A Day in the Life of a CIO: Kieran O’Meara, Executive, Software Engineering & IT, Telstra

Telstra CIO, Kieran O’Meara, has a key piece of advice for organisations looking to deploy artificial intelligence tools: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

O’Meara visited San Francisco recently and was shown a use case of how generative AI could be used to better explain a bill to a customer.

“It’s a great example of, ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should’, because that bill shouldn’t be so complex in the first place,” he tells ADAPT.

Gen AI is playing a significant role across Telstra, firstly in the obvious area of helping to improve customer and employee experience.

In February, the telco expanded the use of two in-house developed gen AI products following pilots in 2023. The first tool, One Sentence Summary, digests customer notes, interactions and transactions to provide a summation of a customer’s recent history and status. This reduces the need for customers to repeat…