At TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies with nearly 20 million subscribers, digital transformation isn’t just a goal. It’s a necessity.
While attending this year’s Appian World, held in Aurora, CO, I had the pleasure of speaking with Moutie Wali, the director of digital transformation and integrated planning, who shared the company’s journey to streamline enterprise-wide planning using Appian tools, turning a fragmented, manual process into a fast, data-driven system that empowers teams across the organization.
The TELUS team was facing a massive coordination challenge. Planning decisions were time consuming, involving multiple teams and upstream and downstream operations that relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets and email communication. The result was slow execution, frequent misalignment, and what Wali called a “Jenga tower” approach to change.
“If you move one of these blocks, the whole thing collapses,” he explained.
To overcome this, TELUS launched Aspire, a custom-built planning system using Appian’s low-code automation platform and data fabric capabilities.
“Change is the name of the game here,” said Wali. “Plans never stay intact, and we needed a way to adapt without starting from scratch each time.”
Aspire digitized the full planning workflow, linking investment activities across teams and enabling localized change tracking. This dramatically reduced cycle time, cutting planning processes from 3 to 4 months down to 4 to 6 weeks, and prevented what Wali described as “misaligned capital.” That alone translated to $42 to 50 million in annual savings, avoiding wasted funds or shortfalls due to poor communication.
TELUS’ digital transformation initiative was a success, enabling not only faster execution, but also clearer communication and better data processing.
“Many teams had to reprocess data because they didn’t speak the same language,” said Wali. “Now, with Appian and Aspire, we can automatically convert and deliver the right data to each team in the way they need it.”
However, the change process wasn’t without a few roadblocks along the way. Wali shared that adoption came with challenges, including resistance to abandoning Excel and the need to redefine user stories. To tackle these issues, TELUS invested in behavior change and backend automation to drive success.
Looking forward, TELUS is expanding on this foundation with three key AI-enabled initiatives. First is self-serve analytics powered by Appian’s Data Fabric and AI Studio, allowing users to generate reports on demand through natural language prompts. Second is automated change management, where AI agents could eventually auto-generate revised plans based on input, further reducing planning time from weeks to days. And third is the ambitious goal of AI-powered “war gaming,” running simulations to test various strategic scenarios and identify the most effective responses.
“This was our first big, complex Appian application,” Wali said. “But now that we’ve proven its value, there’s more to come. We’re scaling vertically and horizontally to bring more teams and workflows onto the platform.”
He added, “I’m not a developer or part of IT. I’m more a business unit owner. What we love about Appian is that it gives us control and accountability to build the workflows we need, without waiting on another department.”
TELUS’s transformation is a powerful example of what’s possible when digital strategy, innovation, intelligent automation, and quality cross-team collaboration converge with the right platform in place.
