Telstra has been slashing its troublesome legacy IT data platforms from 50 to eventually five as it readies for the implementation of AI.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady brought up the issue during a panel discussion at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The prime reason she cited was AI, however Telstra’s problematic and fragmented legacy platforms have seen it wind up before the Australian Communications and Media Authority in cases where the left hand didn’t; know what the right hand was doing.

In 2022 it was reported that Telstra had incorrectly acted against 70 customers facing financial hardship arrangements by restricting or disconnecting services because customer status updates hadn’t flowed in time from one legacy system to another. This was seen as a breach of the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Code.

Some $11m of payments were delayed to more than 67,000 customers in another incident sheeted home to legacy issues.

At MWC, Ms Brady said Telstra had now drastically cut back on legacy systems. The main goal, however, was to be ready for AI implementation.

“As telcos a lot of us have legacy, infrastructure and legacy IT systems,” she told the conference.

“We’re on a pretty radical path to simplify and modernize our infrastructure. Just to give an example, in terms of data platforms. we’ve gone from 50 to 30. That’s okay. But we’ve got a goal by June next year to be at five.”

“(It’s) absolutely critical. It’s the heavy lifting that sits underneath actually opening up AI and that allowed us to pilot “Ask Telstra” within five weeks and then scale it. We’ve got 50 percent of our processes enabled by AI today across the company. Our goal is to be at 100 percent by June next year.”

She said Telstra had used AI to address a problem faced by its frontline team accessing more than 2000 knowledge articles. The company was using generative AI to get the relevant information to customers quickly.

It was also deploying AI in its networks. “(There are) tens of millions of data points every five minutes on the network. So how AI can help us deal with that. A human can’t possibly deal with that. So (we’re) absolutely tackling some of those things right in the core of the business.

“I don’t think we’ve connected the dots well, particularly for governments and regulators around how important the networks are that sit underneath and make it happen, and the value that that creates economically in terms of growth and productivity, but also in terms of society – the benefits delivered.

“I think we’ve got a job to be able to tell that story better.”

She also referred to Telstra’s collaboration with the Commonwealth Bank to help customers fight phone-based scams.