At this year’s Google Cloud Next 25 conference in Las Vegas, TELUS and Google Cloud shared the behind-the-scenes story of a sweeping data transformation that’s reshaping one of Canada’s largest telecom and tech firms.
Speaking onstage, Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS, shared how the company migrated from fragmented on-premise systems to a modern, cloud-based platform built on Google BigQuery—unlocking new capabilities in artificial intelligence and analytics across TELUS’ entire business.
“We didn’t have a solid data foundation to really drive analytics or AI at scale,” said Lee, who joined TELUS in late 2021. “There were data silos, duplication, and no single source of truth. We had to start from scratch.”
With the support of Google Cloud, Accenture, and Onix, TELUS embarked on a three-and-a-half-year journey to overhaul its data infrastructure. The result? A unified enterprise data hub capable of ingesting data from over 100 internal systems, storing 13 to 14 petabytes of structured customer data, and powering a company-wide self-serve analytics environment.
“This wasn’t a lift-and-shift,” Lee emphasized. “We identified 30 percent of our on-prem datasets were obsolete and didn’t move them to the cloud. That alone led to major cost savings and efficiencies.”
Founded in Vancouver, TELUS is known primarily for its telecom services, but the $20-billion company also operates three global business units—TELUS Health, TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods, and TELUS Digital. Together, these businesses serve more than 20 million customer connections.
To support those verticals, Lee’s team focused on building a flexible data foundation that enables AI innovation across the enterprise. The centerpiece is BigQuery, which allows employees to independently run queries, explore insights, and build new applications—without waiting for a centralized analytics team.
“We want every TELUS team member to be able to innovate and tie it to a real business outcome,” said Lee. “That could be top-line revenue, cost efficiency, or operational streamlining.”
The impact has been quantifiable. In the past year alone, TELUS’ data strategy supported an EBITDA contribution target of $150 million, Lee revealed—proof that modern data infrastructure can move the needle beyond just IT metrics.
Crucially, TELUS sees technology as only one part of the equation. Lee noted that people and process changes were often more time-consuming than technical migration. To support adoption, TELUS invested heavily in change management, executive training, and awareness-building—including internal hackathons and ongoing platform education.
“We remind our teams constantly—this isn’t about using the latest tools just because they’re cool,” said Lee. “Every tool must tie to a real, measurable outcome.”
TELUS also launched “squads” made up of product owners, data scientists, engineers, and business stakeholders to tackle complex GenAI use cases. These multidisciplinary teams act as internal champions, helping push innovation into parts of the organization that may be more hesitant.
Now that TELUS has laid its digital foundation, the focus has shifted to expanding GenAI across every business line and scaling lessons learned from the telco side into TELUS’ other units.
Lee pointed to a new cross-company initiative—called CROSSE B2—designed to bring Master Data Management (MDM) to TELUS Health, Agriculture, and Digital. The goal is to unify customer data across all verticals and enable deeper insights, without recreating the wheel.
“We’ve already proven the value of MDM for TELUS’ consumer and B2B customers,” Lee said. “Now we’re helping the rest of the business mature their data strategy, without repeating our early mistakes.”
Powered by Informatica and enriched using AI tools like CLAIRE, TELUS’ MDM initiative standardizes and deduplicates customer records to create a “golden record” for each individual or business.
Asked what he would do differently, Lee had a clear answer: “Nothing. The challenges taught us what we needed to know. You have to take small steps, get feedback, and understand no team or technology can do this alone.”
With TELUS now positioned as a data-first enterprise, the company is ready to accelerate its use of generative AI and continue transforming how it delivers services to consumers and businesses alike.
“People, process, and technology—those are the three pillars,” said Lee. “And you have to keep reinforcing them, from the CEO down to every employee.”
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