Key takeaways
- TELUS moved beyond top-down mandates by empowering team members to drive innovation through Fuel iX™, an enterprise GenAI platform that provides a safe way to address day-to-day business challenges without coding skills.
- By prioritizing high-utility use cases, TELUS converted abstract AI potential into specific tools for teams across the organization, from developers and marketers to lawyers and HR professionals.
- TELUS Digital activated the internal operations of TELUS as a massive incubator to develop proven, productized solutions for global clients looking to transform AI into measurable business value.
- A rigorous "Purple Teaming" methodology and advanced governance protocols ensured that rapid AI deployment never compromised security, data privacy or ethical brand safety.
TELUS, a world-leading communications technology company operating across 45 countries, has been a leading example of successful enterprise AI adoption. Today, TELUS has nearly 50 enterprise-grade AI tools in active use, over 53,000 custom AI copilots created organically by team members and hundreds of new initiatives underway — thanks to early action and collaboration with TELUS Digital, an AI-fueled digital customer experience transformation partner.
TELUS Digital played a critical role in supporting the ambitious AI vision of TELUS to get real, practical value out of artificial intelligence across the enterprise. This massive internal deployment of over 66,000 team members regularly using AI became TELUS Digital's rigorous factory model for building AI solutions. Every tool, every framework, every governance process has now been battle-tested at scale within the large and diverse operations of TELUS and then developed into proven, productized solutions for global clients looking to transform AI from experimental technology to measurable business value.
- 53,000custom Fuel iX copilots created by team members to date
- 66,000+TELUS team members empowered by AI to drive innovation without needing to code
- 3.8 hoursaverage time saved per week for TELUS team members using AI tools
- $600M+in financial benefits through AI and advanced analytics since 2023
The challenge: Democratizing AI access across a global enterprise
TELUS has been pioneering AI and machine learning since 2008, but a significant acceleration occurred with the public release of ChatGPT. While most organizations were still contemplating their AI strategies and debating how to protect their business from risks, leadership made an immediate, strategic decision: Embrace AI at enterprise scale, democratize access across the entire workforce and do it responsibly from day one.
TELUS turned to TELUS Digital to help make this vision a reality. Instead of focusing solely on large, top-down use cases, TELUS Digital helped lower the barrier to entry, empowering all team members — from developers and marketers to lawyers and HR professionals — to experiment safely and securely. This approach unleashed organic innovation across the organization, with team members discovering creative applications of AI to solve their unique business challenges, unlocking efficiencies that saved hundreds of thousands of hours and accelerating productivity across every department.
This balance of top-down vision with grassroots innovation addressed critical business pain points, including:
- Resource-intensive training for contact center agents
- Costly translation services
- Missed customer support opportunities
- Time-consuming IT support
- Retail store inefficiencies
- Fraud risk requiring sophisticated detection
The TELUS Digital approach: Activating strategy, building solutions and streamlining deployment
Bridging the gap between conceptual pilot and global production required a specialized approach focused on strategic alignment, custom engineering and resolving deployment friction.
AI strategy and governance
TELUS Digital participated in establishing TELUS’ AI Governance Board — among the first in Canada — just months after the release of ChatGPT, ensuring a unified strategy and responsible adoption at scale. This governance framework became the bedrock that enabled rapid innovation while proactively managing risk through robust security, data privacy and ethical guardrails.
Today, the governance board:
- Partners with business teams to develop value-driven solutions
- Transforms emerging technology into measurable business outcomes
- Looks beyond individual tasks to optimize entire business processes
- Ensures ethical adherence to principles of trustworthy, responsible AI
Building a platform for AI solution generation
Since there was no single AI solution for complex enterprise use, TELUS Digital designed a sophisticated enterprise GenAI platform that acts as a secure “walled garden,” providing TELUS team members with a safe way to develop innovative AI solutions to address day-to-day business challenges.
The resulting platform, Fuel iX, now available for enterprises of any size, is uniquely built to work with an array of LLMs, avoiding vendor lock-in to any single provider. It also connects with internal tools and applications, simplifying complex data management and retrieval processes. This allows widespread internal AI experimentation without compromising customer or company data privacy, security and ethical controls. Fuel iX continues to serve as the strategic incubator and operational backbone for the diverse suite of AI tools now embedded across TELUS.
Accelerating adoption through change management
Building on TELUS’ long-standing data literacy program, TELUS Digital helped ensure comprehensive training and enablement programs were in place. Team members were upskilled to maximize the AI benefits of new solutions and encouraged to champion these customizable tools with their colleagues.
This iterative approach, supported by dedicated change management teams, continues to ensure refinement and seamless integration of AI solutions across the organization.
Securing trust through rigorous testing
As the AI transformation of TELUS gained momentum, the company was ready to deploy customer-facing solutions. TELUS Digital had leveraged cross-functional teams to move from ideas to in-market pilots in weeks rather than months, but deploying to customers required absolute confidence and trust in AI reliability and security. To operationalize this trust, TELUS Digital implemented rigorous “Purple Teaming” — a sophisticated methodology combining red-teaming (adversarial testing to identify vulnerabilities) with blue-teaming (defensive simulation to harden systems and improve incident response) to proactively create security solutions to address potential security gaps.
Transformative impact at enterprise scale
Through TELUS Digital’s end-to-end solutions and Fuel iX, TELUS has been able to conceptualize, develop and deploy cutting-edge AI tools that revolutionize processes from customer service to network optimization.
Key AI solutions have resolved long-standing pain points, such as:
Enhanced contact center agent training
- Reducing the 16 weeks needed to train contact center agents on TELUS’ diverse products and services
- Analyzing 100% of customer interactions automatically to provide real-time quality scoring and coaching recommendations while ensuring regulatory compliance
Improved CX delivery
- Reducing average handle time (AHT) and increasing first call resolution (FCR) in customer interactions
- Providing customer support through 24/7 asynchronous messaging for seamless transitions from self-serve to agent assistance whenever convenient
- Organizing and updating product information for team members at 300+ retail store locations to quickly resolve customer issues
- Scoring high-likelihood repeat callers and guiding them to the best self-serve flow to reduce customer and agent effort
Fraud prediction and risk mitigation
- Proactively predicting the likelihood of fraud across web, retail and contact centers by analyzing customer data to mitigate potential financial losses from malicious activities
Operational efficiencies
- Providing on-brand translation services for TELUS communications
- Enhancing IT support by providing fast, self-serve assistance and intelligently routing inquiries through regional LLM networks to live agent support
- Providing telecom field technicians with easy access to curated information to generate and modify maintenance work orders
The TELUS Digital advantage: Creating a path to AI-driven business value
Enterprise AI success doesn't come from a single magic-bullet solution, but from the cumulative impact of many targeted innovations. This philosophy is at the core of TELUS Digital’s commitment to responsible AI transformation, evidenced by the massive scale of TELUS’ internal adoption. Built on Fuel iX and integrated with platforms like Google, AWS Connect and other AI platforms, the resulting purpose-built AI copilots have transformed complex operational challenges into measurable competitive advantages for TELUS.
Ready to leverage these capabilities and scalable solutions to build your AI success story? Connect with our AI Transformation experts to discover how TELUS Digital can help your organization achieve measurable AI-driven results.
TELUS was an early AI adopter with a bold vision: Democratize AI across the entire organization regardless of technical skills ... Fuel iX and TELUS Digital Al services now enable our customers to benefit from those hard-won experiences and scalable solutions that we employ ourselves every day.
