AI at Heart of Orange’s Innovation Showcase

I recently attended Orange’s OpenTech event in Paris. Like last year, it was hosted at the operator’s research campus in south-west Paris and brought together partners, customers, employees and the media to showcase its innovation credentials and discuss future technology trends. The underlying theme of the three-day event was openness and industry collaboration, supported by the slogan “further, faster, together”.

AI was a central theme as Orange sought to highlight its ambitions in this fast-growing and increasingly important opportunity. Although telecom operators are hardly at the forefront of the development of AI, I was struck that Orange has 4,000 data and AI experts in Europe in its enterprise arm. It may prefer to partner with big technology companies rather than create its own large language models, but it clearly still has significant capabilities.

AI underpinned two important announcements. Firstly, Orange Business confirmed the launch of Live Intelligence Open, which aims to help business and public sector customers harness the potential of generative AI, as well as manage its adoption in a responsible and effective way. Originally developed to support Orange’s own working practices, it has been tested by more than 50,000 employees over the past year.

During a press conference, Orange Business CEO Aliette Mousnier-Lompre said that the service is aimed at companies in sectors such as healthcare, banking and insurance, which have specific requirements relating to data trust.

She highlighted three leading principles: to address concerns about “shadow AI” — the uncontrolled adoption of free online solutions in organizations; to give customers a choice of models such as OpenAI, Gemini and Mistral based on their needs and budget; and to make the technology easy to use through prompts for common tasks like summarizing a document, extracting information, writing minutes or drafting an agenda.

I’m not surprised Orange is seeking to bolster its enterprise services with AI. During the company’s most recent strategy update, Ms Mousnier-Lompre set out an ambition to grow the proportion of revenue from digital services such as cloud and cybersecurity. This mix is steadily increasing but is still struggling to offset falling use of traditional telecom services. In 3Q24, for example, Orange Business saw revenue fall 2.6%, dragged by declines in fixed-line services.

CCS Insight’s latest survey of senior leaders showed that a huge 82% of companies have already deployed generative AI or expect to do so in the next 12 months, indicating strong appetite to embrace the technology.

In its other AI announcement, Orange said it is working with Meta and OpenAI to fine-tune models to understand regional languages in Africa. This raised an important point about AI inclusivity, highlighting how some populations are unable to benefit from technology advancements. Orange hopes the move will support its customer service and sales teams by enabling more people to communicate with it in their native language.

The initiative will begin in the first half of 2025, focusing on two West African languages, Wolof and Pulaar, which are spoken by 16 million and 6 million people respectively. Eventually, Orange plans to work with multiple AI technology providers to enable future models to recognize all languages written and spoken in the 18 African countries where it has a presence.

OpenTech also included about 50 technology demonstrations, categorized into six groups: the automated home, predictive cybersecurity, API playground, adaptive networks, the future of interactions and the augmented enterprise. I didn’t get the chance to see them all, but here are the five that caught my eye.

Population Density, an API designed by the Camara open-source community that adds a layer of predictive information to Orange’s Flux Vision solution for analysing population movement. In a demonstration, Orange showed how drone operators could adjust flight paths in real time, avoiding densely populated areas to ensure safer flights. Another use could be to make the public aware of busy areas during large sporting or cultural events.

Fibre RootCause is a generative AI-powered solution to automate the process of troubleshooting fibre networks. Orange said its technical team handles an average of 50 incidents per day on its fibre network in France and that until recently it had relied on manually identifying and pinpointing failures. Orange is trialling dashboards in France and Poland that group different alarms together to quickly identify a failure and where it is located.

Orange TV Voice Interaction is a generative AI solution to help people more easily access digital entertainment. Users can quote a line from a film or TV series or describe a scene or character and receive a personalized selection of titles available to watch. Offered on Orange’s Livebox 5, it also covers documentaries, plays, concerts, shows, video games and digital books.

ThreatNet is a cybersecurity platform that analyses large quantities of data to identify and categorize cyberattacks. Presenting the service, Orange referenced data from ANSSI, the French national cybersecurity agency, showing that there were 385,000 cyberattacks in France in 2022 causing €2 billion worth of loss. Orange explained that ThreatNet can process several million events every second and that although it was developed to protect Orange’s own infrastructure, it could one day also be used to enhance the cybersecurity solutions it offers to businesses.

Internet Everywhere is a fixed wireless access solution for small and medium businesses in Slovakia (see picture below). Available since the end of 2023, it is now offered to more than 750 companies. The service comprises six packages offering a range of benefits including speeds of up to 600 Mbps, automatic fixed-line backup in case of an outage, and protection against cyberattacks.

Telecom operators aren’t always considered as pioneers in the development of new technology, so I was struck to hear that Orange has a portfolio of more than 10,000 patents, and files a new one every day. OpenTech was an inspiring event that highlighted Orange’s wide-reaching innovation credentials, as well an openness and willingness to work with partners. That balance should stand it in good stead as it navigates major technology trends such as AI and cybersecurity.