Telstra CEO Vicki Brady: Invest now to be ready for the AI era

Vicki Brady says policy and regulation need to support long-term investment in infrastructure so Australia can realise the benefits of a digital future.

Telstra chief executive Vicky Brady. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers/The Australian

CEO SURVEY 2025: FULL COVERAGE

Economy

How would you rate the momentum of the Australian economy as we head into 2025? Official forecasts have Australia trimming interest rates from the first half of calendar 2025, is that consistent with your view? What are you seeing around inflation in your own business?

There’s a lot going for the Australian economy but it’s also facing its challenges. Inflation has

proven to be stickier than most predicted and means we will continue to be focussed on cost discipline as we head into 2025.

Cost-of-living pressures and housing affordability are big issues right now. We’ve taken steps recently to do more to support customers in vulnerable circumstances and we continue to look at affordability and accessibility. Because we know just how critical it is to be connected – not only for consumers’ day to day lives but to realise positive outcomes for Australians in education, skills and health.

Outlook

What excites you heading into 2025? Are you likely to increase, hold steady, or trim your investment spend?

I’m really excited about the new era of AI we are entering, and the digital infrastructure that will enable Australia to reap the benefits. The potential for digitisation and AI to lift national productivity and grow the Australian economy is huge.

We will continue to invest in our network and connectivity infrastructure to meet the growing demand from our customers. We are still seeing 20 per cent year-on-year growth in traffic over our mobile network and reliable and secure connectivity has never been more important for households and businesses alike.

AI will only add to this demand. We expect to see Australian data centre capacity to grow at a CAGR rate of 18 per cent to 2032, driven by demand from AI and customers moving their processing and storage requirements into the cloud. Australia is now the seventh largest global market for data centre investment, with more than $13.6bn worth of new constructions. We see potential for Australia to become a data centre hub for APAC, in line with increased emphasis on data sovereignty and subsea cable investment driving data processing and storage to Australia.

People don’t live next to data centres, so all that data needs to be transported. Data centres aren’t islands – they need to be connected by the most reliable, secure, lowest latency links possible. That translates to massive demand for digital infrastructure assets, which is why we’re building our intercity fibre network. Our intercity fibre network will be an important part of future-proofing Australia’s speed and capacity needs for the next 20 years. But timing is critical – we need to make these long-term investments now, so Australia is prepared to

realise the benefits of a digital future.

Reform

As we move into an election year, in your mind, what’s the single biggest lever that can/should be used to lift Australia’s competitiveness or productivity? This could be across any area from labour market, tax reform, training or other areas to encourage investment.

I think there’s two things, and they are linked: 1) policy and regulatory settings that support

investment, and 2) driving some of that investment towards digital infrastructure to prime us

for the AI era.

The potential of the digital economy, and the opportunity that holds for Australia, is immense.

Policies that support innovation and digital transformation will be critical to ensure Australia maintains its competitiveness in the global market and grows its economy.

To unlock this growth, it’s critical that our regulatory and policy settings evolve so that they

continue to promote competition and protect consumers, while also encouraging investment and innovation in the underlying connectivity and digital infrastructure Australia will need for the next few decades.

Geopolitics

Will a Donald Trump presidency have a potential impact on your business or sector (tariffs or streamlined regulation)? Does geopolitics drive a bigger part of your decision-making?

If Trump puts forward a more pro-business policy platform as is expected, that’s going to up the pressure on Australia to make our country an easier place to do business or risk impacts

on much needed investment.

More broadly, over the last few years we have seen geopolitics start to spill into cyberspace.

Cyber capabilities have become a means for countries, even those who would not ordinarily

be considered strategic powers, to exert impacts against other countries at low cost. We’ve

also seen in recent years the use of cyber warfare alongside traditional warfare, which is a

concerning trend we are very much alive to.

As a company that operates in over 30 countries, we’ve seen a deterioration in the regional

online security environment as we grapple not only with criminal actors, but nation states seeking to further their political and economic agendas. Our 24/7 Security Operations Centres are purpose-built to provide the visibility, intelligence and tools to manage risk in an evolving threat environment, and cyber security is absolutely integral to everything we do.

To meet the challenge of helping keep Australians safe requires tight engagement and collaboration between government and the private sector. That’s why we’re continuing to accelerate our international relationships with peers and organisations across the globe, leading to more intelligence sharing and actionable insights to help tackle an evolving threat landscape.

People

Has your organisation’s approach to flexible working – including working from home – evolved during the year. Is this likely to change further into 2025?

We’ve been a proud advocate of hybrid working for more than a decade and encourage our people to have a balanced approach to work and personal time. Our people have told us they really value the opportunity to have flexibility and choice in the way they work to fit with their life’s needs, and ‘work life balance’ is regularly one of the highest-ranking areas in our employee experience surveys. It’s also a major part of our employee value proposition and something our increasingly Gen Z workforce really value. In the race for skills and talent it

will continue to be a real differentiator for us.

Technology

Where is your organisation along the AI journey – is it in the developmental stage, or are you now using the technology at scale across your business? If so, are benefits matching the promise?

We’re at the forefront of AI adoption in Australia, working with global leaders to innovate and bring the best technology to our people and our customers. It hasn’t happened overnight –

we’ve been on a journey of transformation and simplification for several years, modernising

systems and moving them to the cloud.

We’re using AI across many parts of the business, including to help our teams serve customers faster. We’ve rolled out our in-house built AI tools AskTelstra and One Sentence

Summary to help our teams respond to customers more efficiently and effectively. AskTelstra

replaces more than 2,000 knowledge management articles to give our people a single, clear

and consistent answer for customers, instead of scrolling through a list of search results.

One Sentence Summary gives our frontline people just that, meaning customers don’t have

to repeat information when they call us and our people don’t have to read through pages of

case notes.

We’re also building tools to help us pre-empt issues and better design and deliver services for customers. For example, we use AI to analyse more than 1 billion data points across our mobile network every day to find issues and resolve them before there is customer impact.

We’re working towards an autonomous, self-healing network to improve resilience, experience, and drive efficiencies. This is the scale we need to be thinking at to realise the massive productivity potential of AI.

Underpinning these tools is our people. To realise the promise of AI you also need to upskill

your workforce to ensure they can take full advantage of the tools. This is why we’ve set up

our Data & AI Academy and invested in 21,000 Microsoft CoPilot licences for our people – the biggest deployment in Australia.