Don’t write off telcos; Orange Business is showing how to reinvent for real impact

Telcos have become the poster child for transformation fatigue—asset-heavy, slow-moving, and outpaced by hyperscalers. But one global player is refusing to play that part. Orange Business Services (Orange Business) is dismantling its legacy and rebuilding as an AI-native, platform-led partner that’s winning back enterprise relevance. Enterprise buyers under pressure to deliver flexible, sovereign, and resilient digital infrastructure should pay close attention to this trend.

Against this backdrop, Orange Business is breaking the mold under the leadership of Aliette Mousnier-Lompré and her diverse leadership team. The company is mid-flight in a bold transformation program to become a next-generation telco, focusing on customer, operational, and employee experiences enabled by AI, platforms, and services. It aims to deliver a new-age distribution architecture, higher network bandwidth, and lower latency to provide the capacity, resilience, and flexibility needed as agent-to-agent interactions increase. The program pirouettes around a series of common themes: a simplified product portfolio, a new operating model, and a new IT stack and digital experience.

Four core initiatives hold value for enterprises

HFS Research recently attended Orange Business’ Analyst Event in Paris, themed “Insights 2025—It works better when it works together,” where four initiatives and their value to enterprises stood out.

1. The Evolution Platform will transform service delivery

The Evolution Platform is a cloud-based SD-WAN platform that powers connectivity, cybersecurity, and cloud services. It’s composable, modular, self-service, and pay-as-you-go, with 15 solutions (plans for 25 at full scale). The platform should help chief information officers (CIOs) simplify vendor complexity and control costs with a single, flexible backbone.

2. The Live Intelligence generative AI platform caters to customer employees’ usage expectations

After a successful internal rollout to 70,000 users, Orange Business is releasing Live Intelligence in Europe on its proprietary Cloud Avenue platform. Live Intelligence is a sovereign, multi-LLM SaaS solution that combines pre-configured prompts, dashboards, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine, APIs for integration and customization. The platform is now in launch and delivering use cases for CIOs in summarization, parsing, drafting, and knowledge management without having to send data to a hyperscaler outside of Europe.

3. NewCo exemplifies “what Orange Business is becoming”

Orange Business is transforming into an AI-native, platform-centric organization. NewCo is an internal transformation program developed in partnership with ServiceNow, targeting deployment in Q4 2025. Enterprises should expect seamless customer, operational, and employee journeys.

4. Trust and sovereignty reign

Orange Business’ sovereign multi-LLM platform, EU-based data centers, and layered compliance architecture directly address the evolving buyer expectations and demand for sovereign cloud and security. HFS has researched extensively how geopolitical and economic impacts have intensified the demand for these capabilities. Our surveys revealed a significant maturity gap: While over half of the organizations in regulated sectors have active measures in place to protect data control and sovereignty, others lag significantly behind. This reinforces a dual imperative: CIOs want jurisdictional assurance, and they should expect sovereignty to extend across infrastructure, platforms, and AI models.

Platform and service capabilities are fusing—and paying off

In her keynote address, Mousnier-Lompré shared some turnaround metrics, including a 15% increase in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) since 2021. Over the past year, the company achieved zero renewal losses, a 9-point increase in net promoter score (NPS), a 4-point increase in employee NPS, and a 9% reduction in carbon emissions.

Orange Business’ plan seems to be working. New clients are adopting the next-gen services, and existing clients are staying and reporting a better overall experience. Its recent flagship wins include Mondelez, Heineken, and JTI. This change has been driven by a wholesale switch in culture and mindset, making Orange Business much easier to engage and collaborate with.

Five key pillars define this transformation

1. Value-led approach

Usman Javaid, Chief Products and Marketing Officer, discussed the shift from product to value proposition selling, focusing on the customer, operational, and employee experiences. Sales and management have been comprehensively trained. Buyers should expect solutions aligned to outcomes—not just tech features—making procurement easier to justify and measure.

2. Choice and flexibility

Services are now on-demand and pay-as-you-go, enabled by modular and composable solutions. IT leaders could gain more control over cost and architecture without long-term lock-in.

3. Partner leadership

While regular players still feature in ecosystems, they are now managed proactively as partners, channels, and co-innovators. Also, new and local players are being introduced to de-risk supply chains and deliver “sovereignty-as-a-service,” reducing reliance on global vendors and strengthening compliance in regulated environments.

4. The drive to services

The combination of platform and service capabilities has been successful. Mousnier-Lompré noted that “every dollar of platform revenue yields another two dollars for services.” Clients potentially benefit from deeper integration and more support as platforms turn into service engines.

5. A culture of “readiness”

COO Mireille Helou said her mission is to make operations invisible through a “readiness mindset”—the ability to anticipate versus adapt. Helou also highlighted the cultural aspects Orange Business is building into the AI Academy and the role of embedded machine learning observability in detecting anomalies before they become incidents. Clients should expect faster issue resolution and fewer service disruptions as operations shift from reactive to predictive.

Orange Business’ reinvention story is compelling overall. Its continued success will depend on executing across three fronts: scaling AI-native operations beyond flagship use cases, navigating rising complexity in sovereignty assurance, and aligning its platform-service flywheel with hyper-personalized industry outcomes. Each of these will shape how effectively enterprise buyers can modernize operations, meet sovereignty demands, and deliver personalized digital experiences at scale.

The Bottom Line: It’s time to take telcos seriously again, because Orange Business is living proof that they can change.

Orange Business was in a tough place when Mousnier-Lompré took over the reins in 2022. The team has acknowledged that the turnaround is underway and a return to profitable growth is just around the corner. What stands out is its vibrant leadership and a consistent, relentless, and inclusive culture, which should be good news for existing and new clients.

CIOs should look beyond hyperscalers and reconsider what a transformed telco can deliver.