AI Powered Enterprise Reinvention

Available on-demand

How does a major enterprise move AI from isolated projects to the core of its business strategy? Arnab Chakraborty, Co-CEO of the Telstra-Accenture Data & AI Joint Venture and Chief Responsible AI Officer at Accenture, and Dayle Stevens, Co-CEO of the Telstra-Accenture Data & AI Joint Venture and Executive for Data & AI at Telstra, detail their landmark joint venture to accelerate Telstra’s AI reinvention. Discover their strategic roadmap for fusing technology, talent, and business value.

The world is in a transformative era, with AI revolutionizing industries, reshaping innovation, and unlocking opportunities once thought impossible. Its vast potential inspires optimism for a future where technology drives progress across industries, governments, NGOs, and society as a whole. However, with this promise comes significant responsibility. Concerns over bias, inequitable access, safety vulnerabilities, and ethical uncertainties highlight the urgent need for a guiding framework. RISE (Responsible, Inclusive, Safe and Ethical) AI fulfills this role, ensuring that AI technologies are developed and applied responsibly, inclusively, and ethically.

The RISE AI Conference provides a unique platform to explore how artificial intelligence can be harnessed to tackle complex societal and contemporary challenges while upholding the principles of RISE. The inaugural RISE AI Conference took place from October 6-8, 2025 at the University of Notre Dame, and was hosted by the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society.

For more information, please visit the RISE AI Conference website.

In a global conversation dominated by the promise of Artificial Intelligence—an economic opportunity estimated at over $10 trillion—the practical reality remains a significant challenge. As Arnab Chakraborty, Co-CEO of the Telstra-Accenture Data & AI Joint Venture and Chief Responsible AI Officer at Accenture, highlighted, only 8% of organizations successfully scale AI to become a core part of their business strategy.

Telstra’s Strategic Pivot

For Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications company, the journey required a fundamental mindset shift. Dayle recounted a pivotal moment in September 2023 when she addressed Telstra’s top 200 enterprise leaders. To break down organizational silos and move AI from a technology concern to a business imperative, she issued a direct challenge: “AI is going to replace roles and the roles it’s going to replace are the enterprise leaders who aren’t thinking about how AI is going to come into their business and that’s all of you.”

This wake-up call was paired with an actionable directive: leadership must learn by doing. Encouraging them to “play with it yourself,” she fostered a culture of hands-on experimentation, turning a theoretical threat into a practical opportunity. This moment catalyzed the strategic reframing articulated in her central argument: “There is no data and AI strategy, it is a company business strategy.”

The Role of the Telstra-Accenture Partnership

Realizing its internal five-year roadmap was too slow in the rapidly evolving world of AI, Telstra made a calculated decision to trade direct control for exponential speed. The company forged a joint venture with Accenture to compress its foundational roadmap into just two years. This partnership was designed to solve two critical challenges: first, to inject essential global talent that is difficult to attract to a geographically remote Australia, and second, to import advanced, cross-vendor collaboration models more common in the US, breaking down traditional one-on-one vendor relationships.

The Pillars of Transformation

The joint venture’s strategy is built on a logical sequence of interdependent pillars that form a blueprint for enterprise AI reinvention.

• Modernizing Foundations: The effort began by addressing foundational data debt. Recognizing that “you cannot build any of this on sand,” Telstra is radically simplifying its data estate from over 80 fragmented data platforms down to 30, with a clear path to 15 and an eventual goal of just three. This establishes a trusted, unified foundation prerequisite for scaled ambition.

• Reimagining Value: To fund this ambition, the team moved beyond traditional, calculation-based business cases, which are ill-suited for transformative AI. Instead, they adopted a model of making bold, “conviction-based bets.” The decision to invest in Microsoft Copilot, expanding from an initial 21,000 licenses to 28,000 before a clear ROI could be banked, exemplifies this forward-looking investment mindset.

• Building Scalable Capabilities: With a modern foundation in place, Telstra can build powerful, reusable AI solutions that solve tangible business problems. For instance, “AskTelstra” was created to address the number one pain point identified in employee engagement surveys: access to knowledge. This generative AI tool now serves 8,000 frontline agents, saving a minute on each of the millions of customer calls they handle. Similarly, an “AI for BI” dashboard addresses the 90 minutes store managers spent daily sifting through over 40 dashboards, reducing the task to under 10 minutes.

• The “Minds not Machines” Imperative: The strategy’s success ultimately hinges on its people. The value of AI is only unlocked through human adoption. By focusing on solving the biggest pain points for employees, Telstra ensures its tools are embraced. This is supported by a robust data and AI academy that provides persona-based learning pathways, empowering the entire workforce to adapt and thrive.

The keynote’s core message is that successful AI reinvention is a holistic endeavor. It requires the fusion of a bold, business-led strategy, modern and simplified technical foundations, and a deep, empathetic focus on empowering people through the change.

• AI Must Be a Core Business Strategy Successful transformation demands treating AI not as an isolated technology project, but as the central engine of the entire business strategy. This requires full executive alignment and sponsorship to break down traditional organizational silos and ensure AI serves the company’s primary goals.

• The “Minds, Not Machines” Imperative The ultimate value of any technology is only realized through human adoption. Success hinges on focusing AI tools on solving employees’ biggest pain points to drive organic adoption. This people-centric approach must be paired with investment in accessible, role-based training to empower the workforce and cultivate a culture of continuous learning.

• Strategic Partnerships as an Accelerator In the fast-paced world of AI, purely internal efforts are often too slow to keep pace with technological change. The Telstra-Accenture joint venture serves as a powerful model for how strategic partnerships can condense multi-year roadmaps, import essential global expertise, and foster new, more effective ways of working.

• Data Modernization is Non-Negotiable Transformative AI cannot be built on a fragmented or unreliable legacy data foundation. Radically simplifying the data landscape—reducing complexity and creating governed, trusted data products—is the critical, foundational prerequisite for scaling AI effectively, responsibly, and with the confidence of the business.

• Shift from ROI Calculation to Strategic Conviction Leadership must adopt a new investment mindset for transformative AI. Instead of relying solely on traditional, predictable business cases, organizations must be willing to make “conviction-based bets” on technologies with high potential. The focus then shifts from pre-calculating value to actively working to capture that value post-investment.