True to its commitments in the field of CSR, Orange Wholesale has undertaken significant endeavors to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its innovations, offering more secure, inclusive and sustainable connectivity services globally.
As AI is becoming a driving force of global business transformation, Orange Wholesale views its potential as a game-changer for delivering on its CSR commitments. Taking advantage of an advanced network transformation program and meaningful partnerships, Orange Wholesale has already started making global connectivity more responsible through several significant innovations.
AI represents a challenge in terms of traffic loads and network performance, but also offers significant opportunities to advance our carbon footprint reduction roadmap:
Through all these concrete applications, “AI is viewed as an investment, both in financial and carbon footprint terms, bringing positive returns on our road to net zero”, Romain Francon, CSR Director for Orange Wholesale explains. Logically, the carbon footprint of our own AI usage is itself subjected to an assessment.
AI also helps us help our customers be more virtuous: “AI is fully integrated in our go-to-market strategy, as it helps us integrate our customers’ CSR priorities into the design of our own services and better answer their RFPs”, Romain adds.
Partners are also helping us deliver this responsible AI into global connectivity services through major innovations. Our PoPs in Europe are already being upgraded with Ethernetics for optimized power management. Using AI-driven Smart Power Distribution Units to monitor and reduce energy usage at rack level makes Ethernetics save up to 15% power. More efficient infrastructure management is also achieved in our Telco towers with Kwarto. AI helps us use Kwarto’s “digital twin” building models to enhance occupation efficiency and anticipate maintenance operations, significantly reducing on-site interventions.
Augtera has a comparable impact on the sustainability of network operations. By aggregating and analyzing hardware data in real time, it can solve a growing number of incidents without maintenance teams having to step in. Finally, Dataiku leverages the power of AI for several processes related to quality of service like traffic routing optimization. And because Orange aims to promote a safer digital world as part of its CSR commitments, Dataiku also helps us identify fraudulent activity before it reaches users by monitoring voice traffic.
The Orange Group purpose to “ensure that digital services are well thought-out, made available and used in a more caring, inclusive, and sustainable way in all areas of our business” compels us to put CSR and ESG at the heart of all innovations. We therefore make sure that AI is used as an enabler giving our staff superpowers to address the challenges of tomorrow’s connectivity markets.
One of these superpowers, Romain Francon says, is to “help us identify the next disruptions. AI is great for brainstorming new ideas, propose more inclusive services and challenge our suppliers”.
An indispensable starting point is to make sure these AI tools are themselves exploited in accordance with our CSR and ESG principles. “First, the tools we use are selected for their optimized power drain, and more than that, we are all trained to use them responsibly”, Romain concludes.
Orange Wholesale’s rationale for developing innovative services resorting to AI follows a simple paradigm: AI has to be at the service of CSR, and CSR must be governing the use of AI.
