Wherever you work, telephony is due an upgrade

Most organizations already have a patchwork of AI pilots yet struggle to connect them to specific business problems or scale anything beyond an initial proof of concept. One area of promise lies in modernizing corporate voice and meeting capabilities to support a distributed workforce.

Though messaging and video conferencing tools have expanded, voice remains a foundational element of human connection and commerce, with a significant majority of employees viewing voice calls as equally effective as in-person communication. Yet, legacy telephony systems and fragmented meeting platforms hinder the goal of improving employee experience. 

Conversations often remain undocumented and unaddressed, leading to knowledge erosion and compliance issues. With AI rising to the top of the IT agenda, voice and meetings are becoming the front door for many AI- and automation-led use cases, from agent assistance to knowledge mining.

Orange Intelligent Meetings: Turning conversation into searchable knowledge

A reliance on fragmented recordings, manual note-taking, and inconsistent follow-up can lead to key actions being missed, a lack of audit trail, or a chronic loss of institutional knowledge when staff change roles or retire. 

For many employees, their first experience of AI in the workplace will be Copilot summaries of Teams meetings. While this can go some way toward resolving issues, it requires a host to have a premium Copilot license and for the transcripts and summaries to be stored in a central and accessible location for AI. It is also platform-specific – Microsoft only. 

Working with AudioCodes, we have developed a low-cost, practical solution for any call or meeting. Orange Intelligent Meetings automatically generates meeting summaries, action items, and a fully searchable conversation archive across heterogeneous platforms, including Teams, Webex, and Zoom. It can also be used to record in-person meetings via a mobile app.

The solution is ideal for employees working in regulated environments, such as financial advisors or lawyers, as it offers Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS), which Copilot cannot do.

Some enterprises might be concerned about where the meeting transcripts and summaries are hosted. To ensure they remain compliant with data residency and sector-specific regulations, we offer two basic options with the possibility to extend to BYO: Orange Intelligent Meetings can run in Azure or within an Orange sovereign data center. 

Another differentiator is cost-efficiency. Orange Intelligent Meetings is ideal for workers who only need AI for meetings. At a fraction of the cost of a full Copilot license, enterprises can extend AI-generated meeting minutes to a much larger group of users. This is essential for organizations looking for AI return on investment (ROI).

One manufacturing customer achieved $3 million in annual productivity savings from a 500-employee deployment, where roughly 480,000 meetings were summarized. The gains came from small increments (e.g. 30 seconds saved per meeting), plus the ability to catch up on missed meetings via a concise summary, saving time for crucial tasks. Multiplied at scale, the numbers add up. 

Orange Extend: Embed corporate telephony in the mobile device

While Intelligent Meetings focuses on the content of meetings, Orange Extend focuses on where the meetings take place. According to a survey by Tango Networks, 57% of customer-facing workers are either hybrid or fully mobile² . Many of these frontline employees rely on personal mobile devices, often creating a “shadow voice” environment that operates outside corporate governance and recording. And when they are in the office, desk phones are becoming less popular as they are costly to maintain.

Our research found that 99% of IT managers would be willing to retire landlines in favor of mobile-only telephony using eSIM, while 96% of employees would accept a business eSIM on their personal phone to replace traditional desk phones. 

Powered by Tango, Orange Extend utilizes eSIM to provide a fully featured business line, complete with the user’s PBX identity and Teams integration, and embed it within a mobile device’s native dialer. Calls use the mobile network with quality-of-service controls and are routed through the corporate UC platform (e.g. Teams, Webex, Zoom, 8x8). They can be automatically recorded, monitored and reported like any other business call. Because the number is tied to the role rather than the individual, organizations can also avoid business contacts being stranded on personal mobiles when staff move on. 

Orange Extend is ideal for a diverse range of workers, including field staff, healthcare workers, frontline workers, home workers, and those in regulated industries.

A Swiss packaging manufacturer replaced 2,000 DECT handsets with Orange Extend. It gained €1 million in savings over three years through lower hardware and maintenance costs, simplified device management and fewer missed calls. Compliance teams benefited from consistent recording and auditability across mobile workers, site staff and office-based roles.

Direct Routing as a Service: Integrate cloud telephony and Teams 

For most enterprises, Microsoft Teams has become the central collaboration hub and it requires a robust, enterprise-grade voice capability. Direct Routing as a Service enables Teams to function as a full enterprise phone system by integrating it with our global SIP infrastructure. 

The telephony components are hosted within Evolution Platform - the Orange Business platform for connectivity, cloud, and cybersecurity services - and connect directly with an enterprise’s Microsoft 365 tenant. It is delivered as a managed service on a per-use, per-month basis. This as-a-service model makes it easier for IT teams to retire end-of-life IP-PBXs, consolidate disparate contracts and extend consistent dial plans, numbering schemes and policies to new sites. 

Many customers now run a mix of Microsoft Operator Connect, which connects them directly to certified operators like Orange, and Direct Routing when they need more complex integration with DECT, contact centers or local regulatory requirements. End users simply place and receive calls in Teams as normal, while the organization gains a more controllable platform on which it can layer analytics, recording and AI.

Market research giant Kantar recently moved to a global telephony environment utilizing Direct Routing and Operator Connect options delivered through the Business Together with Microsoft portfolio, enabling full PSTN capabilities for their Teams workforce. In highly regulated countries, such as China, Orange set up an AudioCodes Session Border Controller (SBC) to connect cloud services to local telecom infrastructure, ensuring regulatory compliance and quality of service. The move has also enabled Kantar to reduce costs by over 50% compared to legacy telephony systems.

Low-risk path to productivity

The integration of these three capabilities provides enterprises with a low-risk path to productivity and efficiency gains. Direct Routing as a Service standardizes how calls flow through Teams; Orange Intelligent Meetings captures and structures the content of those calls; and Orange Extend extends that governed environment to mobile workers, without forcing them to carry a second device. These three new features within our telephony portfolio will help enterprises move beyond legacy infrastructures, silos, and inefficiency towards a workplace that is more productive and better connected. 

¹ https://www.forrester.com/predictions/technology-2025/
² https://tango-networks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Tango-Stats-Infographic-v8-web.pdf