Orange launched its strategic plan for the next five years, Engage 2025, last December and AI-enabled innovation was one of the four pillars of the group's future success. This breaks into four parts, as shown below. The 2025 strategy states, "Our ambition is as strong as our social commitments are firm. And we will never think of one without the other" (see last section of article on inclusivity). Lugagne-Delpon said at the online briefing, "We believe that AI can bring value to almost every phase of the network lifecycle – so network planning and design to optimise the efficiency of investment, operations for advanced monitoring, smarter maintenance and better security, and also optimisation to populate a number of operation processes and also optimise the performance and the use of resources." He went on to describe a number of use cases.

C-SON (centralized self-organized network) technology has been in use for a number of years to automate the configuration of a base stations, noted Jarrett's colleague, Emmanuel Lugagne-Delpon, SVP at Orange Labs Networks, and now it is being enhanced in two ways using AI capabilities (see the graphic above). The first is "predicting the evolution of the traffic of a cell and the congestion of the cell. The tool is making decisions to re-route traffic to neighbouring base stations, to help avoid congestion, improve customer service and make better use of network resources," noted Lugagne-Delpon. The second is using real-time traffic predictions to switch modules (such as antennas) off when not needed to reduce power consumption, which can cut base station energy consumption by a few per cent, stated the Orange executive. "In these instances we can close the loop – AI is not only providing data but is also taking decisions and actions and the use case is automated," he added.

Orange highlighted the importance of data and AI in its innovation model, marking their use as crucial for developing smarter networks and enhancing operational efficiency. At a webinar organised by the company today (18 May), SVP of Orange Labs Networks Emmanuel Lugagne-Delpon said AI could "bring value to almost every phase of the network lifecycle", including planning and design, investment optimisation, smart maintenance and security. He pointed to a use case from Spain where AI and machine learning (ML) were used to determine which sites were most profitable and how to reduce churn levels. This delivered a 10 per cent to 20 per cent improvement in its capex efficiency, with the operator now planning to replicate the model in other markets. In another example, Orange used AI to detect international call fraud, reducing related costs by €37 million, an approach Lugagne-Delpon said was "highly replicable" for other transactions.