$150m in annual revenue uplift.
Speed-to-market up 30%.
A single AI operating model took personalisation out of the experimental lab and into every channel — digital, retail and email — with the commercial evidence to prove it worked.
uplift
speed-to-market
under one mission
Mobile, Fixed, Loyalty
Client
Telstra. Australia’s largest telecommunications and technology company.
Goal
Transform consumer customer experience across every channel by building a single, industrial-scale AI engine capable of driving revenue growth, retention and better customer decisions at consumer scale.
AI that worked in the lab never made it to the shop floor.
Marketing and Product were chasing the same customers with volume-based tactics, producing inconsistent experiences, offer cannibalisation and low ROI. AI models stayed stuck in experimental phases, with no route to permanent production and no central ways of working to scale them.
Technical delivery was fragmented across the consumer business, and specialists worked in silos across Mobile, Fixed and Loyalty with nothing to unify them. Without translatable evidence of AI’s value, the C-suite had no basis to keep funding it.
Three constraints were non-negotiable:
- No path from AI pilot to permanent production
- Marketing and Product cannibalising each other’s offers
- No shared ways of working across Mobile, Fixed and Loyalty
One mission, one operating model, one source of truth.
We built the business case for a flagship ‘Lighthouse AI Mission’ and took it to the executive team — laying out the structural changes needed to run AI from data through to execution, the shifts required in data management, and the revenue upside from AI-driven personalisation. That case won leadership buy-in across every function.
Evidence beat opinion: reporting AI-driven revenue against champion-challenger benchmarks turned an experiment into a funded mission.
Under the mission, a cross-functional team of 20 data science specialists was brought under one operating model, with standardised practices for how AI models and features were built, validated and monitored — replacing fragmented, ad hoc delivery with something repeatable across Digital, Retail and Email.
To keep the C-suite bought in, we introduced live commercial reporting and bi-weekly updates comparing AI-driven revenue directly against champion-challenger benchmarks — hard evidence of incremental growth and cost savings, not projections.
From experimental to industrial.
The Lighthouse AI Mission turned AI from a scattered set of experiments into a repeatable, industrial capability — one that paid for itself immediately and gave Telstra a durable model for growth, retention and better customer decisions going forward.
* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.
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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.