Telstra pushes forward with agentic AI plans

Telstra is only weeks away from launching an agentic AI pilot to be led out of its customer sales and commerce engineering group as it continues to use the technology to chase cost out of its operation.

The commerce engineering group chief Marcella Wells revealed the timing for the production pilot, and some of the planning, preparation and partnerships that are getting it off the ground, at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Sydney.

“We've been exploring Agentforce for about nine months now and we're probably about six weeks away from actually piloting something in production, which is quite exciting,” Wells said.

Telstra is keeping the details of how it intends to use the AI involved in the pilot in its business close for now, but confirmed that it was working with Salesforce on its strategy.

“We're working with Salesforce on a number of different AI tools and solutions to support our teams. We'll have more to share soon,” a Telstra spokesperson said.

In May last year, Telstra cemented a joint venture with Accenture to establish an AI innovation hub in Silicon Valley to accelerate its strategy for the technology.

Wells said that, through the joint venture, Telstra had been working out how to prepare its current Agentforce capability to work with Salesforce Foundations.  

According to Salesforce’s online marketing materials, Foundations is a free add-on module for customers using sales and service editions of its cloud offering.

Foundations allows customers to switch on Salesforce’s Agentforce capabilities across the platform.

“We've got a joint venture with Accenture and they've got a hub in Mountain View in San Francisco and we've been working out how to interoperate our Agentforce capability with agentic Foundations that's coming.

“We've been able to sort of accelerate that understanding and get our target state architecture established so that we can start popping as soon as that comes online as well,” Wells said.

At its recent half-year results presentation, Telstra said it had identified 380 ways it could use AI, but its chief financial officer Michael Ackland warned that the carrier was closely examining the technology to ensure its cost justified its commercial return.

Reinforcing Ackland’s point and finding some resonance with Wells comments regarding achieving a “target state architecture”, the carrier’s most senior technology group executive Kim Krogh Andersen said that the carrier was working to get the foundation of its AI strategy right.

Otherwise, he said, the company risked forfeiting any efficiency gains it might offer.

“This has been very critical for software but it's [now] even more critical for AI. We believe that, if we don't get that foundation right, we will actually see the run cost of AI outperform the benefits of AI. We are very focused on that foundation, to get that in place,” Andersen said at the time.

For now, Telstra’s goals for its agentic AI pilot appear conservative with a firm view on compliance and governance considerations.

“Our early pilot is going to be about figuring out the operating model, working at how we observe these agents, run them securely, take them offline – all of those those non-functional processes around running Agentforce,” Wells said.

Telstra has given AI a central role in its Connected Future 30 strategy which has seen it provided 75 percent of staff with AI tools and train nearly 9000 of them on the technology.

However, at a time when AI is creating uncertainty about job security globally, the carrier has moved to cut back its workforce.

Around 650 roles facing elimination, with around 442 roles to go offshore to Infosys – the majority from its enterprise software divisions.

A further 209 roles face the axe from its joint venture with Accenture.