Google Cloud and Orange today announced they have expanded their collaboration to deploy artificial intelligence, including gen AI, closer to Orange's and its customers' operations. Through the use of Google Distributed Cloud, Orange can meet local requirements for cloud environments, accelerate AI adoption and benefits for customers, and foster an open and value-driven approach.

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is a fully managed hardware and software solution that brings the power of Google's AI services to the Edge, air-gapped environments, and Cross-Cloud. Designed with AI and data-intensive workloads in mind, GDC will enable Orange to take a pivotal step towards accelerating AI adoptionits operations across the 26 countries it serves. The company is focusing on three areas with AI:

• Smarter Networks: With GDC, Orange will get an environment to run sensitive network data and AI workloads that some country regulators may require to be local or on-premise. From capacity planning to root cause analysis,  Orange can benefit from significant improvements in network planning and design through the automation of reporting, classification, and analysis.

• Operational Efficiency: Orange will be able to run gen AI models on-premise in an environment that is very elegantly integratedsimilar Vertex AI services on Google Cloud. Orange's operations and customer service teams will benefit from those AI models by getting the answers they need faster, while customers will experience a faster time-to-resolution and improved quality of service.

• Improved Customer Experience: Beyond the contact center, Orange has leveraged AI and Google Cloud technology to deliver personalized recommendations for relevant phones, plans, and services–improving customer lifetime value. GDC also allows gen AI-based speech recognition to occur in each Orange country, bringing these powerful AI technologies even to countries without a Google Cloud region.

"We have a mission to accelerate value creation for Orange with every job, every network, and every customer experience super-powered by responsible AI. Orange sees enormous value in AI across every dimension of our business," said Christel Heydemann, CEO of Orange Group. "This partnership with Google Cloud and the cutting-edge solutions announced today are foundational to Orange achieving AI at scale and is a major step towards unlocking significant value from all of our data."

To achieve its goals of bringing AI capabilitieseach of the regions it serves, Orange required a secure solution to enhance cloud services at a local level, while still meeting local regulatory requirements around security and data residency. Google Cloud worked with Orange from the concept stage onwards to co-design its Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) deployment, which allows Orange to establish a local cloud that delivers heightened resilience, particularly in challenging environments, while optimizing performance and reducing latency for critical workloads.