Telstra claims Australia's largest Copilot for M365 deployment

Telstra is laying claim to having Australia's largest deployment of Copilot for Microsoft 365, with the AI assistant to be made available to 21,000 staff.

Vicki Brady, Telstra

The telco said it work with both staff and unions on a phased rollout of Copilot, following a 12-month trial that involved use of the tool by 300 staff.

Early uses for the tool include summarisation of "meetings, emails and chat threads" and generating first drafts of content, Telstra said.

Staff involved in the trial indicated that having the tool saved between one and two hours a week. 

Telstra executives indicated on LinkedIn that the capability - and utility - of Copilot had grown, particularly in the past six months.

This was also where Telstra laid claim to having "Australia's largest deployment of Copilot for M365". 

Coinciding with the expansion of Copilot to all staff, Telstra said it would start running Microsoft’s artificial intelligence traffic over its InfraCo backbone under an existing five-year agreement.

In 2022, Telstra named Microsoft as a key cloud provider in a five-year tie-up to shift 90 percent of its workloads to the public cloud by 2025.

The expansion of the strategic partnership saw Telstra adopt Azure as part of its multi-cloud approach under the T25 growth strategy.

In addition, Microsoft became an “anchor tenant” of Telstra’s intercity fibre network.

Telstra has also signed several contracts with Microsoft to carry AI traffic across an existing 1800-kilometre intercity fibre network.

According to CEO Vicki Brady, the telco will now build “high-capacity intercity fibre routes for Microsoft” across “key telecommunications routes” in Australia and Asia Pacific.

The intercity fibre supports both high workload point-to-point solutions such as data centres, and connections into regional centres across the country.  

In terms of capacity, the telco carried out a simulation of the intercity link with Infinera in which the simulated data capacity transmissions reaches 83.6 terabits per second per fibre pair.