Democratized advanced analytics across consumer value streams
Replaced legacy stack with flexible Google Cloud architecture
Enabled "personal analyst" capabilities for non-technical users using AI
Grounding AI responses in trusted LookML business logic
Reduced time-to-insight by shifting from centralized requests to self-service
Telenor Norway transitioned from a centralized, legacy BI model to a self-service culture using Looker and Conversational Analytics. By leveraging Looker’s semantic layer to ground AI, they empower employees with a "personal analyst" to instantly query data and drive targeted actions.
Telenor Norway transitioned from a centralized, legacy BI model to a self-service culture using Looker and Conversational Analytics. By leveraging Looker’s semantic layer to ground AI, they empower employees with a "personal analyst" to instantly query data and drive targeted actions.
The challenge: Breaking down silos in a legacy stack
Telenor Norway, a leading telecommunications provider, faced a critical juncture in its data strategy. For years, the organization operated on a legacy software stack that, while functional, was becoming increasingly inefficient and expensive to maintain. The data management process was labor-intensive, often requiring time-consuming copying of data between disparate systems. This friction created significant data silos, slowing down decision-making and hindering the agility required in the fast-paced telecommunications market. The urgency for change was further compounded by the impending expiration of a costly licensing deal, which prompted the company to reevaluate its entire analytical infrastructure.
Beyond the infrastructure costs and technical debt, the operational model itself was creating bottlenecks. The organization relied heavily on a centralized analytics unit to generate insights for the entire consumer division. This meant that business users across various value streams, such as mobile, Internet, entertainment, and hardware, could not access insights on demand. Instead, they had to file formal requests and wait for technical experts to build specific dashboards. Åge Ingierd, Head of Analytics in Consumer Strategy, recognized that this dependency was unsustainable. He saw that for Telenor to thrive, they needed to move away from this request-based culture.
Ingierd envisioned a distributed architecture where value streams could own their data products and generate insights independently. To achieve this, Telenor Norway aligned with a broader corporate decision across the Nordics to adopt Google Cloud as their analytical platform.
Our objective isn’t to maintain a centralized hub where individuals request help with building dashboards, as that responsibility should be distributed throughout the organization. My team focuses on developing the underlying infrastructure, ensuring that insights can be easily accessed and utilized across the entire business.
Åge Ingierd
Head of Analytics, Consumer Strategy, Telenor Norway
The goal was to fundamentally change the culture of data consumption, moving from static reporting to dynamic, self-service exploration. They needed a solution that could bridge the gap between complex data governance and user-friendly accessibility, ultimately leading them to choose Looker as their business intelligence platform.
The "personal analyst" revolution
Telenor Norway’s adoption of Looker represents a significant leap toward AI-driven self-service. The core of their strategy is to democratize data through Conversational Analytics, effectively providing every employee with a "personal analyst" at their desk. This shift allows non-technical users to bypass complex SQL queries and simply ask natural language questions to get the answers they need. Rather than relying on technical specialists to build new reports for every query, business users can now engage in a dialogue with their data, dramatically reducing time to insight.
With Conversational Analytics, everybody has their personal analyst sitting at the desk. You can ask whatever you want and dig in beyond a dashboard.
Åge Ingierd
Head of Analytics, Consumer Strategy, Telenor Norway
The success of this initiative relies heavily on Looker’s semantic modeling layer, powered by LookML. Åge Ingierd emphasizes that LookML is crucial for "grounding" the AI. By rigorously defining business rules, KPIs, and data relationships in LookML, Telenor ensures that AI answers are accurate and governed, not given to hallucinations. This creates a single source of truth that enables the AI capabilities to function reliably in a production environment. Ingierd notes that without this semantic layer, users cannot trust the numbers; but with LookML, the AI understands exactly what a specific metric means, ensuring consistency across the organization.
In practice, this enables a seamless, interactive workflow. Telenor encourages a "drill-down" approach where an employee starts with a high-level dashboard showing broad metrics—for example, the total Norwegian population of 5.6 million. Using the Conversational Analytics agent, they can then go deeper into this data by asking specific questions, such as filtering for broadband customers or specific demographics. This allows them to narrow a massive dataset down to a precise audience—for example, identifying 42 specific individuals for a campaign, without needing technical intervention to write new code.
To drive adoption, Telenor moved past initial pilots with technical users and launched a "show and learn" session for the entire organization, presenting Conversational Analytics as the future of insight gathering. Hundreds of employees across the Consumer division are now utilizing these Looker dashboards, with early adopters using conversational features daily. As the data on Google Cloud is anonymized, Telenor has been able to deploy this capability directly into production environments, allowing real-time business use without the risk of exposing sensitive personal customer data.
Looking ahead, the solution allows Telenor to close the loop between insight and action. The team is exploring workflows where audiences identified in Looker—like the example 42 individuals found in the conversational workflow, are pushed directly to management tools like Hightouch to trigger SMS or email campaigns. By combining the strict governance of LookML with the accessibility of Gen AI, Telenor Norway is successfully transforming its workforce into smart analysts, driving faster, data-backed decisions.
Telenor Norway is the country’s leading telecommunications operator, providing mobile, broadband, and TV services. It is part of the Telenor Group, a major international connectivity provider.
Industry: Technology
Location: Norway
Products: Google Cloud, Looker, BigQuery, Vertex AI
