How democratizing GenAI tools delivers value from these investments?

Orange’s bold decision to roll out its proprietary GenAI platform—Live Intelligence—to every employee in 2023 has sparked a wave of innovation across the organization. Two years later, Live Intelligence now has between 12,000 to 15,000 daily users and serves up to 48,000 employees each month. This surge in adoption has empowered staff to create over 20,000 personal AI agents, with approximately 300 elevated to enterprise-grade, "official" tools that each save employees about two hours every week. On the front lines, field engineers are developing custom AI agents tailored to their unique challenges, demonstrating the technology’s transformative reach. Already, 50,000 Orange employees are fully trained to use GenAI—laying a strong foundation for the company’s future as a leader in AI-powered productivity and innovation.

Orange’s experience demonstrates that the route to true GenAI value lies not in containment, but in bold, responsible enablement. By implementing robust guardrails and fostering a culture of trust, organisations can empower their people to harness GenAI safely and productively. The secret is a combination of top-down governance and bottom-up innovation.
 

From the outset, Orange’s priority was data protection—a concern shared by both the organisation and its employees. As GenAI tools like M365 Copilot and Live Intelligence were introduced, questions such as “Where is my data going?” and “What data can I use?” naturally arose. We responded with clear commitments: no data sent to large language models (LLMs) would be retained or reused, and all data would be hosted securely within Europe. Even when web search capabilities were added, we ensured full compliance with these strict protocols.

We aligned GenAI adoption with our core business strategy and clearly defined its expected impact on network operations, contact centres, and office productivity. This transparency built trust by showing staff that GenAI was meant to support future success, not reduce jobs.

We also ensured that our senior leaders were very visibly involved in the initiative. We developed targeted education for senior leaders and customised training for the Executive Committee. Our CEO, Aliette Mousnier-Lompré, attended key meetings and shared her experience of Live Intelligence, signalling that GenAI is a strategic business asset, not just an IT tool.

This rigorous approach set the tone for a culture of responsible innovation. By establishing clear technical and legal frameworks, Orange gave employees the confidence to experiment with GenAI, safe in the knowledge that their data—and the company’s reputation—were protected.

While strong governance is essential, value creation truly accelerates when innovation is democratised. Rather than restricting GenAI to a small group of experts, Orange made Live Intelligence available to its entire workforce—over 100,000 employees. Staff were encouraged to explore the technology, identify relevant use cases in their daily workflows, and develop solutions that addressed real business challenges. 

Our experience has shown that employees are eager to embrace GenAI in their daily work—provided they have access to tools that are straightforward, secure, and trustworthy. The key to unlocking widespread adoption, however, has been radical transparency. With Live Intelligence, every employee can not only create and share AI assistants, but also see and understand all system settings and prompts.

This open approach has fueled ongoing education, sparked creativity, and ensured early excitement translates into lasting engagement. The tool’s impressive satisfaction rate of 8,3/10 reflects genuine enthusiasm among employees, many of whom have become advocates—organizing grassroots initiatives like Live Intelligence cafés and team hackathons to inspire and support their peers. This culture of openness and collaboration is driving sustained transformation across the organization. 

To truly unlock value from GenAI innovation, it is essential to actively monitor how these tools are used and industrialise those services with the greatest potential for widespread impact. Live Intelligence was built with privacy at its core—no personally identifiable information is stored, as pledged in our employee charter—while still enabling us to track adoption through usage data and the creation of AI assistants by staff.

A cornerstone of our GenAI tool is a dashboard that provides clear oversight of all AI activity. This visibility not only helps organisations keep tabs on costs and carbon emissions but also empowers employees to make informed choices. By enabling users to select the most appropriate large language model for their needs, Live Intelligence puts control firmly in employees’ hands—giving them responsibility for managing both expenditure and environmental impact. This sense of agency is key to fostering responsible, sustainable use of GenAI across the business.

This widespread adoption hasn’t just boosted current productivity; it has laid the groundwork for the next phase: agentic AI. With a third of Orange’s workforce now fully trained on GenAI, the company is poised for even greater innovation across its business lines.

Significantly, our success stands in stark contrast to the experience of many other companies. Despite billions invested in GenAI, recent studies show that most organisations have yet to realise measurable impact—not due to model quality or regulation, but because of their approach. By combining rigorous governance with open access and employee empowerment, Orange has become a rare success story in the GenAI field.

The lesson is clear: GenAI should not be seen as a tool to impose upon employees, but as a digital colleague that empowers everyone. By being bold—but not rash—organisations can unlock the true value of GenAI, minimising risks while unleashing creativity across all levels of the business. For those ready to let the genie out of the lamp, the rewards can be genuinely transformative.

To learn more about Orange’s successful implementation of Live Intelligence and the insights this can provide for your own GenAI initiative, download "The Adoption Advantage: Why GenAI’s True Value Lies in Everyone’s Hands."