- AI gives telcos a path to grow beyond cost-cutting, said Orange Business's Usman Javaid
- Orange Business supports enterprise AI at every layer — infrastructure, platform, and turnkey solutions — including sovereign AI services
- Telcos like Orange and Telus are embracing network APIs and AI factories to escape the “dumb pipe” model and drive new revenue streams
AI is one of the last remaining hopes for an industry seeking to escape the race to the bottom as commodity connectivity providers, said Usman Javaid, Orange Business chief product and marketing officer.
"This is one of a few lifelines left for the telco industry," Javaid told Fierce in an interview on the sidelines of the FutureNet World conference in London this month. After years of focus on cutting costs and increasing efficiency, AI presents an opportunity to grow revenue.
Telcos can succeed by providing digital infrastructure to enterprises that are adopting AI. "That's the first challenge enterprises face in deploying AI at scale," he said.
Orange Business surveyed 400 enterprises worldwide and asked them what the biggest challenges they face when implementing AI. Some 43% said their networks require modernization. And 83% said they need to optimize their cloud strategy, particularly the balance between public cloud and on-prem. Additionally, 96% said they need to beef up their security before they can drive adoption of AI at scale, Javaid said.
He referred to these factors as "three C's:" Cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity.
The second challenge enterprises face is the AI platform layer, figuring out how to use and deploy models and providing those models with access to the data they need, Javaid said.
And the third factor enterprises need is a turnkey AI solution, he said.
Orange's AI layer cake
Orange has capabilities at each layer, Javaid said.
On the infrastructure layer, Orange launched a connectivity platform to enable enterprises to connect to data with a fully cloud-like experience. Orange provides multi-cloud network-as-a-service, with SD-WAN and other security services, using AI to improve threat and vulnerability detection.
Data and AI sovereignty is an Orange strength, Javaid said. The company offers private cloud with a sovereign AI service across Europe, launched in March 2024. Orange partners with Large Language Model (LLM) providers in Euripe to enable enterprises to deploy local LLMs.
For the platform layer, Orange provides Live Intelligence to help enterprises of different sizes build generative AI systems. Orange has 73,000 employees using Live Intelligence.
On the solutions level, Orange offers a generative AI assistant for contact centers in partnership with Microsoft using the Copilot platform. Orange also provides consulting and change management services.
Enterprise AI use cases
As an example of an AI use case, a large healthcare provider uses an AI assistant to help solve the worldwide shortage of radiologists, Javaid said. Radiology equipment is deployed all over the world, in diverse environments, and Orange Business helped solve the problem of connecting the machines, getting imagery into the AI models, and then making a diagnosis available to doctors. It's a complex networking problem, involving moving high-resolution data in real-time through multiple compliance jurisdictions.
Additionally, Orange Business helped a Parisian metropolitan area deploy AI to 12,000 employees.
In another example, Orange Business helped a utility company deploy field engineers to fix customer equipment. "Once you have finished that work, you must write a detailed report and submit it to the workforce management system. This takes 90 minutes a week," Javaid said. Orange helped the company reduce the time spent doing that reporting work. The field engineer can talk to an AI assistant on the phone to generate the field completion report and submit it to the workforce management IT system.
Orange Business connects network-as-a-service and AI systems to enterprise applications with APIs. For example, an enterprise can use Orange Business network data to measure foot traffic in a particular location using mobile data. "If it's a retail center, how many people show up to that location at a certain time of the day? You can take the mobile data to do that type of forecasting, which is relevant for sales and marketing," he said.
Population density information is available with an API. A user provides the coordinates of a location, in longitude and latitude, and the service responds with the density of people within that location.
APIs are essential
To leverage these services, telcos must partner on consistent and standard APIs, through organizations such as the Camara Project and GSMA Open Gateway, Javaid said.
Network APIs are essential for telcos that want to succeed in the future, Javaid said. "It's a minimum that an enterprise expects," he said. "Customers want to consume everything as an API," Javaid said.
He added, "I cannot expose a capability to an enterprise customer just through a user interface. Every enterprise is also looking for APIs so that they can consume the services that we offer as part of their overall solutions. Every product that we develop, every capability, is available as an API."
As Javaid said, telcos worldwide are turning to AI — particularly AI factories, which are data centers optimized for AI workloads — to diversify beyond commodity connectivity. You can learn more about this trend in a free Fierce Network Research report: "AI sovereignty: Seizing the opportunity for transformative telco infrastructure investment"
In a panel at the FutureNet World conference, Orange's Bruno Zerbib, executive vice president and group technology and innovation officer, talked about how AI is part of a telco industry trend of setting strategy based on customer demand. Previously, telcos adopted a "build it and they will come" philosophy of rolling out strategic change, such as 3G to 4G to 5G, in the expectation that demand would materialize when the infrastructure was complete.
AI was a major theme of the conference. Among the presenters featuring AI was Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong CTO Damien Leong, who discussed how that company's 3 Hong Kong consumer service uses AI to troubleshoot user experience problems even when those problems did not originate on the telco network. For example, a user experiencing lousy video or music streaming will blame the telco network even when the problem originated outside that network, on the streaming service. However, once the problem is identified, 3 Hong Kong can work with the streaming provider to get the problem resolved quickly.
Like Orange, Canada's Telus built its own AI platform, which Telus calls Fuel iX, to boost employee productivity and generate new revenue. The platform is used by over 50,000 employees for coding, legal research, sales support and network operations. Telus is now commercializing Fuel iX and building sovereign AI infrastructure to support Canadian innovation. We interviewed Telus senior vice president and chief AI officer Jaime Tatis on the sidelines of FutureNet World.