Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:05):
So we're in London for Futurenet world 2025. I'm here with Jaime Tatis, who's chief insights officer at TELUS from Canada. Jaime, thanks very much for joining us again. Great to see you.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (00:16):
Great to see you as well.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:18):
So look at this event. It's been all about AI automation and sovereign AI has really come on as a major topic recently and telco run AI factories are starting to spring up and tell us is one of the early movers there. Can you tell us about that? What this AI factory is, why it's been developed and how it fits into your strategy?

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (00:43):
You bet. We are very proud about this. We announced this a few months back. So we are building an AI sovereign compute factory that we want to have up and running before the end of the summer. This year we are the first service provider in North America that is an NVIDIA Cloud partner. And the main reason that we're doing this is by different angles. One is we have a need of sovereign compute in the country from a government perspective, a health perspective. There's many, many needs that we want this for. We also want to be less reliant on computing that is not governed or controlled by us.

(01:31):
And we are working with the public sector, the private sector to start to line up the interest and the offerings that we want to have in this environment. The other thing that is really important for Canada is our productivity has been not as good in the last five to 10 years. So we need to have different ways that we can work in the country to be able to provide working solutions to large enterprises, small medium businesses so they can use this technology to be able to increase productivity in the country that we badly need. And the other thing that is really important is Canada has stopped talent researchers on the AI domain. If you look at ai, many of the godfathers of AI are from Canada. And to be able to keep these researchers and to grow the number of researchers you need to have access to compute researchers

(02:23):
Are going to go wherever the compute is. They want just to research to be able to experiment. So we're very proud of the announcement. We are going to start really, really soon and we're going to see the great things that we're going to be able to create an offer through this solution.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:40):
I presume that TELUS is going to be one of the main first users of this surface.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (02:46):
Of course we are looking forward to use it as well, but equally important for us is to be able to have other enterprises or government who actually can use these services too. The other thing I wanted to add is it's not only about the AI compute side, but it's also how are we providing that AI compute. So the data centers that we are going to use to house this AI compute, they are very energy efficient and 99% of the energy comes from renewable sources because we have the ability and the geographical gift that we actually can use hydropower. And the other thing that we have just that is tied on how the data centers were conceived, but also geographical positions of Canada and where these data centers are. Our efficiency power to run the data centers are three x above the average.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:36):
Okay.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (03:36):
So we actually can provide not only the compute, while we are providing a very secure privacy and sustainable efficient manner for anybody who wants to use

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:46):
It. I mean a few years ago everybody was talking about sustainability and green and then that kind of got pushed to the side a little bit by ai. But that's still really important. Is it for everybody? It's important. Consumers, enterprises, governments. Indeed,

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (04:02):
Indeed. And that's something that the way we conceive this is to be able to hit all the different marks. We want to be able to provide the best compute possible. So the GP for going to run there are the latest generation of lab, well H two hundreds. So if the latest that you can find, they're going to be in a very sustainable environment that is very eco-friendly and we're going to be able to scale it because the data centers that we have, we have the space and power required to be able to scale this really heavily in the months and years to come.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:34):
Really exciting development. So look forward to seeing that, how that evolves. Now another one of the key trends and topics at this event over the two days has been around data and telco data, telco data management. And we've been talking about this since forever. It's been a while about dirty data, about data silos, blah blah blah. Can you tell us about Telus's data management strategy? I mean do you still have silos or have you worked past that or no more silos. No more silos. Okay.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (05:11):
So one of the things that came public last year, there was public announcements that Google did and we did on our site as well because we finalized, we completed our full data modernization program that we started back in 2021. Okay.

(05:27):
So we last year removed, we shut down the legacy data lake platforms that we used to have and now we have a full cloud native, we call it the data hub where all the high quality data sets across the company running a private and secure manner. And when we were doing that also we have very efficient ways where we democratize the data. So teams across the company can experiment or they can run production grade workloads on their own. They don't have to go through me, they just can go and we provide them the right tools and workbenches so they can do this work. And you can use this to go and build a 10,000 line code for machine learning or you just can do some analytics and create visualization for them. You can go in a big spectrum and ratio things that you can do, but the focus is to allow the company to self serve themselves and ensure that they actually can transform the way they do their business by leveraging better data and create better solutions with ai.

