Orange joins list of CSPs targeting enterprise GenAI services

Orange Business has joined the small but growing of telcos who are drawing on their own experience of using GenAI to provide services to customers with the launch of its Live Intelligence offering.

“Many telecoms operators see strong potential for offering GenAI-as-a-service to their business customers, particularly in the SME market. In many cases they are taking the platform that they have built internally, and which sits on top of multiple LLMs, and offering that, as a service to their customers,” according to Mark Newman, Chief Analyst, TM Forum, author of an upcoming report on leveraging AI for service and value creation.

Orange initially developed its Live Intelligence service for its own internal use and says 50,000 of its employees have road-tested it over the last year. A multi-LLM, GenAI software-as-a-service, it aims to help employees of enterprises of all sizes and local authorities improve operational efficiency through the safe and managed use of GenAI.

It does this by providing access to a library of pre-set prompts to address common business GenAI use cases, such as analyzing a document, extracting important information from an email chain, writing meeting minutes, or drafting an agenda.

Orange Business sees data security and data sovereignty as key selling points of Live Intelligence, which initially launched in France, and will be available in other areas of Europe. Not only does it provide an alternative to uncontrolled adoption by employees of free online GenAI tools that could provoke data breaches, the data it uses will remain in Europe. And it comes with a dashboard to monitor how employees are using the GenAI, including the type of LLM.

In-house brains and partnerships

Jio, which is part of the Indian conglomerate, Reliance Group, is another example of how telcos are looking to turning their internal AI development usage into a business, and a potentially very large scale. In an annual general meeting in August of this year, Reliance leadership said Jio is embedding AI into all its processes and offerings and using real-time data to create end-to-end workflows, using a suite of tools and platforms built in-house, called Jio Brain.

“Jio Brain enables us to accelerate AI adoption across Jio, driving faster decisions, more accurate predictions, and better understanding of customer needs.” As a first step Reliance is introducing Jio Brain into other Reliance companies, but the hope is to offer it to external customers, too. Reliance anticipates "that by perfecting Jio Brain within Reliance, we will create a powerful AI service platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well.”

Singtel is another company with big AI ambitions. In October it announced RE:AI, a group of products and services that aims to make AI available to enterprises.

One of RE:AI’s offers is cloud-based enterprise AI capabilities delivered over 5G, using Paragon, its in-house 5G service orchestration platform for enterprises, according to Singtel. It will offer rapid access to AI environments, workspaces, models, tools and applications and and workspaces customized to any industry over 5G and even quantum-safe networks.

"Many enterprises and public sector customers have shown keen interest to bring AI into their operations. However, the high costs and long lead times for GPUs, the need for special environments to host them due to their intense energy utilization, the complexity of AI technology and the lack of talent are key friction points in their respective journeys," according to Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Digital InfraCo, in a company statement.

Singtel isn’t going it alone and emphasizes the importance of partnerships.

“RE:AI will foster a dynamic ecosystem of partners with distinctive capabilities and platforms to accelerate AI adoption to drive innovation and growth in Singapore and the region, sustainably. As we build on this ecosystem, we will attract global AI tech companies here to expand into the region with our market access. This is key to positioning Singapore as a regional AI.”

Orange, too, is partnering, including when it comes to the use of LLM models. Examples include its work with Meta and OpenAI to develop new artificial intelligence models trained on African languages that today are not understood by any GenAI model. It will start with Wolof and Pulaar, spoken by 16 million people and six million people, respectively, in West Africa.

In addition to partnerships, telcos will be wise to leverage their existing brands and data.
"Ultimately the success of these operator initiatives will be a function of whether they have enough data to provide differentiation in the services that they offer and whether they can target the market segments where they already have strong, trusted brands," believes Newman.