Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: It's not a technology issue. It's definitely a people project that we need to work on and it's a collective vision that we need to share together.
So what we did on changing the way people work and embracing the new capabilities offered by generative AI is that we decided that we were very clear that there will always be a human in the loop.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hi, this is Josh Burson.
Welcome to the what Works podcast where Josh Berson company analysts talk with innovative HR and business leaders about what's really working in talent, technology and the future of work.
[00:00:44] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Kathy Anders, senior Vice President of Research and global industry Analyst at the Josh Burson Company and I'm thrilled to talk with Laurent Ophis, Chief People Officer at Orange Business, about the company's AI transformation and AHA's role in it. Laurent, so great to have you. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Thank you for inviting me. I'm so excited as well.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: Sounds great.
[00:01:07] Speaker D: So tell us more about your experience and your role at Orange.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: I am the Chief People Officer at Orange Business.
We are working with our clients to help them in their digital transformation journey. So we are covering the cloud services, the connectivity services, data AI and cyber security.
[00:01:27] Speaker D: So tell us more about your background because obviously you're Chief HR officer and we're always interested in learning where people are coming from and how they're coming to this position. So how did you get into this role?
[00:01:39] Speaker A: I started my career in finance in mergers and acquisitions. So nothing really to do with hr, but then I've been able to work on different major transformation programs for different, different companies. That's what led me to the position as Chief People Officer at Orange Business. And the interesting story is that I was actually heading transformation for from Orange Business before taking on the new role as Chief People Officer. So now I am implementing part of what I worked on. And of course there are new things because it was four years ago, so things have been changing very fast, but it's definitely great and especially in Orange Business because. Because we have been moving really from a traditional legacy telco operator to a digital services integrator. So this move was actually a matter of life or death because our traditional business was completely evaporating and we had no other option than to really embrace this new journey, this change towards digital services, digital integration.
Just to give you an example, we have this tool which is called labib, that we are using for contract management.
When you are in the type of businesses that we are in, you have to analyze hundreds and thousands of pages of contracts to know how you can implement a price increase linked to inflation, or actually an upgrade on the capabilities that are provided to these clients in this part of the world and so on. And basically, people were spending in our teams many weeks sometimes to come up with the right information to solve a specific problem or to actually answer and provide the right contractual terms to the client when the client was asking us for an upgrade. We use this tool, labib, based on generative AI, to completely reinvent the way we were addressing this type of activity. And what was actually taking us weeks or many days is now taking us less than three hours. So, of course, when you have teams of contract managers who have been working on this for years and you have this new tool coming, you have two groups of people. You have those who see it as a threat because they feel that, okay, my job is gone and we need to support these people and to help them move and to help them understand where their value sits. And you have the other group of people who actually sees it as a great opportunity to actually dedicate their time of what brings the most value to our clients and to our customers. This example is very striking to me because you can see the impact of generative AI. It's not just few minutes or hours that you gain per week, but it's completely disrupting the way people work. And it's also disrupting the way people identify the value that they bring working for organization. And we have had to really push forward the new ways of working, the new ways of learning, because learning is not anymore a nature initiative. It's really a business capability at the edge of AI, because the information is so easily available that it really makes learning a key differentiator compared to something that is just done by the tool. And we really needed to change our culture, to embrace the new capabilities, but also to make sure that we were clear about the fact that our employees deliver value. That is absolutely critical. And of course, we are using generative AI as well to deliver value to our customers. But the way we are positioning the human aspects in implementing the generative AI in the way we work has been absolutely instrumental in the successes that we have had. Again, linked to learning, but it's more linked to culture as well.
[00:05:40] Speaker D: No, that's so fantastic. Obviously, even if I don't know a lot about your business, I can totally understand that this role of the contract managers was changing significantly. Can you give us a little bit more detail on how you prepared the organization and people?
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's really my true conviction is that it's not A technology issue. It's definitely a people project that we need to work on. And it's a collective vision that we need to share together.
