Corina Tiu, Telus: “If we look at AI or any other disruption, it’s up to us to make it good or bad and I think that’s the key change”

“It is a disruptive time with a lot of components from pandemic up to inflation, economic crisis, AI rising. If we are looking at AI, and I think it’s valid for every change and every disruption we are facing in the business industry and not only. Half of the people are saying it’s going to be bad for us, and the other half are saying it’s going to be really good. I think if we look at AI or any other disruption, it’s up to us to make it good or bad and I think that’s the key change. What I’m trying to say with this example is we need to change the mindset a little bit. It is a crisis. I think the best things come up during a crisis, usually,” Corina Tiu, Vice-President Operations, Telus International Romania said at Romanian Business Services Forum organized by Outsourcing Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

My people are asking, like, am I losing my job? These are very serious questions, and we don’t have necessarily a 100 percent answer.

But I like to tell them and answer like this. It doesn’t matter what life, technology, another geopolitical conflict throws at us, but it rather matters what we do with what we have.

So, I think that’s the mindset that we all need to adapt independently on the generations that we are part of. Now, the key components we are looking in Telus International, and I’m sure the colleagues here as well in other companies are doing the same. We are looking at digital transformation and AI.

Yes, that’s maybe the first and maybe the most robust that we are looking right now. But I think there are other key components like sustainability. And the sustainability is far beyond having a couple of KPIs from the contract being green. That’s far more than that.

I would say we are looking at collaboration and fostering that, what I like to say, it’s an ecosystem. Even now, if I look in the room, we are competitors. But we are not. Because at the end of the day, we work together, we collaborate, we learn from each other. This is one of those key moments when we learn from each other. And there are several other key factors, like being resilient.

Let me tell you a funny story. I was preparing for a conference. And I needed to stick into, I can’t remember, 45 minutes, which is a lot. And I was repeating in front of a mirror, like, how am I going to speak, what am I going to do. I always go off script afterwards, calling notes. And there was a kid in the room, and he was 12 years old. And he was playing. So, I didn’t realize he was paying attention to what I was speaking loudly.

And when I finished, he said, are you managers going to be real and discuss about the real things? Because this is not real. And I had an open conversation, you know, from that level. And when you go to that genuine level, those are the conversations that we need to have.”