Telstra is cutting around 650 jobs as it accelerates its shift to agentic AI.
The restructure lands as Telstra moves beyond generative AI – the internal chat tools and document summaries – into systems designed to act autonomously.
Agentic AI is basically an all-in-one tool. Instead of just telling you how to make a coffee – or where to get the best one nearby – it would actually make it for you.
In Telstra speak, it works like this: you have a problem, a query, or an order, and the new agentic AI sorts it, fixes it, and if need be ships it.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Telstra showcased AI agents capable of detecting hardware faults and automatically rerouting network traffic in minutes.
Previously, that kind of fix required engineers stepping in manually. Now, the network can essentially self-correct.
The company is also piloting AI agents within its sales and commerce teams, tackling complex “order-to-activate” processes – the backend chain that turns a customer sign-up into a live service.
The goal: compress timelines from weeks to days by removing manual handling.
To power the transition, Telstra launched a $700 million joint venture with Accenture in 2025, setting up an innovation hub in Silicon Valley and partnering with major cloud players, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.
Telstra says it’s adopting a “human-on-the-loop” model–staff supervising AI agents rather than performing repetitive processes. Still, the workforce impact is immediate.
With 650 roles affected, Telstra’s AI pivot signals something bigger for the telco sector: automation is no longer experimental – it’s becoming core to how networks and services are run.
