Many organisations around Aotearoa are considering how to take advantage of the AI revolution, and One New Zealand has set its sights on becoming an “AI-first” telco. This means transforming how the company operates and accelerating product development to improve how customers are served.
At a company-wide AI Showcase in late-2025, One NZ staff heard how the company is scaling artificial intelligence across its core business – from customer service to network operations, marketing campaigns and software development – all with a desire to improve experience and make it more seamless for customers.
Over 30 AI agents, which automate processes in part or in full, are now operational across One NZ. Dozens more are in development, targeting a five-dollar return on every dollar invested in AI, according to Jason Paris, One NZ’s Chief Executive Officer.
“The best way to run our business is to be AI-first but human when it matters, so we can provide more proactive service and better support our customers,” Paris told his colleagues, pointing out that they all needed to familiarise themselves with the technology to understand its potential.
“Customers don’t care about the technology, they care about how you make them feel,” he added.
“Our strategy isn’t changing, but the way we will achieve it is – with AI.”
The power of AI activators to transform and upskill
Getting started can often be the hardest part of any transformation. Central to One NZ’s approach has been the strategic use of AI activators – programmes designed to identify where AI can make a real difference. This includes digging into data and processes, analysing customer interactions, operational information, and business process flows to surface high-impact opportunities for automation and augmentation.
“The AI activators taught us what the tech can do,” said Summer Collins, One NZ’s AI and Data Director.
“They taught us where the data is good, and where it might need a bit more work. That means we can be confident that we are going after the biggest transformation opportunities and achieving value, using AI to make our processes or experience better for customers.”
Over the last 12 months, staff in the activators have guided pilots in call analytics for root cause identification, churn prediction for personalised retention, explored opportunities for mobile coverage optimisation, and automation in campaign delivery using generative AI.
Employees have been upskilled via One NZ’s AI School, offering AI training and development of responsible, ethical AI guardrails. Responsible use of AI is central to the business’ approach, with a Responsible AI Policy and mandatory training for all staff.
One NZ is now launching an AI enablement team, a network of AI champions across the business that will help more employees turn their ideas for AI-driven product and service delivery into reality.
AI concierge making plan changes easier
To further improve customer service, One NZ is using AI to tackle its goal of eradicating queues, said Chris Fletcher, Chief Consumer & Business Officer.
“AI brings intelligence into our systems, which now means that we can solve problems for our customers,” he said. An early success story has been the AI concierge service for One NZ prepaid mobile customers.
They can now use a simple chatbot to get suggestions for a more suitable monthly plan, and then switch plans, without having to talk to a service agent, visit a One NZ store or even navigate the website.
AI has also been put to work in One NZ’s contact centres to generate and summarise call notes so customer queries are better understood and more quickly resolved. The aim is to free agents from routine, repetitive enquiries so they can focus on offering care and empathy to customers with more complex requests.
“When all is said and done, you’ll hear it framed up in a simple statement: AI first, but human where it matters most,” Fletcher said.
Being “AI-first” doesn’t just improve existing processes – it supercharges innovation. With cloud-based machine learning, One NZ analyses thousands of customer calls and data points, categorising network issues, product preferences, and service bottlenecks for continuous improvement.
Its mobile network increasingly employs AI with a goal to eventually optimise in real time, auto-tuning radio antennas, adjusting power levels, and rerouting data to avoid disruption to connectivity.
Supercharging software development
When One NZ decided to offer a free 30-day trial of its pioneering satellite-based text-messaging service to any customer on a New Zealand mobile network, it gave the development team around six weeks to make it happen.
“A project like this would normally take 4 - 7 months, and we were able to knock it out in 45 days,” said Sunil Sanjay, who leads the One NZ Satellite product experience, which gives users with compatible phones and plans text and data capability where traditional cell tower coverage doesn’t reach and more than 20 kilometres out to sea.
“This was the perfect candidate for AI-led code delivery, because there were no legacy systems involved in the type of tech we were trying to build,” added Sanjay.
The software engineering team, led by James Rameil needed to create a system that would allow non-One NZ customers to easily download and activate an eSIM on their phone so they could access the SpaceX satellites via One NZ’s network. The team used AI tooling to rapidly turn requirements into design plans, while Augment Code, an off-the-shelf AI coding tool, was employed to create the necessary code.
The project was delivered, complete with rigorous third-party security testing, on time, with Sanjay describing the AI tools employed as “like having a peer programmer working with you”.
AI and culture change: Just get started
Behavioural change is widely recognised as a decisive factor in the success or failure of any transformation. For One NZ’s workforce, a key tenet was that AI should be viewed not as a threat but an enabler, said Collins.
The company’s leaders talk about AI as a “superpower”, complete with Iron Man references, encouraging staff to seek out ways to transfer from low-value, repetitive roles to higher-value, creative and strategic work.
“Some jobs will evolve, some new ones will emerge, and in some areas we will become leaner,” said Collins, who has been urging her colleagues to spend ten minutes every day as they go about their work, asking themselves the question: ‘Can AI do this better?’
“We are leaning in, we are learning all together,” she said.
It’s a theme echoed by Paris, who now drafts his briefing papers for the One NZ board using AI, saving a day of work ahead of each meeting.
“If you are worried about AI, it’s because you are not using AI,” he told his colleagues at the One NZ AI showcase.
“The blocker is not going to be the technology, the models, or the data. It will be us refusing to unlearn and relearn the way that we’ve always done things. Just get started.”
Watch here to see how One NZ is building a Self-Healing Network.