- Javaid moves up from chief product and marketing officer at Orange Group's enterprise unit, Orange Business
- The Orange Group's ambitious goal is to generate more than 600 million euros in AI-driven value by 2028
- AI should empower people, not replace them, Javaid said
The Orange Group has a new AI head. The French telco appointed Usman Javaid as chief AI officer for the entire Orange Group, the company said Wednesday. Javaid is now chief product and marketing officer at Orange Business, the company's enterprise arm. He will report to Bruno Zerbib, the group's chief technology and innovation officer.
"He will help turn AI into a driver of transformation and value creation for the Group, its customers and its employees. In particular, he will aim to embed AI and agentic AI at the heart of Orange's operations, across networks, customer relations, operations and services for businesses," the company said in a statement .
The stakes are high for Javaid in his new role. "The Group has set itself the objective of harnessing AI to generate more than 600 million euros in value by 2028," the company said.
Javaid, who holds several patents, has served as chief product and marketing officer at Orange Business since April 2023, where he led the strategy, development and marketing of products and services as well as data and AI transformation. From 2019, he held leadership positions at Amazon Web Services, including responsibility for cloud services across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Before that, he worked at Vodafone.
Javaid succeeds Steve Jarrett, "whose work helped structure the Group's AI approach, establish strong technological foundations and position Orange among the most recognized players in the field of AI," the company said.
Javaid announced the new role in a LinkedIn post. "Building on Orange's exceptional technological foundations, our ambition is clear: to embed AI at the heart of everything we do—from networks and operations to customer experience and consumer & business services," he said. "My mission is to accelerate this transformation and help turn AI into a lasting source of value, innovation and competitive advantage for Orange."
He added, "Most importantly, I believe #AI should make us more human, not less. Its greatest promise is not replacing people, but empowering them—to create more, innovate faster, solve harder problems and unlock new forms of human potential."
Javaid notes that his first job out of university 22 years ago was at France Telecom R&D, which later became Orange Group. "Today, life has come full circle," Javaid said.
Javaid spoke with Fierce last year, describing AI as "one of the few lifelines left for the telco industry." He said AI provides a path to grow beyond cost-cutting. Orange Business supports enterprise AI at every layer, including infrastructure, platform, turnkey solutions and sovereign AI services.
In a recent AI initiative, Orange and France's CEA launched a joint research lab to trial "semantic communications." The five-year mission, called "AI-Native Communications," seeks to move beyond dropped or altered packets as a measure of network errors, and instead consider whether the intended meaning is understood by the receiver.