WEALTH October 2, 2026 0 Comments

How Elaine Carey’s Radical Playbook is Set to Turn Three Ireland Into a Lightning-Fast Market Powerhouse—Are You Ready for the Shake-Up?

Taking the reins as CEO of Three Ireland last year, Elaine Carey didn’t just shuffle the deck—she flipped the whole game board. Nearly two decades deep with the company, Carey saw it wasn’t enough to coast on legacy; the telecom giant needed to get agile—enterprise agile, to be precise. Imagine gathering a motley crew of cross-functional problem solvers who operate like a well-oiled machine, ready to tackle shifting customer demands faster than you can say “5G.” After replacing Robert Finnegan, she didn’t ease in; instead, she rallied 700 employees and partners at Dublin’s 3Arena for a bold “turn it upside down and put it back up again” moment. This wasn’t corporate jargon—it’s a cultural overhaul that’s rewriting how Three talks, thinks, and delivers. But here’s the kicker: How do you transform a telecom titan with layers thicker than a well-aged novel without losing your soul (or the customer’s)? Elaine’s bet on scrapping “command and control” culture in favor of empowerment is already paying off, and yes, there’s a lot more to this story than just embracing buzzwords. Ready to see how a woman leading less than a fifth of CEOs is shaking up Ireland’s telecom scene and why her take on infrastructure and AI might just blow your mind? LEARN MORE

After taking over as chief executive of Three Ireland last year, Elaine Carey set about transforming the company by implementing enterprise agile, or as she describes it, putting cross-functional people together to solve problems.

Now nearly two decades into her career with Three, Carey believed the telecoms group needed to become more dynamic in how it served customers, whose demands are rapidly changing.

After replacing Robert Finnegan in the top job, she started studying enterprise agile principles before calling an all-company meeting of 700 employees and partners at the 3Arena last September to “turn the organisation upside down and put it back up again”.

Speaking to BusinessPlus.ie, Carey describes enterprise agile as having “completely and utterly changed the language of the business” with the implementation of squads, town halls, quarterly business reviews, and objectives and key results (OKRs).

“Why do we believe we had to do it? I think we had to believe we had to do it because we had lost a little bit of our customer-centricity, and we’re here to service our customers,” she explains.

“We had got a little bit too big with too many layers, which meant it was harder and more difficult to get things done, and we weren’t responding as quickly as we should do to what the customer needed, and there was a little bit too much of a culture of command and control.

“If you want to move forward and you want people to feel empowered and you want people to feel motivated to do the right thing, I think it was it was a must thing to do. And what we’re seeing now with our engagement scores is people who are engaged in it and living in that new world are absolutely loving it.”

Less than a fifth (19%) of CEOs at enterprises with 250 or more employees are women, according to the CSO – a statistic that Carey cited during her speech. As one of the few to lead a major Irish firm, there must have been some instinct to take things more slowly and not to ruffle any feathers.

Carey, who during her career has worked for CompuB, Digicel and in roles such as head of retail for Three Ireland, said she comes from “a background of brave decisions” and that Three’s majority shareholder Li Ka-Shing encourages growth above all else.

The results have been encouraging so far. Three Ireland grew its customer base 6% year-on-year to 5.6m in the first half of 2026, with revenues rising 2% to €314m and EBITDA up 5% to €88m.

In her previous role as chief commercial officer for Three UK & Ireland, Carey was dismayed by the lack of infrastructure investment in the UK — service in central London during rush hour was chronically poor.

Three Ireland recently completed a €1.1bn investment to upgrade its 4G and 5G infrastructure and has subsequently seen record traffic at high footfall locations such as Croke Park for recent Katie Taylor fight and Electric Picnic.

As data consumption has increased 460% over the past five years, the case for such investment has become clear, and the company is reaping the dividends.

“Number one is customer base. We are now officially over 50% of the market,” Carey says, referring to the SIM market. “That SIM could be in a box or it could be in a person’s hand, and that’s going to be critically important going forward because as we get smart cities, as we get into automation, as we get into 5G standalone … our investment is going to pay off in trying to future-proof us for what’s required.”

Three isn’t alone in investing in its network. The wider telecoms industry in Ireland has pumped €5.5bn into infrastructure, and Three will require greater investment and to diversify its offering to retain its market position.

“I think we have ways of expanding what we offer to our customers. We can, I think, as well diversify into other products and services, which we’re excited about,” she says.

“I think, if you can offer a customer something that makes sense to them, if it’s done in an easy way, if it’s done with the best value that delivers for them, we can even go further beyond what we are today.”

In terms of artificial intelligence, Carey does not expect much disruption to the mobile market and believes its applications in consumer telecommunications will be largely related to network security and fixing outages more quickly.

She also optimistic that AI will give humans the time to start looking at complex queries (“things we never got to because we were too tied up in the transactional day-to-day”) and that the technologies will be complementary to human endeavour.

Earlier in the day, Carey spoke before an audience of 1,200 at the Executive Women Gathering. Telecoms and STEM more widely remains heavily gender imbalanced, and Three is now in its fifth year of offering scholarships to female students of STEM subjects at Trinity College Dublin.

She laments that engineering remains 80% male, but “it’s changing. It’s changing very, very slowly.

“I think if we don’t try and change the pipeline, which is the education system, we are not going to change what that is looking like,” Carey continues. “How can we make sure that women look at every opportunity and just don’t go, ‘it’s probably not for me because it’s a bit more in the male categorisation’.

Elaine Carey become CEO of Three Ireland in 2025.

“[We need to] get into schools, get them enjoying maths. I do believe as well it’s how some of these subjects are taught. I don’t know if they’ve changed since I was school, and I’m 50 years of age.

“I think if we’re not making [STEM subjects] addressable to male and females … we will constantly have this problem where we’re not getting enough female representation in STEM subjects, and therefore in the industries.”

Photo: Elaine Carey. (Pic: file)