As digital complexity skyrockets, organizations face mounting pressure to observe their systems and automate, secure and optimize them at scale. In this scramble toward new-age digital transformation, Telus Communications Inc. is emerging as a blueprint for how technology, business strategy and observability converge to deliver a superior customer experience.

Following a decade-long transformation journey that began with a strategic pivot toward DevOps and agile methodologies, Telus is accelerating toward quicker deployment cycles, reduced operational expenses and enhanced customer experiences — with Dynatrace LLC’s observability tooling at the helm.

Dynatrace’s Bernd Greifeneder talks to theCUBE about enhancing customer experience with AI-driven observability, faster DevOps and real-time business insights.

“When I think of the second generation of Dynatrace, it was all about reaching 200,000 servers,” said Bernd Greifeneder (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer of Dynatrace. “In the third generation, it’s all about defining towards scales of millions of containers and digital services that we all process with the help of AI, toward helping the customers with the automation of their systems and getting the business visibility they need.”

Greifeneder spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay (left) for the “Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace” interview series on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. In a separate interview, Strechay also spoke with Telus’ Kulvir Gahunia, director of the Site Reliability Office, and Dana Harrison, principal site reliability engineer. They discussed how the Canadian telecom giant is leveraging Dynatrace to modernize infrastructure, streamline developer operations, improve the customer experience and bring AI-driven innovation to every layer of the business. (* Disclosure below.)

Dynatrace moves from observability to autonomous intelligence

The first generation of Dynatrace’s platform focused on capturing data, the second brought automation and root-cause analysis and, now, the third generation aims to automate operations, security and business insights at massive scale.

Rather than relying solely on stochastic large language models, Dynatrace’s third-gen platform fuses deterministic AI — which understands causal relationships — with generative AI capabilities. This enables actionable, reliable insights in real time across millions of containers and services, according to Greifeneder.

“What you need for an autonomous intelligence to work and for AI to work is the foundation of high data quality, the foundation of proper accessible memory of how you store all the data in context,” he said. “Think of it as needing to understand the causal dependencies in the data properly because only then can you reason for effects in a deterministic way and not just in a stochastic way, as typically large language models do.”

The secret? High-quality, contextual data. Dynatrace’s lakehouse architecture and Smartscape — a real-time directed graph of interdependencies — create a data-rich environment where AI can understand not just what is happening, but why. This powers automation that is proactive and strategic, not just reactive.

“These new AI instances will continue to drive complexity up and especially, as our customers also use more AI in their digital services that they build, all those systems will even more randomly talk to each other,” Greifeneder said. “It all means you must have an observability platform that does more than just observing it, understands in real time all those interdependencies and helps you with an autonomous intelligence to cope and automate for reliability. It auto-remediates, auto-protects and auto-optimizes that system.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Bernd Greifeneder:

Telus elevates customer experience through reliability

For Telus, delivering a reliable and seamless customer experience — whether online or in-store — is non-negotiable. Critical technology and operational savvy are handy in scenarios such as Black Friday, where even minor performance issues can lead customers to turn to competitors. Dynatrace has empowered the company to remain consistently “on its A-game” by ensuring systems are performant, resilient and responsive to real-time needs, according to Harrison.

Telus’ Kulvir Gahunia and Dana Harrison discuss new-age observability with theCUBE.

“We’re in a world where you have a customer who can walk into a Telus store, let’s say in a mall, and they’re expecting a smooth, reliable and quick experience,” he said. “In that same world, if that experience isn’t meeting all of their expectations, it is trivially easy for them to walk into the mall aisle where they’ve got the kiosk across the hall, maybe to a competitor’s store, and go get served in a way they expect to be served. Technology is what gives us that advantage to make a more resilient, reliable and available experience to get that sale.”

A cornerstone of Telus’ modern DevOps culture is empowering developers with fast and intuitive tools. With Dynatrace’s Gen 3 platform, live debugging capabilities and a custom-built Dynatrace model context protocol, Telus engineers have slashed debugging times from 45 minutes to just two, according to Harrison.

“What used to take us 45 minutes to debug now takes two,” he said. “We also did a quick demo the other day where we showed a production problem and moved from that through our many AI workflows into a full-blown pull request inside of 15 minutes. It has completely changed the game for our developers, from both a development perspective and an operations and support perspective.”

AI isn’t just a buzzword at Telus — it’s a foundational element of everyday operations aimed at delivering a unique customer experience. From AI copilots and chatbots to automated observability workflows, the company is infusing intelligence into every part of the digital stack, according to Gahunia.

“Our chatbots are being used outside of Telus as well, as commercialized and for call centers,” he said. “We have the model that AI is another tool to help the individual — it’s not here to replace you. How do you leverage it to remove, let’s say, toil or to get you focused on more crucial stuff? So, you’re delivering value instead of worrying about the day-to-day mundane tasks that you may have.”

Don’t miss theCUBE’s full interview segment with Kulvir Gahunia and Dana Harrison:

Here’s the complete event video, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Inside the Digital Business With Dynatrace” interview series. Neither Dynatrace LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE