Orange Expands Partnership with Google Cloud to Use AI & GenAI

Google Cloud and Orange announced they have expanded their collaboration to deploy artificial intelligence, including gen AI, closer to Orange's and its customers' operations. 

Through the use of Google Distributed Cloud, Orange can meet local requirements for cloud environments, accelerate AI adoption and benefits for customers, and foster an open and value-driven approach.

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is a fully managed hardware and software solution that brings the power of Google's AI services to the Edge, air-gapped environments, and Cross-Cloud. Designed with AI and data-intensive workloads in mind, GDC will enable Orange to take a pivotal step towards accelerating AI adoption into its operations across the 26 countries it serves. The company is focusing on three areas with AI:

 - With GDC, Orange will get an environment to run sensitive network data and AI workloads that some country regulators may require to be local or on-premise. From capacity planning to root cause analysis, Orange can benefit from significant improvements in network planning and design through the automation of reporting, classification, and analysis.

 - Operational Efficiency: Orange will be able to run gen AI models on-premise in an environment that is very elegantly integrated into similar Vertex AI services on Google Cloud. Orange's operations and customer service teams will benefit from those AI models by getting the answers they need faster, while customers will experience a faster time-to-resolution and improved quality of service.

 - Improved Customer Experience: Beyond the contact center, Orange has leveraged AI and Google Cloud technology to deliver personalized recommendations for relevant phones, plans, and services–improving customer lifetime value. GDC also allows gen AI-based speech recognition to occur in each Orange country, bringing these powerful AI technologies even to countries without a Google Cloud region.

To achieve its goals of bringing AI capabilities into each of the regions it serves, Orange required a secure solution to enhance cloud services at a local level, while still meeting local regulatory requirements around security and data residency. Google Cloud worked with Orange from the concept stage onwards to co-design its Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) deployment, which allows Orange to establish a local cloud that delivers heightened resilience, particularly in challenging environments, while optimizing performance and reducing latency for critical workloads.

This collaboration will bring the cloud to Orange's own data centers, protecting sensitive workloads that must stay on-premises and also enabling Orange to filter extremely high-volume data, such as over one petabyte a day of network telemetry. By bringing the cloud into the data center via GDC, Orange is enabling faster deployment of AI applications for local teams, and fostering agility and responsiveness. Moreover, this collaboration opens up avenues for new business opportunities, as it makes it possible for use cases to be delivered across many Orange countries.

Orange and Google Cloud have collaborated since 2020 to fuel Orange's digital transformation through data and AI. Over the last three years, Orange has migrated 13 petabytes of data to Google Cloud and has many strategic use cases in production across ten countries running on Google Cloud. The two companies' shared passion for innovation has resulted in a collaboration that has brought secure, customizable, best-in-class solutions to customers across geographies and industries.