We are currently living and working in an era of generational technological change brought about by rapid advances in AI. While there has been significant hype, it is undeniable that AI can provide significant benefits to the businesses which embrace it – whether that’s enhancing creativity, improving operational efficiency, or solving problems that previously seemed impossible.

Becoming an AI telco

At One New Zealand, we want to harness the incredible benefits of AI for our customers, and for our own people. That’s why we have an aspiration to become the world’s most AI enabled telco.

We have spent the last couple of years laying the groundwork that will allow us to transform our business to operate in this new world. This includes having robust data privacy, security and ethics at the core.

As a telco, we’re experts in connectivity, not experts at building large language models, so we’re instead working closely with best-in-class partners to deliver joint solutions where it makes sense.

Introducing Microsoft Copilot for all our office-based staff

Even in an AI world, people are at the heart of how we work. That’s why today we’ve rolled out our first AI tool, Microsoft Copilot, across our office-based workforce, to help our people boost their productivity and to take away repetitive, time-consuming work.

During the Copilot trial last year, we saw employees on average achieve a 39-minute time saving per day by using the tool while doing their everyday work. When you scale this across the business, this gifts a lot of time back to higher value and often more rewarding work.

Elevating our workforce

While Copilot is conversational and intuitive to pick up, we recognise that there can be some apprehension in adopting AI tools at first. To help empower our people to make the most of this new technology, we are investing in upskilling and training.

We’re excited to launch ‘AI Elevate’, a company-wide event designed to give our people hands-on experience with Copilot and other agentic AI tools we’re rolling out across One NZ.

Through interactive sessions, our teams will earn badges to showcase their AI readiness, marking a key milestone in their AI journey. Those who complete this stage can then take the next step by joining “AI School”, where they’ll dive even deeper into personalised AI learning pathways.

We see this as the start of a continuous learning and upskilling programme with our people, with the goal of setting them up for future success in their career as AI becomes a key part of peoples working lives.

I’m incredibly excited to be a part of this generational technology shift, and I can’t wait to see the results AI has for our people, our customers, and New Zealand.