So what we did on changing the way people work and embracing the new capabilities offered by Generative AI is that we decided that we were very clear that there will always be a human in the loop. And it was very important because it was based on two key convictions. One, it could have been easier to say, okay, we let 30,000 people go of the company and then we rehire 5,000 who are really experts in generative AI, but that's not the culture of the company. And when I say human always in the loop, basically it goes through different steps. We have the technology, but first we need to identify what can be done by generative AI or by agentic AI and what can be done by our employees and where the value resides. The second step, which is very important is of course you need to program or you need to tell what generative AI is going to, or agentic AI is going to deliver for you. The third part, which is very important as well, is that you need to control and monitor what's happening. Because everybody knows that there are hallucinations, you can have results that are not at all what you expected. And it goes with the fourth element, which is around the fact that then you need to have a proper usage of what comes out of generative AI. And the fifth part, which is to me the most important one, is that the responsibility resides with the human being, meaning that you can outsource an activity or task to to AI, but the responsibility still remain human. So when there is a problem, it's the human being which will be responsible. So this human always in the loop type of approach was absolutely critical also to reassure our employees to reassure the fact that they can be part of the adventure if they decide to grow and learn.
The company will grow thanks to their desire to improve and upskill themselves and embrace these changes. And it has been absolutely key to help our employees to also understand the risks around Generative AI, because some of them were very happy that it was saving them a lot of time in their day to day activities, but they sometimes didn't really understand the risks. And we have our own internal tool within the company called Live Intelligence. It uses internal information. So we only are training the models on our own information. And the condition to use this tool was that people need to be trained in terms of ethical usage of generative AI and AI. So that's what we did. To come to your second Question around learning. For us, it was absolutely a key element of our transformations. So the objective was to upskill and reskill 5,000 employees within two and a half years and obtain 20,000 certifications. And this objective was actually at the same level as some financial objectives and marketing objectives. So it was from the very beginning important to align everyone on that and that learning will be a key success factor in our transformation, but also in our business results.
And we had to change the culture and the approach around learning first because our employees are mostly engineers and people who have technical skills and they were used to having been trained 15, 20 years ago. And then their skills was based on their expertise and their experience, meaning that they had been doing and they were actually very highly skilled in this technology because they had been working on this technology for five or 10 years. And of course, all that was disrupted. And we see it, for instance, when we hire young graduates who majored in generative AI or artificial intelligence. Those graduates that we hired 18 months ago, their skills are actually completely obsolete now. The rule of the game and the key success factor is actually to change the approach towards learning. And learning is not a one time effort. It's actually something that is continuous and that is key to progress, to grow within the company, but also to help the company grow. So we had to convince the managers as well that it's important for them to ensure that their employees dedicate time to learning. And it's not always easy, especially for salespeople, for instance, because they need to be on the ground.
So we had this initiative called uTime, which is dedicating every single employee three hours per month to learning. So of course, three hours per month is not something great. But however, it changed completely the mindset of the people saying, okay, now I understand that learning is important. Learning is a key part of what I need to do. And we have seen that people are using learning a lot more and are integrating a lot more in their ways of working and in the objectives as well that managers set to their employees. So it was very important. And the other topic as well that we needed to change was internally for the HR team, because we were used to having an approach which was a bit outdated, to be honest. And it was actually very important for us to change because we were used to taking two years to build and design the best training program with the right curriculum, so on. And this training program had the lifespan of five to seven years or whatever. And now basically it doesn't work anymore. We need to have learning which is continuously improving and kept up to date to the latest technologies, to the latest changes and evolutions. And this change also was associated with our training modules where we tell our employees, okay, if you want to be more proficient in the cloud area, this is the training module that you need to follow. And it's not 20 of them, but this is the training module that you need to follow. This will bring and deliver certification, which is very important because actually people have a lot of appetite for certifications, for recognition as well. So it's also very important.
[00:12:16] Speaker D: How did you change the learning function and did AI play a role in that too? Are you using AI tools for learning as well?
