Operator has road-tested ‘Live Intelligence’ with 50,000 staff this year and wants to expand the service beyond France to Europe
Orange Business has launched a new multi-LLM solution it calls ‘Live Intelligence’ which it believes will help enterprises and government entities adopt AI more readily due to its ease of operation. The so-called “plug and play” service has been used internally by the operator and while it is initially targeting organisation in France, it says the service will be available “soon” across Europe.
The operator is keen to emphasise the sovereign nature of the service pointing out secure data remains hosted and managed in Europe – in contrast to many US-based rivals – meaning European organisations won’t need to compromise to adopt AI. In March, the Orange Business launched two trusted generative AI (GenAI) offers covering the infrastructure layer (IaaS) and applications (SaaS) bundled with a service wrap on professional services.
To launch these services, the operator partnered LightOn, a French start-up specialising in GenAI solutions. LightOn provides a “complete solution” with LLMs and intuitive business interfaces, which makes it extremely easy and understandable for average users to use and optimise. Orange Business emphasised at the time the services were supported by very high bandwidth servers and GPUs, hosted in Orange data centres in France on the trusted Cloud Avenue platform and operated by it.
‘Live Intelligence’ – which is available in SaaS mode – addresses the growing phenomenon of “Shadow AI,” which refers to the uncontrolled adoption by employees of free online solutions, exposing companies to the risk of sensitive data leaks.
Beyond the data sensitivities Orange is touting the service’s simplicity which it believes will accelerate adoption. This is pretty important if companies want to prove a return on investment for AI investments. In Australia, the government – a large Microsoft Copilot user – found in a survey that only a third of trial participants across classifications and job families used Copilot daily, despite users liking it.
Orange says users will get – via “a straightforward and intuitive interface” – access to a library of pre-set prompts, enabling them to address the most common use cases: analyse or summarise a document, extract important information from an email chain, write meeting minutes, draft an agenda, prepare interviews or edit articles.
The solution allows companies to monitor the deployment and use of GenAI, such as the type of LLM, the number of users, and a consumption dashboard which is important to prevent cost blowouts.
“Supporting business innovation through digital services is at the heart of our strategy,” said Orange Business CEO Aliette Mousnier-Lompré. “Live Intelligence enables all businesses, regardless of their size or sector, to leverage the power of GenAI to improve operational efficiency and customer experience without compromising the security of their data. AI is more than just a technology; it represents a fundamental shift in how we envision future applications.”
Expanding African language models
Somewhat overshadowed by the ‘Live Intelligence’ launch but by no means less important, Orange announced that it will partner with OpenAI and Meta to fine-tune AI Large Language models (LLMs) to understand regional languages across Africa that today are not understood by any GenAI model.
This project aims to develop custom AI models capable of allowing customers to communicate naturally in their local languages with Orange for customer support and sales. These open-source AI models will also be provided externally by Orange with a free license for non-commercial use such as for public health, public education, and many other services. Orange intends to help drive AI innovation in these regional languages including by collaborating on these new AI models with local startups and other technology companies.
The initiative, commencing in the first half of 2025 will initially focus on incorporating regional languages, namely Wolof and Pulaar, spoken by 16 million people and six million people, respectively, in West Africa. Orange’s long-term goal is to work with many AI technology providers to enable future models to recognise all African languages spoken and written across Orange’s 18-country footprint in the region.
By fine-tuning leading AI models such as OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ speech model and Meta’s ‘Llama’ text model with diverse examples of these languages, the partners reckon they will enable them to better understand these regional languages.
In addition to this regional African language recognition project, OpenAI and Orange have signed an agreement that will provide Orange with direct access to OpenAI’s models, available for the first time in Europe with data processing and hosting in European datacentres, enabling Orange to work on improving existing solutions across its footprint. Furthermore, this new partnership will also facilitate early access to OpenAI’s latest and most advanced AI models, including key use cases such as AI-based voice interactions with Orange customers.