TELUS builds its Fuel iX generative AI platform on Google Cloud

Overview

Canadian telecom TELUS built Fuel iX, a proprietary generative AI platform on Google Cloud, giving more than 57,000 team members secure access to 40+ AI models, including Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini via Vertex AI. Employees have created over 13,000 custom AI solutions and 47 large-scale gen AI products, driving more than $90 million in benefits and 500,000+ hours of time savings to date, and TELUS's engineering teams now ship code 30% faster. TELUS extended Fuel iX to power its customer-facing GenAI support tool, which became the first gen AI tool in the world internationally certified in Privacy by Design.

The challenge

When generative AI first emerged, TELUS saw an opportunity to give its global workforce of over 100,000 team members safe and secure access to AI. The challenge wasn't simply whether to adopt AI, but building a long-term strategy that could evolve with rapidly changing technology while maintaining the data privacy, control and customer trust TELUS is known for, so rather than committing to a single AI model, TELUS needed a flexible way to let employees choose the best model for the task at hand.

The solution

TELUS built Fuel iX, a proprietary in-house generative AI platform on Google Cloud, that acts as a gateway letting employees select the best model for a given task -- from generating content and summarizing reports to helping engineers with complex coding and analyzing data -- from a choice of 40+ leading AI models and vendors, including Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini on Vertex AI. New or updated models become available to all users instantly without new procurement or IT projects. Many employees access Fuel iX through chatbot interfaces integrated into tools they already use, such as Google Chat or Slack, and can use Claude's tool-calling abilities to search documentation, access Jira or analyze code in GitHub. Fuel iX was later extended externally to power TELUS's customer-facing GenAI support tool.

Reported business value

Fuel iX gives more than 57,000 TELUS team members safe and secure AI access and has enabled over 13,000 custom AI solutions and 47 large-scale gen AI products, driving more than $90 million in benefits and over 500,000 hours of time savings (about 40 minutes saved per AI interaction) to date. TELUS's engineering teams now ship code 30% faster, and 90% of Fuel iX's AI model traffic runs through Vertex AI, powering thousands of use cases at around 100 billion tokens a month. Fuel iX also powers TELUS's customer-facing GenAI Customer Support Tool, which became the first gen AI tool in the world internationally certified in Privacy by Design.