Orange has promoted Usman Javaid to group Chief AI Officer, effective 1 September 2026. He will report to Bruno Zerbib, Orange’s chief technology and innovation officer, and his mandate is to accelerate the scaling up of Orange’s artificial intelligence initiatives.
The move lands inside Orange’s Trust the Future plan, which the company presented in February. Orange aims to generate more than 600 million euros in value from AI by 2028, with that value tied to better service quality, improved operational efficiency, improved customer experience, and new growth drivers.
AI now sits across Orange’s operating model
Orange expects Javaid to embed AI, especially agentic AI, into networks, customer relations, operations, and business services. That puts the role closer to execution than experimentation: the brief is to push AI deeper into the parts of the group where Orange says it expects the value to show up.
Javaid succeeds Steve Jarrett, whom Orange credits with structuring its AI approach and putting in place the technological foundations needed for its development. The company is not changing direction so much as formalizing ownership for the next phase.
Javaid arrives with Orange Business and cloud pedigree
Since April 2023, Javaid had been Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Orange Business. In that role, he led strategy, product and services development and marketing, as well as data and AI transformation.
Before joining Orange Business, he held several leadership roles at AWS starting in 2019, including roles focused on cloud services for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Before AWS, he spent more than ten years at Vodafone in B2C and B2B roles covering IoT, cloud, operations, network strategy, and innovation. He began his career in 2005 at France Telecom in research and innovation.
Read for enterprise and cloud teams inside Orange’s customer base
Orange is putting a named executive on AI scale-up, not just platform trials. For enterprise buyers and partners, the useful signal is that AI now reaches networks, customer relations, operations, and business services under one group role.
The background also matters: Javaid’s path runs through Orange Business, AWS, Vodafone, and France Telecom, so the appointment blends telecom, cloud, and enterprise services experience rather than a pure research profile.