Azure AI, Our Guiding Light. 

I got one more.  

[AUDIENANCE APPLUSE]  

Thank you. 

Very kind. 

Now, put it in there. 

Make the last verse a nice joke about Microsoft and Telstra. 

Go back to the 12-bar blues. 

Everyone likes blues? 

There we go. 

(JAMES SINGING), In the era of AI and Microsoft Cloud, we hail. 

With Telstra by our side, we're all set in sale. 

A partnership so strong, we are sure to prevail. 

But remember, even in the cloud, don't forget to check your email. 

Nah, it wasn't that funny, but it was alright. 

So, hopefully you can see that AI is not gonna kill creativity. 

It's not gonna stop people having a job. 

It's gonna help. 

We're already using it to help. 

It's important to do it securely. 

It's important to use private data. 

It's important to plan for these things. 

Hope that you've all taken away something good. 

Thanks very much for joining us. 

Thanks to the team for helping out. 

I wish we had more time, but you all have to move to the next session, which is in the big room. 

Thanks very much, everyone. 

[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo] 

[Title: Vanessa Sorenson, Global Partner Solutions, Director for ANZ, Microsoft] 

Kia ora. G’day, 

How are you all doing straight after the lunchtime session? I love that one. It is fabulous to be here in person, and thank you, Kathryn. I've got 10 minutes to talk to you about a topic that is unbelievable. Did you know that it was only March when this AI revolution started, and more than a hundred million users came on? So welcome, everybody. So, so, so wonderful. And yes, I've been given 10 minutes to talk about all three things AI, but it's going to take longer than that. So I encourage each and every one of you to go out to the breakout session. 

You know, I knew we were onto something pretty great when my 82-year-old father came for dinner. He said, Vanessa, what's with this AI thing? What's going on? Like, I'm using it every day to build out documents. What's going to happen with healthcare? What's going to happen with education? And, you know, when someone at 82 and your 14-year-old son are just as excited about it, that's what I want each and every one of you to leave today. 

It's like being in the barrel of a surf, you know, a wave, and you're right in the middle of it. And you feel this energy, this buzz, but you don't really know how it's going to end. But what I want to say, it's not often in your career that you get to be right in the middle of the wave. It was only at breakfast this morning, and I'm really going to show my age that I remember Beyond 2000, that TV program that was pretty out there and now we're living in it. Each and every one of you needs to think of the art of the possible within your business. 

So will AI fix work? Gosh, hasn't the last few years changed what we thought work was? These tools and opportunities for each and every one of you is going to help you. This work index that we've actually gone out there and found out, and none of you will be surprised that how bogged down we are, how overloaded we are, and how much we simply can't keep up with the amount of change. You know, I'm one of those parents that says, my son and daughter, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" They’re like, "I don't know. I don't even think the job I'm going to be in is not even existing years." And that's the truth. But we also have to think of creativity. 

I joined Microsoft because of Satya Nadella six years ago. I joined this movement, and Satya Nadella is the leader that said we are no longer going to be a know-it-all culture. We're going to be a learn-it-all culture. And he also knows that it's critical that we maximize every single day to make sure that every day we get the most out of it. 

That is why we are investing so heavily in all things AI. AI has been around for years. It's now that we have the compute power, the Azure platform, the brains of our platform with our partner Telstra to take this to the next level. But let's be honest, there's a big promise out there, and a lot of people are saying, will AI fix all of this for us? Well, I believe it definitely lifts the burden on the work we do. 

Like Kathryn said, we need to be working on critical work. And actually, the recent study, which 31,000 people were part of over 31 countries with all of our trillions of 0365 data said that they are not creative and are so bogged down by everything that's coming at us, we have to lift that burden. It is the drudgery of things that none of us actually get our energy from. 

And you know what? I don't know about you, but it's separating us from the soul of work, the purpose of what we all want to achieve. You know, I know every day when I get out of bed, I want my days to maximize. And I can tell you that this report said that 57% of our time is managing information and communication that actually doesn't really matter. 

And you know, I'm on the beta version of this AI thing, and I can't predict the future, but I can certainly see that this is going to uplift more than we could even imagine. So hopefully, I'm sure all of your boards and all of your exec teams are saying, what does this mean? 

Well, in this beta, I got invited to a meeting. Yes, on Teams, that platform that we didn't think would ever take off, go code. And we recorded the meeting like many of us do, and we were having a great session, and don't we all? We like the sound of our own voice. As soon as the meeting finished, tell me all the actions. What do we need to do by when? And the best news. I wasn't even at that meeting. Tell me when my boss raised his voice or when he mentioned my name. Summarize all of that and then set up our next meetings. 

This is about unleashing that creativity because we have got a barrage of Teams meetings coming. But isn't it amazing when we actually get together? So the small snippets that I've been seeing are just next level, and who here doesn't want a co-pilot just the sound of that somebody that's right beside you because this is now managing our lives. You know, it's the work, but it's also the stuff with our kids. It's all the sporting things and everything that we've got to do, the travel that we're all now doing. And that's what the promise is. 

But many also say, what about the bad actors? What about the things that we need to be careful of? 

Well, I say that if you're going to leave your front door unlocked, someone may come in. So talking to Telstra about how secure is your environment because your data now is the new gold, and once you can put that securely, imagine your business with your data of everything that you know about your customers, about how this can change and transform them. 

So I don't know about you, but I was certainly feeling overwhelmed when I saw this coming. A lot of people said Vanessa, surely within Microsoft you all knew that you were investing like this. We didn't. But many of you say, look, Microsoft, we missed the search movement. We missed the developer movement, we missed the mobile movement. We're not missing this movement, and we will do it the most trusted and secure way. And some of the products and services that you're going to see through this incredible partnership that we have with Telstra means that you can build out these services in the most secure way. 

I'm watching it save people's lives, literally. That technical debt that you have because you couldn't invest in it. You can now leapfrog whether it's a single patient record of getting information to our frontline workers or the work that we're doing with an organization like Volpara to make sure that we're saving women's lives through breast screening and AI to make sure that the things that the human eye can't see this technology can pick up. 

But I encourage all of you to think about skilling. We will need, the survey said, about 1.2 million Australians and digital services skillsets to truly embrace this. So one of the programs that I launched in New Zealand was 10K Women to inspire more women to consider a role in tech and also more diverse backgrounds of our indigenous communities. I encourage you to do that because it is coming. 

And for any people when you're employing and say, "I'm not digital, I'm not a geek or a coder," I say no, we want the creative thinkers, we want the problem solvers, we want the people that truly don't have to do that stuff that's going to be simple, to imagine a world ahead. 

So we have launched many, many opportunities, which I encourage you to look at, certainly in partnership with Telstra. I'm so excited what we can do together, and I know that we are right in the middle of this change. It isn't often in your life when you can look back and go, wow.  

So I encourage you all to ride the wave. Don't sit back and let the future go past. Be part of creating that with your teams. Embrace it and have an amazing wild ride.  

Kia ora. Thank you, team. 

[Your Business Optimised. Telstra and Telstra Purple logo] 

[VIDEO STARTS] 

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. 

[VIDEO ENDS] 

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. 

[VIDEO PLAYS] 

[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] 

[VIDEO ENDS] 

[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.