OpEx cut 20% across a global telco.
£200M added to EBITDA in five years.

A new revenue channel had no operating model to run on.

The IT managed services channel launched in July 2025 with nothing consolidated underneath it: no shared data foundation, no agreed operating model, and no plan for the hundreds of roles that would need to change as AI took on more of the work. CRM, billing, ITSM and proposal workflows each held inconsistent data with manual handoffs between them, threatening adoption before the channel had scaled.

Talent was a separate front. The business needed to attract and retain people without leaning on compensation, build a governance framework to de-risk critical data assets, and hold to zero tolerance for privacy breaches — all while redesigning who did what across the organisation.

Three constraints were non-negotiable:

• Data fragmented across CRM, billing and ITSM systems
• Hundreds of roles to redesign around AI, not just automate
• Zero tolerance for PII or privacy breaches

People, data and tooling redesigned together, not in sequence.

HR led the change itself, not IT. Every role was mapped into one of three buckets — augmented by AI, retired, or newly created — backed by a structured upskilling and mentoring programme, supported by the Ezra coaching platform, so people moved with the change rather than against it. Tooling was built and tested in retail and contact centres first, then rolled out enterprise-wide.

On the data side, the team migrated to GCP and implemented Collibra to democratise data assets under a single governance framework, lifting the data modelling team’s capacity by 40%. Qlik Sense sustainability reports tracked mobile product usage and energy consumption across major B2B and multinational accounts, and a data science model helped UK local councils plan recycling-centre footprints.

Seven tools went live where they’d move the needle fastest: a Microsoft Copilot for sales proposals, an in-house service-design agent that removed junior testing work, in-house HLD/LLD design, ConnectWise for managed detection and response, a web agent for pricing updates, an ElevenLabs contact-centre voice agent, and in-house process optimisation.

20% out of OpEx. £200M onto EBITDA.

The programme is on track for its internal target: roughly £200M in EBITDA improvement over five years and a 5% lift in overall revenue, with capital investment down 10% year-on-year through offshoring, automation and partnerships. None of it came at the expense of the workforce or compliance — pulse scores, diversity and internal promotions all rose, PII handling stayed at zero breaches, and the same AI-enabled approach also opened a smaller new line in network analytics monetisation worth £200k across UK local government.