Telia Drives Business Value by Upskilling Its Workforce on AWS

In 2021, Telia Company (Telia) announced a large-scale in-house training program to help its workers gain cloud fluency on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and drive business value. The goal of the program is to upskill 10 percent of Telia’s total workforce, or approximately 2,000 employees. “Data, cloud, and the migration toward a data-centric organization play a central role in our transformation program,” says Dr. Rainer Deutschmann, group chief operating officer of Telia. “With the AWS team, we have worked together to really lay the data and the cloud foundation as well as to develop the skills that we need to unlock the value.”

To prepare for this journey, Telia’s analytics community invested over 4,000 hours in cloud and data analytics training. This step warranted that key teams were already familiar with cloud concepts, data analytics, and ML. Thanks to this initiative, Telia’s workforce was prepared to capitalize on the more advanced training that would follow.

In less than 1 year after the program began, Telia’s Analytics IT team launched a full data analytics stack in the cloud using Amazon Redshift Serverless, which makes it simple to run analytics workloads of any size without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure. The company is also running ML models using Amazon SageMaker, a service used to build, train, and deploy ML models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows.

Since initiating its cloud education program, Telia has empowered employees with deep cloud and analytics fluency. The company is currently running in six countries on the cloud and has delivered exciting digital solutions for the benefit of its customers. “We have already launched 70-plus percent of the population with 5G, for example, in Finland and Norway, and up here in Denmark,” says Deutschmann.

With a full cloud analytics stack, Telia has created a common data foundation and democratized data access. This has enhanced data-driven decision-making and provided its employees with advanced analytics capabilities. Its data scientists and engineers are using ML to identify new omnichannel offers and recommendations to enhance the customer experience.

By using customer data to predict customers’ needs, Telia has achieved higher conversion rates and an improved net promoter score for customer satisfaction. “The customer value management has been proven now in an omnichannel delivery to increase the conversion for offers to our customers, as well as actually increasing the customer satisfaction by 15 points,” says Deutschmann.

Through its innovative training program, Telia is setting a precedent for digital transformation in the telecommunications industry. “This is, I think, a set of themes that are really relevant for the future and will keep us busy in the future,” says Deutschmann.