(06:29):
And Gene A i on the GAI front, I don't know you remember, but one of the things that we did from 2023, we saw a clear need to democratize safe and private secure environment where the team members could experiment and explore what Jenny and I could do. This was the beginning of 2023 was very recent. And one of the things that when you look at now is we have a platform that we created that scale called Fuel IX. Any day we have around 55,000 team members in TELUS using this platform because they use it to create their own copilots. So you have teams who actually create solutions for their own teams or we actually create use cases enterprise grade that uses the same platform to be able to transform different the operations and how we do business across the company. That has been a very good success. And since the end of 2023, beginning of 2024, the tool is also being sold through our sister company, TELUS Digital as a solution that other companies can use.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:36):
So I imagine that must have involved quite a major training upskilling, blah blah blah.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (07:47):
Yes.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (07:48):
Was that enthusiastically taken on by the TELUS population?

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (07:55):
Absolutely. So the way that we tackle AI and gene AI is there's a top down and bottom up strategy. One of them is we believe the best ideas are all over the business, but you need to give everybody in the business tooling to be able to experiment, learn, explore.

(08:15):
We also have very strong AI literacy programs across the company and every couple of years actually all executives, we go to different universities. We were in 2023, we were at Stanford this year. We were at MIT. And then these professors, they come and have sessions with all the directors across the company, then the managers across the company. And the main reason that we do that is to ensure that we have an equal footing to understand what this technology can do, what platforms, tooling are available to you in the company to safely and securely do that. And we have seen tremendous great amount of good ideas. You get people motivated to learn who doesn't want to actually learn and experiment with gene ai? Everybody is dying and willing to do this. So when you give them the right literacy and you combine that with good tools and a good cultural environment that ments the experimentation, then you get to where we are. That is a very good material state on how we actually create ideas to life.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (09:16):
You must also have a model to be able to track what people are doing and share what people are doing. Of course.

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (09:23):
So part of the success is how you create champions all across the business that are actually taking this to the forefront. And you want to have communities of practice where you can take them and they can showcase what they are doing, what worked well, what didn't work well. And then you get a very nice virtual cycle that actually stimulates better and better outcomes, better ideas. So my main recommendation for anybody is just get started.

(09:56):
When you start, you create a momentum, you create these snowball effects that you get more literacy across the company, better ideas, more champions, and that deeply accelerates what you can transform with ai.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:08):
Yeah, I get the sense here from the companies that are here, many of them have started are getting their governance just right in that and setting the parameters and are now heading down that path as well. So it's going to be great to see what comes out. And then finally as well, this event still a very heavy focus on how AI can improve efficiencies, help network operators to save money, not quite so much on how they can make money. Can you talk about the business models or the financial outcomes from the use of AI at telus? Is it both sides of the fence?

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (10:46):
So lid is both sides. One of them. Of course there's streams of work on how can we run certain things more efficiently. But there's also a lot of focus on how we use these to actually create better outcomes for new products that we do or existing ones that we sell. For example, many of the solutions that we are working on is on the B2B side, how we can make the sales organization more efficient. Just think about somebody that is tending to the mid-market. You have maybe 50 or a hundred accounts that you need to manage and ensure that they are okay humanly. It's very hard to understand at any given moment exactly what the last conversation with any of the 50 or hundred were. What was their feedback? What is the right thing that you should talk next time? So we have traded solutions that allow sales team members to be able to use this and get information on if you're going to meet a client, what is the right thing you should talk about what is the last conversation that happened, what is the outcome?

(11:49):
And more than that, we've been able to also create ai, look at all the business account plans and have gene AI rate them all. So they can go and tell you feedback to say, well maybe you could actually improve this part or this part will be even greater if you did A, B or C. And the good news is this being embraced by the business organization. And to my point, you have champions. You have champions there that are saying, Hey, I'm using this every single day. The other thing that is really cool, some of these champions, they just want to showcase to their friends how they're using these tools. They create videos and they show these videos to their colleagues

(12:25):
So they can get a stimulated and actually work with them on how they can transform and get help from these tools in their day-to-day job.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:33):
Well, anything that helps salespeople to improve their bonus is always going to be embraced. Good for everybody. Yeah,

Jaime Tatis, TELUS (12:39):
Absolutely. Yes indeed.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:40):
Jaime, thanks very much for joining us today. Great to gather day and what TELUS is doing. Thank you very much.