- Telus built its own AI platform, Fuel iX, to boost employee productivity and generate new revenue
- The platform is used by over 50,000 employees for coding, legal research, sales support and network operations
- Telus is now commercializing Fuel iX and building sovereign AI infrastructure to support Canadian innovation
Telus is leveraging its in-house AI platform, Fuel iX, to improve productivity across the business, create new revenue streams, and support Canada’s sovereign AI ambitions.
Telus took a risk on generative AI — and it’s paying off. Rather than ban ChatGPT or ignore it, the company built its own AI platform, Fuel iX, now used by more than 50,000 employees and generating hundreds of millions in value.
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Telus realized it could simply do nothing and let employees make their own decisions about using it. Telus could ban ChatGPT, as many companies did. "Which is stupid, because people are just going to use personal accounts," Jaime Tatis, Telus senior vice president and chief AI officer, told Fierce in a 1:1 interview on the sidelines of FutureNet World in London last week.
Instead, Telus created its own platform to enable employees to access multiple large language models (LLMs) and experiment with them. That platform is called Fuel iX, and it now has 53,000-55,000 users, accessing 40 LLMs.
Telus' software developers use the platform to generate code faster, and the company's legal department uses it to research the implications of new regulations. The platform allows users to create their own copilots and create retrieval-augmented generation (RAGs) — custom information stores — to reference information stored in Google Drive or other sources.
Fuel iX generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Telus last year, and the company now sells that platform to other companies. "We created it in-house, and we were customer zero," Tatis said.
AI boosts productivity
Using Fuel IX, Telus enables network technicians' productivity. These technicians have to access multiple systems for scheduling and work. To streamline that process, Telus integrated AI to enable technicians to access systems using chat. Telus uses Google Chat, but any chat app, such as Slack, would work.
"The technician wakes up in the morning, and they can just chat. It will say the jobs they have scheduled to do that day. When they get to the job site, they can open a ticket, update it from Google, and access instructions for completing the job, with diagrams," Tatis said.
Network technicians can work more efficiently by avoiding toggling between multiple systems. "The amount of hours that get lost going from system A to B to C is wasted time," Talis said.
The AI chat saves technicians 90 minutes of administration per week, which they can devote to more productive work, Tatis said.
On the B2B sales side, each user has about a hundred clients to care for. An AI system can provide background on a customer: How long they've been using Telus services, the last contact time and subject of the discussion, and recommended points to discuss with the customer. The AI assistant works with users for the length of the sales funnel, from first interest to signed contract. "We see the number of potential good leads dramatically increase," Talis said.
Building sovereign compute
Additionally, Telus is building a sovereign AI compute solution in Canada, hoping to have it online by the end of the summer. Sovereign AI will provide Canadian businesses, government and researchers with AI infrastructure for innovation.
"In Canada, we badly need sovereign compute access," Tatis said.
Canadian workers lag their American counterparts in productivity, and the country faces challenges keeping its top talent and attracting new talent. Sovereign AI infrastructure will help Canada achieve those goals.
Telus is building multiple data centers, with two main data centers in remote locations: one in Rimouski, a city in Quebec with a population of about 50,000 about a seven—or eight-hour drive north of Montreal, and the other in Kamloops, in south-central British Columbia, population about 98,000, five hours from Vancouver.
As noted in a recent report by Fierce Network Research, Telus is among telcos worldwide that are looking to sovereign AI to diversify business and generate new revenue streams. Download the free report: AI sovereignty: Seizing the opportunity for transformative telco infrastructure investment.
Telus is riding a wave of telcos leveraging AI for business value. About half of C-level executives at telcos surveyed "currently capturing impact from AI/GenAI,", compared with 25% in a year-ago survey, according to a February McKinsey report. They're using AI to reduce costs and generate growth and customer experience improvements.
One example from the FutureNet World conference: 3 Hong Kong, operated by Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong, uses AI to troubleshoot customer experience problems caused by factors outside the telcos own network, such as laggy YouTube videos or music streams.
Telcos were also featured at the recent Nvidia GTC developer conference, which highlighted AI RAN, agentic AI for telco networks and AI factories.