en.Wedoany.com Reported - New Zealand telecommunications operator One New Zealand (One NZ) has set itself a goal: to become the most AI-savvy telecom operator. Rather than starting with simple tasks, the company deliberately chose a highly complex pilot project: the enterprise service provisioning process.
Cy Wright, General Manager of AI at One NZ, told Fierce that the team wanted to prove AI could operate across multiple platforms, handle real-world process complexity, and achieve end-to-end orchestration. The company partnered with UiPath, leveraging its Maestro orchestration platform to automate this process across Salesforce, Oracle, and internal platforms.
Ashley Boag, Chief Operating Officer for International Regions at UiPath, told Fierce that before deployment, the main bottleneck in service provisioning was the lack of connectivity between One NZ's various systems and extensive manual processing, resulting in provisioning times of up to 10 days. With the Maestro platform, One NZ streamlined the process and eliminated manual bottlenecks. Boag noted that AI agents coordinate work across systems, while software robots execute tasks within applications, thereby building an orchestration layer on top of existing systems.
Wright emphasized that process cleanup both benefits from AI and is a prerequisite for AI to be effective. The challenge lies in fully understanding the processes, dependencies, decision points, and downstream consequences so that AI can effectively coordinate and optimize. He pointed out that what appears to be a single provisioning process is actually a highly fragmented set of workflows. Without AI, it is difficult to gain the knowledge needed to clean up fragmented handoffs; without process cleanup, AI cannot obtain the context required to coordinate workflows. According to disclosures, One NZ moved from proof of concept to production within five weeks and achieved a return on investment in less than six months.
Regarding the AI roadmap, Wright stated that One NZ believes the greatest value AI brings to telecom companies will come from modernizing back-office operations, including network planning, service and revenue assurance, billing, and process orchestration. The company is actively addressing financial processes, data modernization, billing and payments, and has automated certain aspects of its retail digital platform before replacing it. In the latter effort, AI is used to help generate requirements, document downstream processes, and identify dependencies. The operator is also collaborating with Red Hat on cloud and automation and has adopted Microsoft CoPilot. On balancing cost and innovation, Boag told Fierce that the cost pressure operators feel stems from treating AI as an expenditure separate from existing operations. When run this way, each new model or tool adds integration overhead and computing costs without clear returns. One NZ is carefully monitoring utilization, optimizing agent deployment, and measuring outcomes against each original business case. Boag concluded that successful organizations are not necessarily those that spend the most on AI, but those with the strongest governance, visibility, and value management discipline.
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