The Challenge

Connecting Millions, Optimizing Every Experience

Operating in more than 26 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, Orange Group has built one of the fastest, most secure, and reliable telecommunication networks in the world. Formerly France Télécom, the company has spent decades shaping the digital landscape through seamless communications, innovation, and strategic use of technology. Today, it serves nearly 300 million B2B and B2C customers worldwide and generates more than €40 billion in annual revenue.
 

Orange applies the same rigor to customer experience as it does to its services. For more than a decade, it has continuously optimized its search and discovery experience, improving performance, relevance, and engagement. With a complex, multichannel offering and no single customer path, the company set out to streamline journeys across mobile, web, and TV, using AI to drive stronger engagement, conversion, and overall experience.

This approach is guided by its core values, with a focus on responsibility and quality. By combining AI with human oversight, strong UX analytics, and continuous optimization, Orange delivers a thoughtful and effective customer experience.
 

Elevating Search into a Strategic Growth Driver

Over time, Orange has expanded the role of search from a functional tool to a core driver of customer experience and business performance. What began as foundational search capabilities evolved into advanced discovery, deeper intent understanding, and now conversational, answer-driven experiences. This shift has not only enhanced its multichannel customer journeys but also improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the teams supporting them.

The Solution

Building a Scalable, High-Performance Search Foundation

Orange adopted Algolia in 2018 with a clear objective to improve speed of access to information and simplifying navigation.

As part of their long‑term vision to streamline customer journeys, the company had recently moved to a SaaS architecture to simplify management and enable large‑scale deployment. Algolia was an ideal strategic fit, in part thanks to its simple integration, ease of use and strong performance.

The company initially deployed Algolia InstantSearch and quickly expanded its capabilities, adding features such as filters and facets, AI-driven synonyms, Dynamic Re-Ranking, Collections, Query Categorization, Recommend and advanced Personalization. Together, these features strengthened relevance and helped guide customers more intuitively through complex, individual journeys.

Every stage of its Algolia implementation and feature improvement was grounded in Orange’s mindset of strong, continuous innovation. Indexing all its content on Algolia allowed the company to more easily embrace new features, steadily optimize search and, ultimately, turn it into a true business driver. New feature rollouts were piloted in a single market, measured for performance and impact through UX analysis, then scaled to additional markets.

Today, all features are live across 24 markets, with five in progress, across their online shops, support websites and TV apps. Nicolas Coudert, Digital Director at Orange, attributes Algolia’s ease and speed of implementation for the rapid rollouts, consistently backed by strong, demonstrable results.

• Higher order rates, reaching up to +63% when search is used

• Increased add-to-cart rate by up to +7%

This scalability was accelerated by Orange’s close partnership with Algolia. “All those years of working with Algolia allowed us to build a network of indexes that contained all of Orange’s content,” he notes.
 

Moving from Keywords to True Customer Understanding

Moving beyond simple search to build business impact was always a goal for Coudert and his team. 

“At Orange, we have always believed that an effective search engine should do more than return a list of pages. It should provide a direct and relevant answer.” Orange implemented Algolia’s Neural Search to better interpret longer, more natural queries and make the search experience feel more conversational. 

With Neural Search, combined with Advanced DRR and Advanced Personalization, the company could now recognize what customers were trying to find, whether or not they knew the exact product they were looking for, allowing imperfect queries to surface the right results still. For example, a customer asking for “pink phone recommendations" and the engine to say back “I found a purple smartphone that could be of interest,” including highly relevant results whether the exact keyword “pink” appears or not.

This ability to capture how customers naturally express needs has significantly improved relevance, resulting in up to 14 percent higher CTR and a 53 percent reduction in no results rate.
 

A Paradigm Shift with Agentic AI

“We have been working for years on integrating AI into bots, augmented customer service, and automated support systems” says Nicolas. 

Today, AI is embedded across Orange’s entire digital ecosystem, from technical and commercial support to sales assistance, and more recently “personal shopper” experiences that help customers choose the right offers or devices. What was a real “rupture” according to Nicolas and created a fundamental shift is generative AI.

