Orange: Technology for the sake of technology goes nowhere

French operator group Orange gathered journalists and analysts for a roundtable in London to discuss its ‘innovation and technology’ strategy, which was hosted by Bruno Zerbib, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer (pictured above left) and Laurent Leboucher, Group Chief Technology Officer and SVP Orange Innovation Networks (pictured above right).

The core messaging centred around AI, both in terms of the wider landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) which practically every industry is working out how to integrate with, and what Orange itself is doing with AI with regard to automation and predictive networks.

“The thing that has become more and more important to us over the last year – it started years ago, but really it has been accelerating the last year – has been the impact of artificial intelligence, and it has really two different chapters,” said Zerbib. “The first one is the fact that we are now using artificial intelligence to make Orange a better company across the board. We've been training, we have about 40,000 people that have been using our AI capabilities as tools within the company. So [that’s] just an incredible amount of investment in terms of training.

“The way we think about AI is not to replace humans, but to augment humans, to give them more capabilities, more tools. From the way they're going to help interact with customers, to the way we're designing our network and network capacity, making sure we optimise the capacity of our network…. also being smarter about the way we deal with outages – we’ve become much more predictive in the way we design our network. So that has become very efficient.”

Zerbib also touched on the importance of industry collaboration in pursuit of getting the most out of AI:

“We want to make sure that our network uses AI to be much smarter. We also want to make sure that we have the best network to deliver AI. We cannot do that alone. We don't believe we can build something at Orange that the other telcos are not going to be using… it doesn't work like that. There's no scenario where OpenAI only works with Orange and then has to figure out another solution with the other telcos. So to some extent, we believe that at the telco level, at that level of the entire industry, we have to tackle this together, and obviously we’re working with GSMA and others to make sure that we have a consistent approach towards solving that deep problem.”

Zerbib also spoke about getting away from the generational concept of 4G/5G/6G progression as a marker of technological progression, and how its operations are becoming more defined by incremental software rollouts.

“The thing that we've been working on the last few years is to make sure that we move away from the generational paradigm of moving from 4G to 5G to 6G… we’ve become much more software defined. So our entire infrastructure has been evolving to a set of capabilities exposed through a platform play – through APIs. And essentially, we're debating whether or not we should compare ourselves to hyperscalers. I think it's always a mistake to compare yourself, because it creates the wrong kind of metaphor. But in many, many ways, we've learned a lot from the AWSs, Microsofts and Googles of the world. We work very closely with them, and so we have adopted a play where our infrastructure looks more and more like a cloud.”

APIs have long been touted as a potential new wellspring of revenue for cash strapped operators, though after some initial buzz, its probably safe to say we’re yet to see anything resembling a golden goose hit the market thus far. Leboucher believes there is much to look forward to on this front, however.

“I think there is a lot of expectation around geolocation [which could] be used to add interesting features for fraud mitigation, with the consent of the end user. Think of mobile payments… a bank obviously is interested in mitigating fraud, for instance, if your card is stolen. It's interesting to look at the geolocation of your smartphone, because at the same time, it can at least send a red flag if your smartphone is far away.

“The same geolocation could be used also for B2B use cases, for looking at a fleet of trucks or AGVs in a smart factory. So you have different kind of use cases, maybe with different granularity or quality parameters that you need for geolocation - for indoor geolocation, not only a geolocation with satellites. You can also have ‘quality on demand’ for different kind of use cases. So I think identity fraud mitigation and carrier billing is the easiest part. This is a starting point, and today we know that telcos could really start to show that this is already available…. but then there is a high potential on some new use cases leveraging 5G and 5G SA, and this is really what matters for us.”

Meanwhile, Zerbib spoke candidly about the importance of keeping the customer in mind when developing new technology like 5G SA or APIs – or to put it another way, to work out what the point of it is for the customer rather than simply crow about technological milestones.  

“I think we are on the cusp of a new set of use cases. I was listening to Steve Jobs yesterday… he was being asked about technology and things like that, it’s from 1997. He was saying ‘we have to work backwards from the customer use cases.’ I think in the telecommunication world, we’re obsessed with technology. We talked about APIs, we talking about quality on demand - the reality is, what are the things that people want to do that they can’t do today, and if they could do it, would they do it, for what kind of price? And that's where we're spending most of our time and energy right now. It's working with the people who are figuring out those new, emerging use cases, and giving them the very easy way to do it going forward. And so I think the big revolution in telcos is to be much more ‘outsighted’, as opposed to, say ‘hey, we have created 5G SA, that's great, the world's going to change.’

“No, it's trying to figure out, we have 5GG SA, why? And what are the use cases? And if you don't have use cases, then technology, for the sake of technology, goes nowhere. And that's really why the launch of 5G has been underwhelming, because there was no real discussion about what purpose… what was the end game? I think what we're seeing is that we're getting smarter, talking about 5G not as a technology play anymore, but let's focus on those emerging use cases, and let's connect the dots between what we could do, but more importantly, what people need. And that's new for the telecommunication industry.”