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Yeah, we are using AI tools for learning. It's quite important. We are still in the process of experimenting some tools that exist in the market and some tools that have been developed internally. But it's, it's actually very important to also help people within the HR human resources function, but also across the company to understand that learning is not anymore sitting in a classroom or listening to an E learning module. Now it has so many different ways it can be collective. We have actually a community around generative AI where we have 11,000 employees. So out of the 30,000, we are 11,000 employees who are actually dedicating time and very much engaged in this community, helping each other, sharing tricks on how you use generative AI to solve a problem, to help respond to a client and so on. And we are doing that as well for the HR function. For me it was very important to really make sure that the human resources function was at the forefront of using generative AI, being trained on generative AI as well and experimenting playing. Because again, I think we are playing a lot of about the return on investment of generative AI. But there is something that we sometimes forget to see, which is actually the long time value of experimenting, learning, changing the mindset, changing the ways that people are addressing some specific topics within the HR domain. For instance, like when we look at training, how we help salespeople to get some information about the market trends and at the same time prepare their pitch when they will be meeting with the clients and also remember some of the basics of what could be done in terms of helping this client to grow or to actually get this new client. It's generative AI when it's helping the learning and development function is actually also combining the different ways of learning and it has its true value in doing that. It's one of my convictions that this is a perfect time for HR to rethink our value added to rethink Our role, how do we help the business and how do we decide in some way to be a strategic player, to be part of the strategy, to be part of the way the company will be evolving, the company will be rethinking its own ways of working and where the value resides and so on. So I think actually in some way we have to be part of the disruption as well. Otherwise again, we will be suffering from the changes and not driving the changes.
[00:15:03] Speaker D: I couldn't agree more. I think that's one of the most important roles that we have in HR and such a big opportunity. What about the culture piece that you mentioned too? How are you working on establishing this more agile, more dynamic culture, that experimentation, all of those kind of things that you mentioned? Because culture is always a little bit squishy, right? So we don't quite know how you work around that. What do you do around culture?
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Well, I mentioned what we did in terms of learning, making sure that learning becomes really part of the everyday activity in every job. And it's also a key part to make sure that the company grows and the fact that when the company can align the aspirations of its employees with the business needs and to have a prospective vision as well of what kind of skills do we need or what kind of skills we need to prepare for the future. It's absolutely important in changing the cultures, in having managers looking at the way they are driving their teams as long term investment and not only as a short term KPI delivering type of activity. So it's very important. And when we entered into this upskilling and reskilling journey, it meant as well that we needed to make sure that people understood what would be their benefits in engaging themselves into this upskilling and reskilling journey. Because they could see that, hey, you know, I have a job, I have quite a lot to do today, so why change? Why take a risk to change job to spend time learning new skills, when actually today it's pretty fine. We did a lot of work in making visible the strategic workforce management vision that we had for our teams. We spent also a lot of time on the skills mapping to identify what could be the career paths that we could offer to our teams and to the employees. And we also did invest a lot in listening to our employees in terms of aspirations. We completely shifted our performance reviews to okay, I have done that this year and this I didn't do it completely. And so on to yes, we review your performance, we review your results, but we also look at your aspirations, what you want to do what your current skills could help you go and how the company could help you move towards these new jobs or these jobs that are actually very much on demand today. Again, we are working with a lot of engineers and sometimes they felt that because they were experts in this technology, they couldn't move to any other technology. And it was also helping them to understand that they could spend some time, for instance, in the future job that they could have to understand what it means and to also close the gap, to see that, hey, it's not so different, and to really help them be reassured about the fact that if they invest in upskilling themselves, there is a future for them with the company. And again, when they decide to grow, it's the entire company that will grow with them. So culture was a very important part. And again, when it was what we call the Live My Life project, which is, okay, you can go and spend two days working with generative AI experts on a customer case. We had the utime initiative, which is around dedicating three hours per month for learning and all these kind of things. The communities and all that together brought some great results. And the feedback that we get from our employees that they really feel that learning is part of the strategy of the company and that we help them have a future in the company. And some people might decide to leave us as well, but we help them and we give them the possibility to actually grow with the company.
