Telstra
Telstra wanted to improve frontline knowledge access, customer self-service, and network reliability, but roughly 80 historical data platforms fragmented data and interfaces. Without a shared foundation, role-based training, and responsible controls, individual pilots would not scale into hundreds of business use cases.
Telstra reduced its data platforms from roughly 80 to about 20 and moved toward cloud and API-first architecture. On that foundation it built AskTelstra with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search over trusted corporate knowledge, then deployed a customer-facing generative AI assistant, One Sentence Summary, and SmartFix in network operations. A Data & AI Academy supports workforce adoption.
AskTelstra and summarization tools give frontline staff answers and context; employees remain responsible for customer communication and exceptions. Network automation handles standardizable problems, with anomalies entering operations workflows. Responsible-AI controls, security, and training for more than 20,000 employees support scaling.
- Consolidate data platforms and standardize API access first
- Start with high-volume knowledge lookup and proactive network repair
- Ground generated answers in trusted corporate knowledge
- Build an AI Academy and role-level adoption support
- Measure call time, self-service resolution, and prevented calls separately
- Enterprise AI often depends on prior simplification of data and interfaces
- Set different business metrics for different workflows under one AI strategy
- Employee assistants should be grounded in controlled corporate knowledge
- Network automation and conversational AI need different escalation paths
Telstra reports that AskTelstra supports more than 8,000 frontline employees and reduces average call time by over one minute. Its customer assistant nearly tripled the number of queries resolved without escalation. SmartFix performed 2.5 million proactive actions in FY25 and prevented nearly one million support calls.
- Call-time reduction, query resolution, and prevented calls belong to different workflows and should not be treated as interchangeable.
- SmartFix is part of Telstra’s broader AI and automation portfolio, not a standalone generative AI feature.