Unified data has had an immediate impact on customer experiences as TELUS builds proactive loyalty into their approach. They’ve adopted Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience to empower call center employees, who can now ask questions in real time using natural language processing applied to customer data.

“Before AI, our call center agents had to access disparate systems and stitch together data to create a view of the customer, while the customer waited,” says Lee. “Now, Gemini Enterprise analyzes millions of calls coming in so we can find and fix issues before the customer is aware.”

TELUS call centers already get fewer calls, saving tens of millions of dollars.

With unified customer and network data in BigQuery, and reasoning provided by Gemini Enterprise, TELUS is now working to build and scale self-healing networks, which will continue to reduce costs as well as improve the customer experience and overall satisfaction.

“AI has totally sped up the velocity for delivery,” Lee said. “This allows our data engineers to shift their focus from managing infrastructure to be able to drive innovation and business value.”

AI helped the team refactor data pipelines when source systems move from on-prem to cloud, as an example. And the solid data foundation opens up lots of possibilities for using agentic AI.

Another major milestone is the new ability to tap into unstructured data. Using BigQuery multimodal tables, TELUS blends structured network datasets with previously unused unstructured data, such as customer call recordings and support logs, to open up new operational insights.

Because BigQuery unifies and secures customer data, TELUS can now easily launch new services, so they can turn their networks into secure identity platforms.

“Our approach [to self-healing networks] is to leverage real-time data along with AI agents,” said Lee, “to fix wireline and wireless network issues, along with issues in our TV platform before customers are aware.”

Telus’s team first adopted Google AI tools when building its proprietary Fuel iX platform, designed to enable a long-term AI strategy that could evolve while maintaining data privacy, control, and customer trust.

Fuel iX allows TELUS’s more than 100,000 employees to select from more than 40+ leading AI models for any given task, from generating content and summarizing reports to helping engineers with complex coding and analyzing data. Every time a model gets updated or changed, it is instantly and securely available to all users.

Many team members access Fuel iX through intuitive chatbot interfaces within platforms they already use, such as Google Chat or Slack. Fuel iX powers TELUS's Customer Support Tool, which became the first gen AI tool in the world to be internationally certified in Privacy by Design. Fuel iX now powers thousands of use cases with 100 billion tokens a month and more than 13,000 custom projects built.

A key component to building Fuel iX was gaining access to hundreds of curated AI models through Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform’s Model Garden—including Google's Gemini models, third-party models like Anthropic's Claude, and many others. Now, 90% of AI model traffic runs through Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

"We initially thought generative AI would have the biggest impact on marketers and creatives,” said Justin Watts, distinguished engineer at TELUS, “but it's been instrumental in increasing productivity and reducing toil for our engineering, development, and coding teams as well.”

Engineering teams are now shipping code 30% faster with reduced bottlenecks such as development, planning, and resource allocation. This process creates a feedback loop where Fuel iX creates the code and developers, designers, and product managers refine it through conversation.

The Gemini Flash series model provides TELUS with fast experiences, and many users at TELUS take advantage of Gemini Deep Research for comprehensive reports on topics with citable sources. "By connecting it to Google Drive, email, and the internet, Gemini is uniquely positioned to complete complex research tasks," said Watts. "The load it takes off of our team members is tremendous."

With an Agentic Data Cloud in place along with a self-serve gen AI platform, the TELUS team can now build a true System of Action across all business units—with trusted data and empowered employees.