[00:18:49] Speaker D: I love how you're thinking about culture because you made it very tangible and made it very concrete on what you are actually doing on culture, where you are at with your AI journey overall as a company. What are some results that you have seen and maybe where are you going
[00:19:03] Speaker A: with that in terms of results? I love data. And of course it's quite important for the human resources functions to use data to make decisions. Looking at two tangible KPIs that I can share with you, we have been looking at our employee net promoter score ENPs to measure the engagement. And again, going through this kind of transformation, a lot of people were really afraid that they will lose their job, that they will be irrelevant and so on. And when we look at the enps, we managed to continuously improve this enps. And when we focus on those people who went through the reskilling and upskilling program for those people, we actually managed to move the ENPs from plus 8, which is okay average, to plus 41, which is really great. You know, this is to me a very tangible result.
And of course you also have other results around business KPIs because we managed to sign new contracts because we had people who had obtained certifications and were able to pitch to our clients that, okay, we have 2,000 of our employees who are certified on this technology and it was very important. I can't disclose the numbers, but we are also following the revenues that we are generating thanks to the new skills that we have developed or the new certifications that we have developed. And of course, we have the individual stories as well that are great, especially for us in human resources. But I have many different examples of some people who managed to completely change jobs. I can tell one of them. You know, Stefan, he was formerly working as a customer service support in an area that was really decreasing and really impacted by the transformation.
Clients were just leaving us to move to completely other providers. But actually he was very interested in Generative AI and once he came to his manager and said, hey, I want to change job, but I don't know what I can do, and so on. So manager directed him towards someone in human resources and we helped him identify that actually he was completely legitimate to move to an expert role in Generative AI because he was very active in the community and Stefan was able to become an expert. Of course, we helped him through training and he was able to pitch to one very important client and to the CTIO of this large MNC about our offer around Generative AI and to win the contract. So for him, who was, let's say, administrative customer service agent, he managed to move to a completely different role. And for me, these personal stories are actually very important because it means that we changed the lives of some of our employees and they took the risk because it was a real risk and they have been rewarded from taking this risk.
[00:21:56] Speaker D: I totally agree with you. It's so important. I think it's also so important for employees to see that it actually is working right. I know we could talk for another few hours, but I know we're almost out of time in the last few minutes. Laurent, what's your one piece of advice to other CHROs chief people, officers, HR leaders, in terms of what would you advise them? How to embrace this journey that we're all on?
[00:22:20] Speaker A: I think the first part is to be humble because when I look at what we have done, we are still not where we would like to be. And of course it's a journey. So it's continuous improvement. It's also going through experimentation, failing, learning from these projects that that didn't really deliver the value that was expected. As long as you use AI and generative AI with ethical behaviors. I think it's always better to try to experiment and to test. And again, we are just in the middle of our journey because we have 90% of our employees who are trained in generative AI, which is great. So it means that they went through the trainings about what is generative AI, how do you prompt, and so on. We have more than 60% who are regular users, meaning that in their day to day job, they have included AI as part of what they are delivering in terms of value. So it can be, for instance, in HR, in L&D, we are using generative AI to help us design some training paths and so on. So I think the next step is really to make sure that we are completely redesigning our operating models to make sure that we have the right value delivered by our employees and the right value delivered by what I call is outsourced to agentic AI or AI. And this complete revamp of our operating models I think will be really disruptive for us. We are not starting from scratch, so it will take time as well. But it needs to consistently invest in our people, in their skills, to make sure that we are at the right pace. And we don't have technology moving faster than the skills or the way we operate. But again, that's our role as hr, to make sure that the company can perform because we align the pace at which the people, the technology and the strategy are moving.
[00:24:22] Speaker D: And with that, Laurent, thank you so much for your time. We had such a great conversation, so many insights shared and, and I'm excited for where you are and even more excited to see where you're all going with this AI transformation. So really appreciate your time. Thank you.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: And that's it for our conversation with Laurent or Phil, Chief People Officer at Orange Business. I loved learning from Laurent how he leads the company's AI transformation with a focus on people, not technology. He and the Orange executive team know that AI is only as strong as the integration and workflows. And they prioritize developing skills, culture and employees willingness to use AI in their work and to use it for their work to make them more productive, not against it. If you're an HR or business leader, there's lots of great lessons in what Laurent shares. Thanks for listening to the what Works podcast. Until next time, keep exploring what works in your world.
