Telstra is expanding two in-house developed generative AI solutions following promising pilots with frontline team members.
The applications, One Sentence Summary and Ask Telstra, leverage Microsoft Cloud and its Azure OpenAI.
- One Sentence Summary ,condenses recent customer notes, interactions, and transactions into a brief overview of a customer’s current situation. This reduces the need for customers to reiterate their information. During trials in 2023, it was found that 90% of employees who used the tool experienced time savings and enhanced productivity, with a 20% reduction in the need for follow-up contact. The tool also facilitated employees’ ability to comprehend and handle complex or delicate issues, such as prioritizing or providing financial assistance to customers. Telstra plans to expand the availability of One Sentence Summary to all its contact center and store teams throughout 2024.
- Ask Telstra is another GenAI app deployed by Telstra to allow employees swift and easy access to the company’s vast internal knowledge bases. Leveraging Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search, Ask Telstra delivers AI-generated answers to employee inquiries through a straightforward search interface, ensuring responses are based on Telstra’s reliable and secure corporate information. This tool streamlines the process of finding information within the company, making it quicker and more efficient for employees to get the answers they need.
Kim Krogh Andersen, Telstra’s Group Executive Product & Technology, states “We’re at a profound juncture in a new era of transformation, and it’s one that we’re navigating in lockstep with our partners. Our deep, strategic relationship with Microsoft is positioning us well to unlock value and growth as technologies like generative AI proliferate at speed. We’ve been on a journey of simplification and modernisation over a number of years. We’ve simplified our technology architecture and shifted to a 100% API-first approach to product development. We’re also migrating workloads to the public cloud and building reusable AI capabilities. Our collaboration with Accenture is now helping to accelerate the work we have ahead. It’s a massive undertaking, but it has put us in a position to now rapidly scale bespoke generative AI tools, like Ask Telstra and One Sentence Summary, that can really shift the dial when it comes to helping our teams provide quicker, more effective, and more personalised customer interactions.”