Published on the 13/08/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

Putting twins in the hands of customers…

An AI-enhanced digital twin has earned telecommunications infrastructure company FortySouth an national award for innovation, but chief executive Nick Clarke says the real success wasn’t the digital twin technology itself, but putting it in the customer’s hands, rather than using it just maintenance and getting people to use it.

Fortysouth was born out of the now One NZ’s sale of its mobile tower infrastructure in late 2022. It took out the Innovation Leadership Through an Emerging Technology award at the recent New Zealand CIO Awards for its digital twin program which is being rolled out across 1,700 telecommunications towers across New Zealand.

“We didn’t, in our wildest dreams, think it was going to be this good.”

The system, which turned a process taking six months into a 10-minute task, uses drones to capture thousands of images of each tower, creating a highly detailed virtual model that engineers, customers and operational staff can access remotely.

Clarke says the award reflected the project’s adoption, rather than just its technical sophistication.

‘The reason we won the award is not because of the technology, it’s because we’ve got everybody using it,” he told iStart.

What makes Fortysouth’s approach unusual, is who those users are.

While most organisations deploy digital twins to improve maintenance, asset inspections and operational efficiency, Clarke says Fortysouth has focused on making the technology part of the customer experience.

“For me, it’s the customer. We’re the only people I’ve found in the world that are really using digital twin to make the customer’s life easy. Most are using it for maintenance.”

The customer-first approach has transformed a traditionally slow and heavily manual process.

Historically, telecommunications companies wanting to place equipment on a tower would request engineering drawings – which could prove a challenge to find and weren’t always accurate – review site records wait for structural assessments and work through multiple iterations with engineers. Finding documentation alone could take weeks, and that documentation wasn’t always accurate, while engineering reviews could stretch the process out to six months.

Under the digital twin model, customers can access a virtual tower, choose equipment from a BIM (building information modelling) catalogue of specific equipment and place it directly onto the igital model. The system provides visibility of available space, checks structural capacity, references lease and regulatory information held in Fortysouth’s asset management system, and provides an initial engineering assessment.

“At the end of 10 minutes customers have a high degree of confidence that the whole thing will work,” Clarke says. Formal engineering calculations still follow, but customers can move ahead with planning instead of waiting for information to be gathered manually.

For customers, Clarke says the process is ‘very, very simple’. Customers select equipment from catalogues containing their actual hardware and use simple drag-and-drop tools to visualise installations and tower suitability.

“The hardest thing is getting someone to see it first,” Clarke says. “Once people see it, they love it.”

Cutting the Gordian knot

The ease of use became a major factor in adoption, both externally and internally.

When Fortysouth began the project many of its engineers were unconvinced. Adoption of digital twins was part of the conditions attached to its acquisition of the tower assets from One NZ (then Vodafone NZ), and Clarke is blunt that FortySouth initially had little sense of how valuable the technology would be.

“We didn’t really know how it would be used,” he says. “Our engineers were sceptical because they’d all grown up on paper drawings.”

The scepticism didn’t last long.

Engineers quickly discovered the digital models were often more useful than traditional records because they represented the asset as it actually existed, rather than how it appeared on drawings that may have become outdated. “They flipped overnight from being sceptical to being it’s the one thing you can trust,” Clarke says.

Customers too, ‘got it very quickly’.

The experience also highlighted another challenge familiar to infrastructure owners: Poor asset records.

When Fortysouth acquired the network, it inherited large volumes of engineering documentation.

“They won’t thank me for saying this, but they were handing over a bit of a mess. Telco’s records are terrible. I think that’s sort of a universal truth.” While those records are now organised and searchable, Clarke says traditional asset information is often difficult to locate and may not accurately reflect what was ultimately built.

Digital twins, he says, allow infrastructure companies to create an accurate current representation of the asset and work forward from there, rather than trying to progressively improve legacy records. “It’s a bit like cutting the Gordian knot. You don’t improve the record you’ve got. You just start again,” he says.

“It just cuts through any historical data issues and gives you a near perfect record of what’s there today, which is a massively valuable thing for any infrastructure owner thinking about maintenance or changes to the network.”

Beyond telecommunications

That capability is now generating interest beyond telecommunications. Clarke says infrastructure operators have approached Fortysouth to learn more about the project. He recently spoke at a US conference, sparking ‘a lot of interest’ in the project.

The company believes the opportunity extends well beyond tower networks to any organisation managing large numbers of geographically dispersed physical assets. Clarke says the value becomes particularly apparent when assets are difficult, expensive or time-consuming to visit in person. But he admits it doesn’t work for all assets. Clarke has come from the power sector where building digital twins is ‘quite a different thing’. “You can’t fly a drone for those, you actually have to build them on a computer because you can’t fly a drone inside a turbine.”

Alongside the use by customers, Fortysouth is also harnessing the twin for the more traditional maintenance activities. AI tools help identify potential issues including missing bolts and signs of rust, allowing maintenance teams to focus attention on areas requiring inspection and reducing the need for staff to climb 20m towers or travel long distances to gather information.

It’s also being used to show landowners, and councils, what a proposed tower would look like ‘in a very high definition way’. “Everybody wants mobile coverage, no one wants a tower on their land,” Clarke says. The digital twin, ironically, is ‘much more human, understandable and valuable’ than a 2D drawing.

The biggest lesson

His advice to organisations considering the technology is straightforward: Give it a go.

“You will find value in it. You probably don’t know what it is until you do it, but give it a go and pass it around your various teams and customers. I’m confident that in doing that, you’ll get value out of it,” he says.

Despite the operational benefits, Clarke says the biggest lesson from the project was not in maintenance, engineering or AI. Instead it was in discovering how much value customers derived from being able to inspect assets themselves, test options and make decisions without waiting for information to be supplied by Fortysouth.

“We didn’t, in our wildest dreams, think it was going to be this good,” he says.