Empowering Customers with GenAI: Lessons from Live Intelligence

In 2023, following the launch of ChatGPT a few months earlier, there was huge interest in the potential behind Generative AI (GenAI) at Orange Business. Learning more about the technology’s capabilities was the main driver behind the company joining the Early Access Program for Copilot for Microsoft 365 in September of that year – originally, 300 employees were part of the pilot scheme, but this was extended to 600 the following year. 

In line with its responsible approach, Orange Business had significant concerns about personal data management and data sovereignty from the outset. At that time, there were no Enterprise versions of the LLMs – everything was on the public cloud. It also observed growing use of ChatGPT among its own employees and was alarmed about the security implications of this ‘shadow GenAI’. Orange Business quickly decided to launch its own internal GenAI tool, which was later developed into the commercial platform Live Intelligence.

The company understood that value creation relied on adoption, and that adoption relied on trust –an insight subsequently borne out by industry research. Orange Business put trust, in the form of top-down governance, and democratized access to the technology at the heart of its GenAI deployment. 

Orange Business established a robust technical and legal framework ensuring no data submitted to a large language model (LLM) is stored or reused – data is processed solely to generate a response to each prompt. To reinforce this commitment, the company introduced a Responsible AI charter outlining clear, company-wide principles for AI usage. Orange Business also prioritized employee education, emphasizing both ethical and regulatory data practices. For instance, the company explicitly prohibited the use of GenAI for tasks that are not allowed under the EU AI Act, such as ranking candidates’ résumés for job openings. By setting transparent guidelines on appropriate GenAI use, it empowered employees to harness this technology securely, compliantly, and responsibly.

With these guardrails in place, Orange Business confidently gave over 80,000 people access to its GenAI tool. Striking the right balance between security and accessibility was crucial. If employees face too many obstacles when trying to use an approved GenAI tool, they’ll simply turn to unauthorized alternatives—the very risk it set out to eliminate. That’s why the company made it a priority to design Live Intelligence with a seamless, intuitive interface. By integrating it with its existing Single Sign-On system, it eliminated the need for new accounts or passwords, ensuring effortless access for all. This frictionless experience was essential to driving adoption across the organization. 

Responsibility for developing use cases expanded from top-level decision makers and expert teams to include business unit contributors. With safeguards in place, Orange Business recognized that frontline employees are uniquely positioned to spot where GenAI can have the biggest impact. 

Rather than tightly controlling how GenAI would be used, the company partnered with key departments, such as HR, finance, and marketing, to pinpoint the areas where this technology would deliver the greatest value. 

The Live Intelligence dashboard provides anonymized visibility into the most popular and useful GenAI assistants, enabling their industrialization and company-wide deployment. Some GenAI tools, such as the hugely popular PowerPoint generator assistant, were initiated by the central team, but many other GenAI assistants emerged from grassroots insights.

Live Intelligence offers advanced flexibility in GenAI budget management, enabling highly granular sharing of AI resources to better match each user’s needs and usage level. Each end-user is provided with a personal budget, which contains a certain amount of tokens. Tokens are small units of data –a word, character, or even part of an image or audio clip – that GenAI models use to process information and generate responses. Orange Business believes this offers a more accurate view of the true cost of GenAI, and Live Intelligence customers report that it helps reduce the expenses of their GenAI initiatives.

Tokens do more than measure usage—they also reveal GenAI’s true environmental cost. Each token processed by a model translates into energy use, carbon emissions, and water consumption. Live Intelligence makes this visible. The platform estimates the carbon footprint of each LLMs, through a personal carbon footprint dashboard, nudging users toward a responsible use of AI — a feature consistently praised by users. 

Two years after its launch, Live Intelligence has more than 15,000 daily users and 50,000 monthly users. Over 20,000 personal AI agents have been created, around 300 of which have been industrialized into “official” agents by central teams, typically saving employees over two hours per week. Frontline staff are also developing AI agents for specific roles, such as field engineers. This widespread adoption has also laid the foundation for the next stage of the company’s exciting GenAI journey: agentic AI.