Knowledge 2026: Inside Ateko’s Innovation Sandbox – ServiceNow, AI, and the Future of Telco

with Dean Clark

What happens when a 150-year-old telecom giant decides to completely overhaul its legacy infrastructure? They flip the script on customer experience.

In this exclusive interview, Ashlea Miller sits down with Dean Clark to discuss the massive digital transformation underway at Bell Canada and the launch of Ateko.

Transcript:

Ashlea Miller: Hey everyone, I’m here with Dean from Ateko to talk about a digital transformation effort that has been underway for them. Welcome, Dean.

Dean Clark: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Ashlea Miller: Yeah, glad to have you here. Uh, let’s take it back to the beginning. Tell me a little bit about the challenges that you’re facing as an organization that led you down the path of this transformation in the first place.

Dean Clark: Sure. So, uh, Ateko is actually a service integration company that’s owned by Bell Canada, who’s one of our anchor clients. So, Bell Canada is the largest and oldest telco and media company in Canada, nearly 150 years old. So as you can imagine, through history, legacy, expansion, acquisition, lots of disconnected infrastructure, lots of disconnected processes, and we realized that we needed to kind of decide on some anchor stone or cornerstone technologies to really figure out how to propel us from an operational perspective into the next generation. And ServiceNow was that, uh, one of those cornerstone technologies that we chose.

Ashlea Miller: Yes, we call this the patchwork enterprise, right? Where a lot of companies are facing thousands of disconnected data points, uh, multiple distinct apps that maybe not are talking to each other. So it sounds like you were facing the same challenge. What did that look like for your customers and your folks in the field? How was that actually showing up?

Dean Clark: Oh, you can imagine, you know, kind of the stereotypical experience with a telco where you schedule your appointment and maybe something moves throughout the day and you have a very narrow window that you’re given of like 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. where a tech may or may not show up. So there’s some version of that that actually existed or, for example, you call in and you have an issue and you’re uh, sent from one person to the next person and every time that you meet the next person in the escalation chain, they ask you what your name is, what your phone number is, what your history is, and you’ve kind of given that multiple, you know, times and steps throughout the process. So from a real-world customer experience perspective, like that was kind of some of the challenges that Bell Canada was facing. And, you know, transparently, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, we had some of the, you know, lower end of the customer satisfaction and highest customer complaints of the biggest telcos in Canada. And now we’re proud to say through some of this work and other uh, initiatives that we’ve undertaken, we have the lowest percentage of uh, complaints in Canada. So we’ve kind of flipped the script in terms of our experience with customers and ServiceNow is a big part of that for us.

Ashlea Miller: Well, that’s amazing. Yeah, I think we’ve all been there, so it’s glad to hear this amazing transformation effort’s underway. And you are having some amazing outcomes out of it. Can you walk us through a few of those points of impact, maybe something that you’re particularly proud of?

Dean Clark: Sure. I mean, one is, like you hear a lot about like what is possible with the technology and you hear a lot about AI use cases, but you know, it’s hard to get actual data and real-world examples of some of the things that are theoretically possible. And one thing that I’m proud of is the actual data that we have and the value that we’ve unlocked through some of the AI, uh, and Now Assist applications that we’ve deployed. For example, when you call in now, when I mentioned that disconnected experience with customers that we used to have, now we have ServiceNow listening into the calls, pre-populating information in fields for agents, understanding like what the issue is, what the expertise that’s required to solve that problem, what the language is that the person’s calling in from. So now that routes pre-populated to the right agent. And this year we’ll have nearly half a million, uh, calls and interactions that will be automated, uh, through AI and through Now Assist with a 25% reduction in handling time.

Ashlea Miller: Wow, that’s incredible. And it sounds like there is a true impact on your technicians in the field then. You know, folks who are helping customers day-to-day, real-time, they may not have the time to think about the AI orchestration level, right? But what does that look like for them? How does it improve their day-to-day in serving your customers?

Dean Clark: Well, I mean, I worked at Bell for a long time before, um, moving over into Ateko and I do know a lot of people in field and the people that run operations and, you know, they’re people too. Like the, when I mentioned that, you know, poor experience of having, you know, a customer who has an issue and maybe they need to get on a call because they’re working from home and their Wi-Fi is down and having to repeat like the information various steps along the way, that’s not great for the customer and it’s also not great for the agent, right? Like they, they know that the customer’s in a tough spot. The field tech who shows up at somebody’s house, like theyre there and they understand that, you know, they want to just do their job, do it efficiently, and make the customer happy. And when you can automate steps in the process before it gets to a human and then that human interaction becomes better and the interaction with the client becomes better, what we’ve seen, when I talk about that automation piece, we also have a significant increase in employee satisfaction from our field techs and from our agents because they’re delivering a better experience from the customer or for the customer and they feel that in their day-to-day interaction.

Ashlea Miller: Okay. And the Ateko journey itself is pretty interesting. You started out as an implementation partner of Bell Canada and now it’s part of the Bell family. Can you talk a little bit about how that model came to life and how now it’s the right structure for this transformation effort?

Dean Clark: Sure. Like, Ateko is, um, actually, we launched the Ateko brand a year ago today at Knowledge. So I’m happy to be, happy anniversary, I’m happy to be here. Yes, thank you. So, uh, but Ateko is actually, um, six companies that we acquired from a Bell Canada perspective in the last 30 months and then we rebranded as Ateko. And part of the value creation of these companies is they were exceptional at what they did and they had this great expertise and this great passion and a founder kind of growth mindset, but they were limited by their scale, by their reach, by their access to capital. So by acquiring these companies from a Bell perspective and rebranding as Ateko, we can now take kind of these smaller entrepreneurial companies and introduce them into some of the biggest, most complicated, you know, financial services, public sector areas where a smaller company could never get access to. But by working alongside Bell Canada, we do have now have access to those clients and the interesting use cases that we deliver for Bell become almost like a playground and a sandbox where we can do really cool things and we can be an innovation partner and we can work with ServiceNow directly on their field services roadmap as an example to help evolve it and deliver for Bell at scale and then have that experience not only as delivery, but also being around on day two in operations, right? Because for Bell, it’s not like we can just deliver something or present a PowerPoint and then walk away. Like we have to live with the results of what we’ve implemented and help them evolve. So doing that for Bell Canada and then taking it to other very complicated, heavily regulated companies is kind of the value creation story for us.

Ashlea Miller: That’s amazing. Well, it sounds like a model that can help deliver the same type of success to other enterprises. So thank you for sharing these examples. It’s such a great example of bringing control to the chaos, previously, and now you’re having amazing outcomes through the ServiceNow AI platform and these solutions.