[Pedro Fardo Ree]: So, as we just learned from Anthropic, there's a lot of change happening in leadership and in technology at the stage. How are you leading Orange to operate at a new and much faster pace now?

[Christel Heydemann]: Well, I think a company like Orange that operates in 26 countries that have a mission that's so clear. It's somehow and we've been passionate about technology. Of course, we started with copper networks and 2G GSM at the time. We had Nokia phones as we've seen earlier. And so the company loves technology changes. So that's the easy part. Now the difficult part is speed. I think AI is just mind-blowing and it feels like it keeps accelerating. And so the speed of course in a company with 130,000 employees in 26 country is not a startup. And so it's all about taking decisions understanding what are one way decision what are two ways where you can go backwards and that makes a huge difference. So we are just testing testing testing and of course there's a number of of things we are we have to address not just orange but as a society because security I mean entropic knows with mitos I mean there's a lot of debate that are happening with country leadership with security agencies about okay what are we going to unleash when this technology goes in all our hands whether they are bad or or good hands

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: And beyond the need for speed, um, where is AI already having the most impact for your teams or for your customers right now?

[Christel Heydemann]: So, we've trained thousands of our teams and we've put tools in the hands of our team so that they could use Genai. So, and of course this if you use Genai to I mean go faster in your analysis, email work, etc. That's the basics. That doesn't really change the company itself. We've launched a number of assistants in our customer service. Of course, when we serve more than 300 million of customers that's a lot of data in terms of I mean how do we manage the portfolio of offers we have across countries. How do we simplify? So we have AI tools for our sales teams. I mean to be able to propose the best information and and to know the customer journey and these are things we just cannot do without AI. Uh we have of course uh our networks and cyber security. I mean today we have orange cyber defense that's preventing and helping customers cope with cyber attacks. I mean our networks are so complex. The data that flows through your network through our networks is so complex that without AI it's just not possible. So there's I mean many many areas where we already see the potential of AI. We're not a software development company. So when I meet with Entropic and I'm told that I'm going to have unlimited capabilities to develop software, I like that promise because it feels like we're going to be able to do things that frankly speaking we just could not do because of I mean now the cost of it is still something we haven't uh we haven't tackled.

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: I imagine that there's a lot of experimentation going on at the moment. How do you create that room for bold innovation and risk takingaking in a company that at the end of the day is built on critical infrastructure that simply cannot fail?

[Christel Heydemann]: Well, that's a very good question and that's really the culture of a company whose purpose is very clear. No matter what happens, extreme events, cyber attacks, I mean our networks, our connectivity services have to work. Which means that the design and the way we work is absolutely zero risk to a point where now of course if we think about AI, we are not going to let AI agents manage our core networks because that's not an option. So, so we've made it very clear and and the company and especially we come I mean in France or in many countries actually we have been the incumbent. So we come from being an administration. So the company value and when I joined the company I was very surprised that people think that doing good is applying the process. If I apply the process I'm safe. I'm doing my job that's all good. And sometime we have to challenge actually very often we have to challenge because the process is not fast enough the process was designed for different intent and sometime we have way too many processes that end up being contradicting each others. So that's all the work we're we're doing on on on changing that. But uh but in the end it's been said earlier the the winning mindset and and I've been reflecting on what does winning mean in a company like Orange because our teams are excellent in managing crisis. So you would think that the today's world is awful. We go from one crisis to another. At Orange, our teams are excellent because extreme events, network outage, cyber attacks, this is when the company unites around one purpose which is very clear. Restore the service, serve our customers. So that's the good thing given the current environment. Now of course when we think about innovation, we have to move from a culture where we were thinking you know we launch a service for millions of customer, tens of millions of customers. So everything has to be ready training the salespeople etc which does not work if you want to incubate new solutions and so we've been designing things where it's okay to fail it's okay to test and not scale a solution and to find new fine-tune it and one of the challenges of course like like any big industrial company you're not launching a product for tens of millions of customers unless you know it's going to work but you can launch a solution beta best like software development and then when it's ready you really scale it. So we've been we've had to to to change that and we've done a lot I mean on on cyber security uh today we talk about satellite connectivity complementing our mobile networks we talk a lot about AI solution AI agent for our sales team AI agent for our customers I mean customer service and it's back to you know telecom operators somehow have been good at taking technology and bringing it to market but I don't think as an industry We are very good at coming from the customer needs, the real needs and then pulling back what type of innovation could go with it. And when I joined the company, I was amazed by the number of the failure rate we had when people move into a store, they sign up for broadband fiber and guess what? 40% of the time we would send the technician failed with the connectivity. And so I was challenging the team saying think about companies like Airbus if 40% of the time you ship you ship the plane it crashes. So why are we not collectively in the company trying to address that? But the mindset of the company was well it's for a fact that it's 40% failure rate and they did not realize that maybe we could optimize that. So we've been working on that. This is the type of innovation that maybe is not visible by the engineers. Maybe it's not vis it's very visible by the shop people because they turn up that people are signing up for broadband and they get the service and then they get the bill and they pay and they get their bonus when on the contrary we had people waiting for weeks and eventually cancelling their their order. So that's the type of innovation which is focused on quality customer experience going into the details of our processes and and working with our partners on it.

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: You've mentioned winning and we heard many simple words from many companies today. You chose for orange bold, responsible and caring. So my question is how do you move that? How do you bring that to life to the 26 countries from France to the rest of Europe to Africa? To AJ's words before how do you make sure that those are the values when you're not in the room?

