Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady has outlined a five-year plan that would entrench the country’s largest telecoms company as an infrastructure business that will ride the boom in artificial intelligence and data centres.

The strategy, which will guide the company until the end of the decade, reverses former chief executive Andy Penn’s previous five-year plan that separated out Telstra’s infrastructure assets – which include fibre optical and subsea cables as well as data centres – ahead of a potential sale.