- Orange didn’t want its employees to become too dependent on any one particular AI model
- So, it created an internal platform that offers employees a variety of AI models, which Orange can monitor and control
- Now, Orange Business is selling access to the platform to its enterprise customers
The Orange Group has created an internal AI platform called Live Intelligence in order to provide its employees with a variety of AI models for their use. Live Intelligence is working so well that now, Orange Business is selling it to its enterprise customers.
Live Intelligence offers employees a number of AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, LightOn’s Paradigm, Mistral AI, as well as some open-source AI models.
Vincent Garnier, SVP of Data and AI at Orange Business, said Orange saw employees using ChatGPT, and it didn’t want them to become dependent on any one particular third-party model or to share internal company data indiscriminately.
The company had already built its own data center to keep its data sovereign. So, it decided to use this data center to also host a number of different AI models. “We’re drinking our own orange juice,” joked Garnier. “We wanted to have sovereign capacity, and we wanted to keep control.”
He added, “It doesn't mean that we don't want to use the public cloud, but we wanted to keep optionality and control on some of our data because we have very sensitive data. It's just a way to better manage the AI.”
Now, 100,000 people from Orange Group have connected to live intelligence, with about 60,000 employees connecting on a monthly basis.
Orange built the experience layer for people to access the different models. Employees can use the models they want, within limits. For instance, Garnier said that Claude is “very expensive, which is concerning for Orange’s CFO.” So, employees who want to use Claude must have a compelling reason.
Orange is also deploying agentic capabilities within Live Intelligence. Apparently, Orange’s salespeople love being able to combine data that’s internal to the company along with external data. And top executives at the company have created AI agents to capture information about possible M&A targets from internal and external sources.
Enterprise users
The company has also sold usage of Live Intelligence to 150 of its enterprise customers.
From the enterprise’s perspective, it's a platform that they can plug into, using Orange’s data center or another cloud. They can then select the AI models they want, and if they want a sovereign option, then they will have to select an open-source model that Orange has already secured.
Garnier said, “At the origin, we did not foresee that we could sell it, but because it has some value for us, we decided to create it for businesses. And we will be accelerating in the course of 2026 because we think that it has some traction.”
He said when the Trump administration recently pulled Anthropic’s most powerful AI model for a couple of weeks, that actually gave more value to Live Intelligence because companies realized they might need to quickly pivot from one AI model to another so that their systems aren’t vulnerable to the whims of the U.S. government.
“What we provide is a catalog of AI models that you can utilize and that you can plug directly within your process, so we are making the shift easier from one model to the other,” he said.
Ultimately, Orange’s goal isn’t so much to help people be more productive or to save time. It’s to create new revenue streams.
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