Building on their ongoing collaboration, Orange announces it will deploy OpenAI's new advanced open-weight reasoning models, 'gpt-oss-120b' and 'gpt-oss-20b', in its own trusted infrastructure, making customers' data even safer and meeting the growing demand for sovereign, state-of-the-art AI solutions. As an early access partner, Orange is one of the first companies globally to deploy OpenAI's new open models. This joint effort marks a significant step forward in the shared missions of Orange and OpenAI to harness AI for the benefit of society.
AI Anywhere: accelerating Orange's AI solutions
The new advanced open-weight models from OpenAI enables Orange to flexibly deploy them across a variety of environments – from Orange's large regional cloud data centers in France to small on-premises servers or edge sites. By maintaining control over the deployment environment, Orange can host AI workloads locally across any of its 26-country footprint, whilst safeguarding sensitive data and complying with diverse and evolving national regulations across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
Furthermore, Orange's deep AI engineering talent enables it to customize and distill the OpenAI models for specific tasks, effectively creating smaller sub-models for particular use-cases, while ensuring the protection of all sensitive data used in these customized models. This process facilitates innovative use-cases in network operations and will enable Orange to build on its existing suite of 'Live Intelligence' AI solutions for enterprises, as well as utilizing it for its own operational needs to improve efficiency, and drive cost savings.
Responsible AI: Right Tool, Right Problem
The OpenAI collaboration exemplifies Orange's commitment to Responsible AI, where the emphasis is on pragmatism and sustainability as much as performance. Orange's 'frugal' AI approach –strives for high performance with less computing power, less data, and less energy.
Crucially, these gpt-oss models from OpenAI fit perfectly into Orange's Responsible AI framework, enabling it to adapt the models to the specific use case, thereby better controlling the environmental impact and operational costs. Additionally, as Orange can run the models in its own data centers, it can directly manage and optimize the power consumption of the customized models to reduce emissions.
Inclusive AI for Africa
Another core focus of this collaboration is to drive digital inclusion and AI innovation across Africa. With access to OpenAI's gpt-oss models, coupled with Orange's skills to fine-tune them, Orange's pioneering initiative to include several African languages in AI models will be greatly accelerated.
This will enable Orange's customers across its 18-country footprint in the region to communicate naturally in their local languages with customer support, sales and marketing. In the future, Orange will release the customized AI models in open source for free, to local government authorities to use across its public services.
A Wide Range of High Value Orange Use Cases
The deployment of OpenAI's open-weight reasoning models will also contribute to the development of numerous innovative applications and services to improve the daily lives of all Orange customers. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Natural language understanding in multiple languages across Orange's countries for voice assistants and chatbots, providing faster and more accurate and more efficient technical and sales support.
- Smarter Networks: Using AI to improve the quality and resilience of its networks, for example by enabling Orange to more easily explore and diagnose complex network issues with the help of AI. This can be achieved with trusted AI models that operate entirely within Orange sovereign data centers where Orange has complete control over the use of sensitive network data. This ability to create customized, secure, and sovereign AI models for network use cases is a key enabler in Orange's mission to achieve higher levels of automation across all of its networks.
- Business Solutions: Using its expertise, Orange can also offer custom AI solutions leveraging these new OpenAI open-weight gpt-oss models to its enterprise customers such as AI chatbots, advanced voice recognition-based services, and AI analysis of sensitive data tailored to specific customer needs.
Orange and OpenAI see this collaboration as a blueprint for responsible deployment of state-of-the-art AI at scale. Building on Orange's existing use of OpenAI's advanced models —including internal GenAI toolkits—this next step expands Orange's model mix with the latest OpenAI open-weight reasoning models. By locally deploying OpenAI's leading AI models in a way that is ethically governed and customized to meet specific needs, Orange will set a new benchmark in the telecom industry for AI excellence.
“This collaboration with OpenAI is foundational to our strategy of using state-of-the-art AI models that are both trusted and responsible,” said Steve Jarrett, Chief AI Officer, Orange. “This strategy drives new use cases to address sensitive enterprise needs, help manage our networks, enable innovating customer care solutions including African regional languages, and much more. The most advanced AI, like these new OpenAI open models, and our world-class team of AI experts allow us to balance value generation while mitigating cost and environmental impact, in line with our Responsible AI approach.”
Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI, said: “Our ongoing work with Orange shows how forward-thinking businesses can use our open models to solve real-world problems—from boosting network efficiency to improving African language support, they are delivering meaningful benefits directly to their customers.”
