Telstra deploys billing reconciliation AI agent

Telstra has been revealed as a customer of a nascent AI implementation and consulting unit of Microsoft, using the engagement to build an agent that assists with customer migration processes.

The telco has partnered with what the hyperscaler calls ‘Microsoft Frontier Company’, launched by Microsoft at the start of July.

In a blog post, Microsoft said that its work with Telstra so far has produced “an AI-powered migration payment agent that helps simplify one of the most complex aspects of customer migration: reconciling billing and payments across legacy and new platforms.”

“The agent uses intelligence across these systems to proactively identify inconsistencies, recommend corrective actions and create enriched cases for human review,” it said.

The AI agent is “already supporting more than 272,000 service migrations and delivering recommendations at 95 percent-plus accuracy in production.”

Microsoft said the agent is an example of Telstra’s commitment to run agentic AI and “build reusable AI capabilities”.

Around the same time that Microsoft Frontier Company was launched, Telstra took the step of creating an enterprise-wide AI leadership role, which is held by Dayle Stevens.

The telco has also deployed a large-scale, real-time AI cost and governance monitoring tool called an “AI control plane” to keep a firmer hand on deployments.

It was recently revealed that Accenture played a role in standing up the control plane.

Telstra is also increasingly publicising AI use cases where it is deriving operational value.

It is known to be using agentic AI to interrogate its customer data to ease pressure on its frontline call centre operations.

Additionally, it is using AI agents powered by Salesforce to assist it in meeting its customer service guarantee obligations.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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