Initially, the Orange team experimented with connecting their indexed content to large language models like ChatGPT, quickly revealing the potential of combining Algolia’s structured data with AI. “We could see how connecting those indexes to LLMs gave us something quite powerful,” Nicolas explains. But these early efforts also exposed key challenges, particularly the complexity of managing multiple bots and the difficulty of scaling across Orange’s vast ecosystem.

To support this, Orange adopted Algolia’s Agent Studio, moving from isolated bots to a more connected, intent-driven approach for managing knowledge-based bots. ‘We moved from a search engine to an answer engine,’ Nicolas says. With Agent Studio, Orange set out to deliver fast, relevant, and contextual responses, while equipping both support teams and automated systems with accurate, actionable information.

By coordinating across multiple bots and indexes and leveraging facets and filters to refine responses, Agent Studio goes beyond content retrieval to deliver precise, real-time answers with minimal latency. “There is almost no delay between the customer’s question and the response provided by the customer service representative,” Nicolas Coudert adds.

The Results

A transformation across markets and solutions

Orange is already seeing strong adoption, with generative AI experiences among the most used areas and a clear shift from keyword queries to natural-language interactions, alongside high customer satisfaction scores.

“In a complex digital environment, being able to respond instantly improves the customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction and stronger engagement. This expectation also applies to internal teams, who must quickly provide reliable answers to customers,” Nicolas notes. By giving customers greater autonomy, agentic AI reduces friction and lowers the volume of in-store and call center interactions.

Agent Studio has been rolled out across key digital journeys, including some online shop and customer support services, first in Côte d’Ivoire and then in the Congo, in less than two weeks. The company is now expanding to additional markets.

Algolia plays a central role in Orange’s broader ecosystem, where interoperability is critical. By enabling seamless connections between Agent Studio and third-party systems, Orange allows its various platforms and agents to work together fluidly. For example, a conversational agent can handle a billing question, then seamlessly route more complex requests, such as invoice modifications, to a more specialized agent. This marks a shift from simply providing information to resolving customer needs end-to-end through digital channels.
 

A Partnership Built for Continuous Innovation

By building on strong data foundations, an innovation-driven team with a disciplined rollout approach, and a close partnership with Algolia and its AI-powered solutions that are easy to deploy at enterprise scale, Orange has transformed search into a powerful driver of business impact.

Nicolas explains how each company brings distinct expertise to this strategic partnership: Orange focuses on its core telecommunications business, while Algolia provides ready-to-use search and discovery solutions that support its growth. This clear division of roles allows Orange to benefit from highly sophisticated technology without managing its underlying complexity.

That complexity remains fully abstracted, which is critical in a large enterprise IT environment. The solutions are easy to understand, quick to integrate, and avoid adding unnecessary architectural burden on internal teams.

Orange also highlights the role of inspiration in the partnership. At key moments, Algolia brought the right vision and perspective, encouraging the team to push further in its transformation and directly contributing to the scale of what has been achieved. The result is not a traditional vendor relationship, but a true co-construction model that combines technical depth, operational simplicity, and strategic alignment. As Laurent Pasquiou, Digital Project Manager at Orange, puts it, “I truly believe that at key moments, you were able to inspire us. That’s also what motivated us to go as far as we have in what we can achieve with Algolia today.”

The Future of Agentic AI at Orange

Looking ahead, Orange is entering a new phase in its adoption of agentic AI, with a focus on scaling, orchestration, and new high-impact use cases. The next step is to extend Agent Studio to its largest market, Orange France. At the same time, the company continues to enrich its knowledge base with generative AI, particularly for customer support.

Orange is also exploring opportunities in areas like TV, where conversational and voice interfaces can transform content discovery and create more intuitive, engaging experiences across devices.

Throughout this evolution, governance, quality, and reliability remain central. Through continuous testing and feedback, Orange ensures high relevance, minimizes AI hallucinations, and maintains user trust within a complex system landscape.

Today, this is no longer experimentation. With Agent Studio and Orange’s solid infrastructure, making agentic AI the foundation of a global, omnichannel conversational architecture powered by high-quality, structured data will be a key challenge in the coming months. As Nicolas puts it, “Agentic AI could become a core building block of Orange’s digital experience, making assistance simpler, more intelligent, and more personalized across all our channels.”