How Tele2 scaled intelligent automation to deliver speed and value

At Tele2, progress moves at the speed of connection. As a challenger brand in the Nordic telecom market, the company has long stood for simplicity, agility, and exceptional customer experience. But while its networks were operating at high performance, some internal processes struggled to keep pace.

Repetitive manual tasks, fragmented automation attempts, and siloed workflows were placing pressure on teams and slowing the organization’s ability to scale. Determined to change that, Tele2 set out to modernize the way work flowed across the organization—making processes faster, smarter, and more efficient.

To do so, Tele2 partnered with UiPath to build a new Intelligent Automation capability. The ambition was not simply to automate tasks, but to create a model that empowered employees, accelerated delivery, and supported the company’s broader transformation agenda.

We wanted to move fast, prove value quickly, and keep things simple. With UiPath, we could start small, deliver visible impact, and then scale effectively. That’s been the key to our success.

Girish Pai • Head of Intelligent Automation, Tele2

This new approach marked a turning point—one that would evolve into a strategic capability embedded across the business.

Starting fast, building for scale

When Tele2 began reimagining its automation strategy, the ambition was clear: make automation a practical engine for business value, not a technology experiment. Supported by UiPath, the team began with a minimal footprint—one external developer for the first pilot—before assembling a small internal group of six specialists who could deliver automations and train others. “We started lean by design,” recalls Girish Pai. “Our goal was to prove value fast and build confidence in the process. UiPath’s flexibility allowed us to move at pace while keeping complete control of outcomes.”

The first pilots focused on Tele2’s B2B division, led by Executive Vice President Stefan Trampus. High-volume customer and billing processes presented clear opportunities to remove friction and improve accuracy. From automated validation to onboarding support and reporting, these early workflows immediately reduced manual effort and freed up time for customer-facing work.

Over the course of five months, Tele2 deployed 16 robots that saved more than 900 hours within the B2B business teams, demonstrating what a small but disciplined team could achieve when focused on impact.

Automation for us wasn’t about technology—it was about removing friction for our customers. Girish and the team understood that from day one. They translated business pain points into fast, tangible wins.

Stefan Trampus • Executive Vice President, Tele2

With each use case assessed against a clear business case, only projects that delivered demonstrable value were built. This discipline enabled Tele2 to scale without creating complexity or technical debt. Girish reflects. “We validate every use case up front—if it doesn’t stand up, we cut it. That’s how we maintain speed to value.”

From this foundation, Tele2 formalized a scalable, modular automation framework—combining autonomous automation for end-to-end optimization with assisted automation to give employees greater ownership and capability.

This blend of structure and agility has allowed Tele2 to get more out of every investment—maximizing usage, reusing solutions across teams, and continuing to operate with that cost-efficient challenger mindset that defines the brand.

Embedding automation into the culture

As Tele2’s intelligent automation capability matured, the focus shifted toward adoption and engagement. To ensure automation became a natural part of how people worked, the team launched a series of discovery sessions, workshops, and skills-focused training programs.

“From the beginning, we wanted automation to belong to the business, not sit apart from it,” explains Girish. “That meant building awareness, capability, and excitement internally.” These initiatives equipped employees to identify opportunities, understand automation’s value, and—in some cases—design small automations themselves.

More than 1,000 employees took part in awareness or skills development, feeding a pipeline of over 300+ automation opportunities from across the business. This momentum helped establish an automation-first mindset that continues to spread organically. Stefan notes, “Automation has changed how our teams think. When someone spots an opportunity, they now have a route to get support to move it forward.”

What underpins this cultural shift is a set of guiding principles: simplicity, customer focus, and responsible use of resources. By investing in reskilling, empowering teams, and embedding automation into everyday problem-solving, Tele2 has created a model where innovation is shared—not centralized.

Automation has now become a way of working that supports employees, improves processes, and ensures that the customer experience remains at the heart of everything Tele2 does.

Looking ahead: building on momentum

Tele2’s Intelligent Automation journey has evolved from a small, focused initiative into a strategic engine for value across the business. As the Intelligent Automation team and the B2B organization deepen their collaboration, the shift is no longer about proving automation’s potential—it is about accelerating impact at scale.

Tele2’s roadmap outlines a clear north star: value-driven intelligent automation. This includes scaling automation across the enterprise, expanding its training programs, and unlocking new efficiency through smarter orchestration and more advanced capabilities.

A key part of this future is agentic AI. While adoption must align with Tele2’s security and regulatory environment, the company sees agentic capabilities as the next logical step. It’s a solution that will further enhance decision making, enable more autonomous processes, and open new opportunities to improve customer experience.

The journey must always be to deliver better customer experience,” emphasizes Stefan. “If we support our teams with the right tools and efficient processes as we move forward, they’ll deliver a better experience—and customers invest in us because of that.

Stefan Trampus • Executive Vice President, Tele2

As Tele2 prepares for its next phase, the organization remains grounded in the principles that sparked its early success. Offering advice to others, Girish notes, “You have to start small, think big and scale fast. Once the first automations proved their value, we built a critical team that could train others, spread the knowledge, and keep the momentum going.”

That momentum now drives the business forward. “What sets us apart isn’t what we do—our competitors often use the same tools,” adds Stefan. “It’s how we do it and how we use the tools. The way we work with customers, the way we run our processes—that’s what creates real business value.”

Tele2’s story demonstrates what’s possible when simplicity, speed, and customer focus come together—and how the right technology, in the hands of the right people, can unlock meaningful change at pace.