Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hello, you're watching telecom tv. We are joining from Future Network 2024 in London, uk. Now I'm happy to be joined by Tony Geheran, COO of Telus. And Jamie Tatis, chief Insights Officer at Telus. Hi, thank you very much for joining us today.

Tony Geheran, TELUS (00:23):
Thank you Yani. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:25):
So the trend of telcos becoming TechCo is getting stronger. Tony is, tell us on that transformation journey, and if so, what does this mean for the company?

Tony Geheran, TELUS (00:35):
Very much so from a combinations of avenues of approach, actually, we've been leveraging supervised ai, predictive AI in our core networks for years. The recent general utilization of generative AI presents a lot of opportunity but also some risk. So we're evaluating how it will be part of the automation journey that we're on. And then as our business model evolves from being a legacy telco, typically looking at voice services connectivity, a little bit of TV entertainment to a much more expansive service provider model where we're layering on capability on a broadband network ecosystem. The opportunities for us to evolve the way we reach and interact with our customers is rapidly expanding. And I think the technologies of convergence we're seeing in the IT and network space, the general F AI capabilities are really opening up many avenues for us to explore how our business model should evolve.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (01:43):
Automation is absolutely essential for network operators in the future. Jaime. What kind of progress is tes making towards automation?

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (01:51):
Well, we've been automating for the last decade through different technologies. So it was analytics, big data coming to ai, and now most recently, gen ai. Our culture is to always innovate and I find that on today's world and technology that we have available has never been easier to innovate as it is right now. So across the company, through all the business units, we're looking at ways that we can enhance the automation to be able to provide better customer experiences, but also make life easier for our employees. When you look at networks, networks has been getting far more complex than before, and it's a must that we actually automate and provide platforms and tooling that allows the different team members to not only make their own life easier, but actually being able to navigate the complexities that we have on the network in a more successful way.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (02:43):
And you mentioned AI a few times, Tony, to what extent has tell us embraced AI applications in its operations?

Tony Geheran, TELUS (02:51):
So pure, simple network management leverages a lot of predictive AI and scripted AI tool sets. But what we've done since the general awareness of chat, GBT and generative AI came to the fore 14 months ago now practically, we've really undertaken a very expansive look at how we would govern within the business, the utilization of these tool sets, how we would create a framework so that we can ensure that data integrity, ethical usage are paramount, factors of consideration, and then how can we create access the tools and to the utilization of Gen FFA across the business in the widest possible context so that we can really leverage every part of our business. The kind of innovation ideas that will come from people that are at the forefront of the business models that we're evolving to really bring these tool sets to work. And Jaime's team are really there to create a fabric framework that we can then create fast track tool sets in a general framework of consistency and then allow the business to explore how best to utilize them.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (04:11):
Jaime, what kind of impact has AI made on your AI strategy and operations?

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (04:17):
Massive. So we actually are tracking for hundreds of millions of dollars of right to the bottom line on cost reduction. Not only that, but looking at opportunities to enhance revenue streams as well. When you think about gen AI is an ability to be able to fully rethink how you operate and how you can transform how you do business. As Tony was mentioning, we have a multi-front approach on the way we tackle that. So one of them is provide a safe and secure and reliable tooling for our team members across the entire global footprint that we have so they can create their own use cases without having dependencies in other teams as much as possible. And for some of those more complex use cases, we have multidisciplinary squads composed of machine learning engineers, software engineers, and the business itself that actually tackles some of these more complex problems. To date. Since GPT came out at the end of 2022, we have over 15 enterprise grade use cases that are helping transform the company from how we operate the network, on how we dispatch technicians on the field, how we share knowledge, how we equip call center agents to be more effective. And it's across the broad spectrum of businesses and how we approach customer experience and how we improve constantly, how we evolve the products that we offer.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (05:38):
Jaime, Tony, thank you very much for your insights.

Tony Geheran, TELUS (05:41):
It's a pleasure.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (05:42):
A pleasure to be here. Thank you.