Telstra is expecting to shrink its workforce by 2030 with “AI efficiencies” potentially coming through customer service, software development and the use of autonomous AI agents, the company has told investors on Tuesday.
The telco’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, told the Telstra’s annual investor day on Tuesday that artificial intelligence “will be a significant unlock when it comes to enabling our workforce”.
“We will embrace AI, as every business will need to, and we expect the pace of change over the next five years to be extraordinary,” Brady said, flagging it would likely reduce the headcount of Australia’s largest telecommunications company.
“We can’t predict exactly what our business will look like in 2030, but we expect our workforce to be smaller than it is today,” she said.
Brady said Telstra had not yet launched agentic AI – a type of AI that acts autonomously and can perform tasks without human guidance. But she said they were working “on a number of things” and she expected Telstra to be talking about agentic AI working alongside Telstra staff in the coming months.
It was not expected, for now, for AI agents to be dealing directly with customers.
Brady said AI was going to play a big part in Telstra reinventing itself over the next five years. She said after a recent trip to the US, she came away thinking the pace and scale of change happening as a result of AI is “just phenomenal”.
“Twelve months ago, people weren’t really talking about [agentic] agents a whole lot. I think a year ago, people were probably in a conversation about models hallucinating and talking about that,” she said.
“Actually, 12 months on, that’s not really a conversation any more, because the models have become so much more sophisticated now the conversation is around agents.”
Telstra’s chief financial officer, Michael Ackland said the company was “leaning in hard” on artificial intelligence, with the opportunity greatest in customer engagement.
“We spend over $2bn per annum in operating costs across activities from sales to contact centres, activation, billing and customer management. And we think AI will revolutionise these activities,” he said.
Telstra has already deployed generative AI in its business, including in its customer service, using AI to summarise customer calls in a task that previously had to be done by staff manually.
Brady did not put a number on a future reduction expected by AI. As of December 2024, more than 31,000 full-time equivalent employees work for Telstra Group.
Ackland said the more than $1bn of capital expenditure and operating expenditure on software development and IT was another area AI “has the potential to fundamentally change how this is done”.
He also flagged having networks able to automatically fix itself or proactively identify network issues before they occur would also save on costs.
The Optus CEO Stephen Rue told Guardian Australia last week that AI would have a big role to play in telecommunications.
Analysts have warned about companies announcing job cuts as a result of the use of artificial intelligence. After the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike announced plans earlier this month to cut 5% of its workforce after identifying AI efficiencies, Aaron McEwan, vice-president of research and advisory at the consulting firm Gartner, said he was sceptical because companies were facing pressure to deliver on big investments made in AI.
“The productivity gains that we expect to see from AI just aren’t flowing through.”
Telstra’s comments came at the launch of its Connected Future 30 strategy, outlining the course of the business in the next five years, focused on cost discipline and efficiency across the company.
While Telstra may shrink its headcount, the plan stated Telstra aimed to “be in the top 25% of companies globally for employee engagement”, while also aiming to be in the top 25% of global enterprises in AI maturity by 2030.