Key points
- Telstra has deployed a new large-scale, real-time AI cost and governance monitoring tool called an “AI control plane” to keep a firmer hand on deployments.
- Head of corporate software engineering Chris Ellis said the challenge is no longer managing individual deployments but governing an enterprise-wide AI ecosystem, requiring a more disciplined approach.
- Chief financial officer Michael Ackland has flagged the risk of AI costs, including software licencing and cloud spend, eating into productivity benefits across the telco’s 380 identified AI use cases.
Telstra has deployed a new large-scale, real-time AI cost and governance monitoring tool with senior leadership mandating a more “disciplined” approach to using the technology.
Head of corporate software engineering Chris Ellis told iTnews that the tool, an “AI control plane”, would help it keep a firmer hand on deployments as the telco pushes ahead with its plan to be an AI-first enterprise.
The AI control plane was first revealed at the telco’s annual results briefing earlier this month.
“As AI scales across the organisation, observability becomes increasingly important. Telstra has long-established responsible AI, security and governance disciplines, and we’re now enhancing those capabilities through our AI control plane, which will provide real-time visibility of AI performance, risk and cost at scale,” Ellis said.
“The challenge is no longer managing individual deployments, but governing an increasingly enterprise-wide AI ecosystem.”
Telstra declined to reveal any further detail about the technical underpinnings of its new AI monitoring apparatus.
Ellis’ comments aligned with those he made at an SAP customer event in Sydney earlier this month regarding Telstra’s shifting approach to AI. However, at the event he described the challenge in more concrete terms.
“We can no longer you know put AI out in the wild and let the organisation experiment with it and I think we need to be far more disciplined.
“And for me … I think almost productising the outcomes that we want to enable through AI and making sure that we’re prescriptive, directive and clear, rather than enabling or either enabling a process or enabling a team and letting them discover their own next adventure, because I think that’s just nothing but missed opportunity,” he said.
Telstra has previously aired concerns about the difficulty of weighing the cost of its AI investments against their savings and productivity benefits.
At its half-year result presentation in February, chief financial officer Michael Ackland said that the telco’s investments in the technology would be under scrutiny to ensure that the former didn’t start to eat into the latter.
At the time, Telstra was reporting that it had identified 380 use cases for AI across its business.
The technology is playing a central role in its Connected Future 30 Plan, which involves deep workforce re-engineering.
Ackland told investors and analysts that the telco was taking steps to control its cost, including streamlining its cloud consumption and avoiding vendor lock-in with any one AI Large Language Model [LLM] provider.
“The one point I would make, and I think it’s really core to our technology strategy and how we’re going about it … is there is a risk here that you end up in software licencing, cloud cost and in paying the AI providers so that you offset your benefits. That is very much our focus,” Ackland said.
Ellis said that while cost was one of the drivers behind the carrier’s more disciplined approach to AI, he said it was also about ensuring that the technology became part of how the business operates “not just another tool within existing processes”.
“Across Telstra, this transformation is already under way through some of our largest enterprise priorities, where AI is helping redesign end-to-end processes, decision-making and ways of working.
“The focus is on changing how the organisation operates, not simply automating individual tasks,” he said.
At the SAP event, Ellis said that Telstra had established the foundation elements for its AI transformation through its work with the enterprise software provider and Infosys and was “sitting there waiting to realise the true value of the investment”.
However, he remained clear-eyed about the program of work that the carrier’s was facing to deliver on its AI strategy.
“[The] vision would be to completely reimagine the future of work for our people at Telstra. That is the sort of the scale of the change … the scale of the opportunity and impact. And when I say that I don’t say that lightly,” he said.
“We’re distracted by the AI when, in actual fact, these are deep transformational exercises that we have to undertake … we almost throw the process rulebook out and start from scratch.
“As much as it’s exciting, it is daunting and it even forces you to rethink what capabilities do the business units need – or the functional units need – to support this exercise, not just the technologists and how we turn up and engage.
“I think it’s an exciting frontier [with] absolutely nothing but upside, but seriously challenging in terms of how we think about the work that’s coming at us,” he added.
