Usman Javaid to Lead AI at Orange as CAIO Joins Anthropic

French multinational telecommunications company, Orange, has appointed Usman Javaid as its new Chief AI Officer (CAIO) effective 1 September 2026.

Usman has been Orange Business’ Global Chief Product and Marketing Officer since 2023 and is replacing former CAIO, Steve Jarrett, who has accepted a job at AI powerhouse Anthropic. 

The news follows ongoing reports of an industry wide talent war in AI, with massive tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta reportedly offering large compensation packages to secure top talent. 

Orange’s incoming Chief AI Officer

Usman has more than twenty years of international experience in technology and is now bringing that to his new role at Orange. 

Since April 2023, he has served as Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Orange Business, where he has led the strategy, development and marketing of products and services, as well as data and AI transformation, according to a statement from Orange. 

From 2019, Usman held several leadership positions at AWS, including the responsibility for cloud services across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 

Before that, from 2008 to 2019, he held a number of international roles at Vodafone, first in the B2C field, where he led the launch of 4G in Europe and then in B2B, covering IoT, cloud, operations and network strategy.

Steve Jarret moves to Anthropic

Announcing his departure from Orange on LinkedIn, Steve said: “I start at Anthropic on August 25th and will be based in Paris, initially helping the company to better understand and adapt our products to the needs of the European and African market. 

“Anthropic impresses me with their ethics-driven mission to build reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems, and I continue to meet wonderfully brilliant and modest people at the company.”

Steve has worked at Orange since 2019, first as Group Senior Vice President for Data and AI at Orange Innovation, before taking the role of CAIO in December 2023. 

In Steve’s LinkedIn post, he highlighted some of his achievements at Orange, which range from making Orange the first French company with a direct OpenAI relationship to working on the first fine-tuned speech AI models to accurately recognise regional African languages such as Wolof, Swahili, Bombara and Lingala.

Orange, sustainability and AI

On its website, Orange describes itself as “a leading player in AI”. The French telecommunications company says it has prevented 180,000 maintenance callouts in France by using AI and data-based online diagnostic tools to test its customers’ Fiber to the Home boxes.

The company says it focuses on “frugal AI”, optimising deployments for “efficiency and sustainability”.

Bruno Zerbib, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Orange, says: “At Orange, we believe every innovation should be inclusive and beneficial for all. 

“That’s why our vision for AI is ethical, low-impact, human-centred and inclusive, without compromising our commitment to reducing CO2 emissions.”

In Steve’s leaving post, he described the company as having deeply held ethical beliefs and said its mission, to connect over 340 million people around the world in 26 countries, was close to his heart.