[Christel Heydemann]: Well, first when I joined the company and I asked okay what what are our values? And there wasn't one answer. So we had values in Africa, we had values in France, we had values for our B2B business. And so I told the team, okay, what makes us a group then? What's what's the many in one value that brings us which is more than just a sum of of of divisions and we spend a lot of time and and given our purpose and the the service we provide it was actually very easy to come up with what creates excitement for for our teams. Then we worked on these values around caring, caring for our customers and our people of course responsible and responsible people think about responsible but but we've been very clear that responsible is also your responsible to call it out and to speak up when things go wrong etc. So it's and then bold is probably the value where the company is more eager to transform because this is an expectation from our teams that we want to innovate. We want to be bold and if you think about the orange brand when it was created I mean more than 20 years ago it was very bold. So there's also link with the past and where we come from but but in the end it's all about leadership. It's all about as you said it's when you're not in the room that things happen and and it's about I mean if I take B for instance first of all the values work together it's not just one or the other. It's also about speaking out speaking up about our failures being it I mean and it's it's okay to fail. I mean it's not okay to lose billions. It's okay to fail and to fail fast if you fail and it's okay to speak about it as part of our culture. So there's a lot of things we've changed starting in the management team and then of course we worked on how do we assess leaders? Who do we promote? Why do we promote people? And and that's where you connect the dots between the values that can't be just words on the wall and the different uh the different actions we take on a day-to-day basis. And it's very clear that I realized I mean being a CEO that sometime there's a lot more comments in the company about the type of questions I asked about the the answers that we we make to those question. And so and sometime people tell me in the field oh it seems that you're interested in understanding what we do there and so there's a lot of myth as well about the CEO who what what I say what we discuss in the management team and that's also how we shape so we tell stories about as well the the way we work as a management team and uh and then it's about being in the field focusing on customers and uh and and again I mean our teams are super proud they are very knowledgeable they have deep technical knowhow And so the the I mean we spend a lot of time understanding what are those jewel and and talents in the field that we are not I mean enabling to do more for the company. So and there's a lot of reasons for that in a company of our size of course

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: and you spent five years in the board before becoming CEO. How does that experience influenced the way that you dealt uh with a company from day one?

[Christel Heydemann]: Well, first of all, I have a very direct relationship with my board because I've been sitting on the board and I realized I mean, of course, I came with my experience from different companies, very different culture and so when I came to the company, I knew about I I had a feeling about the culture from the topics that we were not discussing in the board and I thought they were important to discuss and then of course I mean the CEO is not being a director and so but there's a lot of things I still discovered by by joining the company but I had already very clear ideas about what are the things we should fix what are the the question I was frustrated somehow as a director not having answers and and I remember and I had a lot of discussion with our investors there there was a kind of myth that orange was a company where I mean the French government owns 23% of orange and there was a lot of myth around I mean investors and the French government and things that we could not do because of that. And so being on the board for five years, I was very clear on the type of debate we had where there was absolutely full consensus amongst shareholders and and and board members. And so there was a lot of I mean myth around some of our shareholding structure that actually were neither true in the company nor on the board. And so that's the type of thing as well that was very useful engaging with investors and all type of stakeholders having that history of the five years having in mind some of the debates where we couldn't I mean conclude as as a board and uh and and I think the world keeps on having a very direct relationship and and transparent relationship with my board and I've met with a lot of CEOs when they get appointed from the company and they have they have difficult times understanding what should I discuss with my board why should I hide from my board etc. And I've been very open from day one saying look these are the things we really have to tackle as a board because being I felt like I was a peer joining and I'm still a director on the board as well.

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: Let's bring it home for a second and focus on Europe. There's a lot of uh of chatter around competitiveness of Europe in the global stage. The scale is is scale required for high performance?

[Christel Heydemann]: It depends depends on your business. But if you are in telecom, telecom is uh I mean capital intensive business where we invest a lot in our infrastructure. So scale matters. We're a fixed cost business. It's very simple to explain that if you're number one in your market, you have more margin to invest and and to and to do things than if you're number two, three or four. And this is I mean very easy. You look at the math etc. And so that's the type of discussion where I mean and I've been very open with I mean all the stakeholders in in Europe being country leaders, regulators uh that I mean we have to change something because I mean first of all our networks are critical infrastructure and I think nobody would challenge that these days and we've been in Europe for quite some time in a situation where many telecom operators had to sell their assets to continue to invest in next generation assets. That doesn't sound right. And so I think this is where we need we've probably gone too far in in a number of areas. We need regulation. I mean our business is very critical. So we need regulation. But Europe is missing the scale of Europe. I mean I operate in eight countries in Europe. I mean I can't copy paste the service. If I have a successful service that we launch in Spain, it's impossible to copy paste across Europe simply because I mean I'm not going to go but the list of things we would have to unleash to be able to do that is quite long and and and it's I mean it's easy to say simplify if we go into the details there's always a good reason why and sometime by the way the company itself loves this type of complexity because I have country CEOs who love to be the king of their empire. They don't want to share. And so we need to create pride in pride as well in copying from others and being fast. So I think speed is really the thing we use now to to measure because I mean in a world of unlimited capital, unlimited time, it's very easy for everyone to do the same thing. That's not the world we live in these days. So that's also the type of thing we're driving in the company.

[Pedro Fardo Ree]: Well, it's clear that Orange is not just about being everywhere. It's about like leading from the front in technology, in speed, and in culture. So, thank you so much, Crystal, for being with us today.

[Christel Heydemann]: Thank you.