AI can't fix work that isn't connected. Telstra's Niki Rose shares why leaders must redesign work with a focus on people, process and technology.
Sharon Ellerker
Vice President, People & Purpose
Workday APAC & Japan
Audio also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Every day, Australian employees act as the glue holding together systems that were never designed to work together.
Our own research shows that 63% spend at least half their effort translating and coordinating between systems and teams, instead of creating value for their organisation.
It's a challenge that Niki Rose, Workforce Experience and Capability Executive at Telstra, knows all too well. She joined the Future of Work: Australia podcast recently to share how the 'copy/paste economy' is impacting her own teams.
“When our employees spend too much time figuring out which system to use… they’re not delivering for our customers," she says. "So a system that doesn’t connect our people means we are dragging out that time for our customers.”
In her view, AI has the potential to make this even more challenging. As she says: "I worry that all these AI tools will result in more tools and more decisions and more cognitive load on already busy people."
Armed with that knowledge, Niki is taking a different approach to create a simpler, friction-free experience. Instead of adding AI to already fragmented systems, Niki's team are thinking about how it can be embedded into existing workflows.
As she explained, “The challenge isn't at this point whether AI works. It's whether we can redesign the work around it to capture the benefits.” She calls this ambition 'Connected by Design'.
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It all began when Niki and her team took a step back to reconsider the Telstra HR ecosystem. “What I saw was this array of beautiful HR products, but none were designed to work together,” she says.
“The recruitment process didn’t talk to the onboarding process, which didn’t talk to the learning system – and it just felt like a missed opportunity.”
This recognition prompted Niki to simplify the organisation's HR tech stack.
“Every time you bring in different technology stacks, there's a quite a cost to make sure they connect together. And the beauty [of being connected], particularly as you bring in AI, is that’s where your data sits.”
Niki compares this 'Connected by Design' ambition to the Apple ecosystem. Every product works well independently, but the real value comes from the way they work together.
“You have to make really intentional decisions, so your technologies talk to each other, because that enables that seamless connection,” she advises.
In Niki’s experience, focusing on technology alone rarely delivers lasting value. She says successful AI transformation depends on three things working together: people, process and technology.
That’s why, before introducing a candidate virtual assistant into recruitment, Telstra first looked at the recruitment process itself, which hadn’t been reviewed for eight years. "We found 120 process fixes we could improve," recalls Niki.
Next, Telstra prepared its recruitment team for the new technology by building capability and involving them throughout implementation.
"The value didn't come from the technology itself – it came from redesigning the work and uplifting our team's capability with the technology."
Niki Rose
Workforce Experience and Capability Executive, Telstra
Niki says this approach paid dividends many times over. As a result of deploying an embedded candidate virtual assistant, recruitment time reduced from 21 days to five and candidate satisfaction exceeded 95%.
Automating interview scheduling generated further savings, equivalent to seven full-time roles – allowing Niki to pay for the new technology for two years.
As she explains in a keynote at Workday Elevate 2026, "The value didn't come from the technology itself – it came from redesigning the work and uplifting our team's capability with the technology."
By 2030, Niki expects Telstra’s business and workforce to look very different. While the company has a mature learning system, with thousands of courses and learning pathways, she doesn’t think it will deliver the shift required.
In her view, the results, “are not quite measuring up to the return on investment you’d like to see.” And she’s concerned that, “research tells us 80% of all learning today is not retained.”
Her bold solution? “We need to blow up the way we learn.”
I was inspired when, in her Workday Elevate 2026 keynote, Niki described what that looks like.
“Imagine if learning didn’t show up in a system you had to go to – but showed up in the flow of your work, in your Teams and your emails.
"Imagine if the learning understood your role, your goals and even what you are working on in that moment. And then it could guide you to the next best step.
"Imagine if learning was truly connected by design – not courses in one place and work in another.
"Where the role you’re hired to do shapes your onboarding, which shapes then your skills and learning and into your performance reviews. Where learning helped make you better immediately.”
She also challenged the audience to imagine if we stopped asking people to find time to learn, but could curate learning to fit their exact 22-minute commute or their dog walk around the neighbourhood.
"Imagine if the learning actually knew how you learn best," she says. "‘I like to listen to podcasts.’ ‘I like to have a conversation with a coach’. ‘I like to watch an interview or a presentation.’”
This futuristic-sounding scenario is exactly what Telstra is piloting right now.
"It's not about how many AI tools you can afford to buy, but how you connect those tools by design."
Niki Rose
Workforce Experience and Capability Executive, Telstra
Niki reports that, when someone moves into a new role they are now automatically given the skills training they need and the learning pathways to support them in that role.
And when a leader is preparing for a difficult conversation, they can use an AI coach to help them practice.
Coming soon is the ability to nudge people with the right learning at the right time, to help them get better in the flow of work.
It's clear that employees are ready for – and increasingly expect – AI to work intuitively and seamlessly: embedded, intelligent and invisible in the flow of work.
The constraint is an operating environment still designed for a world before AI existed.
The lessons from Telstra suggest that getting a better return on AI isn't primarily about buying better technology. It's about redesigning work.
Every disconnected process that's redesigned, every hand-off that's removed and every learning experience that's embedded into the flow of work improves both the employee and the customer experience.
As Niki says: "It's not about how many AI tools you can afford to buy, but how you connect those tools by design."
Learn more about how Workday helped Telstra aligned their people, finances and resources to an agile way of working, delivering timely insights at all levels across the business.
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