Laurent Aufils, Chief People Officer at Orange Business: AI Transformation Is a People Project

About this episode

Laurent Aufils discusses how Orange Business transformed its workforce through a people-first approach to AI.

What if the biggest mistake companies make with AI transformation is treating it as a technology problem? Laurent Aufils, Chief People Officer at Orange Business, knows that it’s all about people. In this episode, Kathi Enderes sits down with Laurent to explore how one of the world’s leading digital services companies transformed its entire 30,000-people workforce through a people-first approach to generative AI. The results are concrete and striking. Orange Business’s AI-powered contract management tool slashed what previously took teams weeks of painstaking analysis to under three hours — fundamentally disrupting not just how people work, but how they understand the value they bring. Rather than letting 30,000 people go and rehiring AI specialists, Laurent and his team made a bold choice: there will always be a human in the loop. That principle became the foundation of everything — the cultural compass that kept employees from fearing the future and turned anxiety into engagement. The numbers tell the story. Among employees who went through Orange Business’s reskilling and upskilling programs, employee Net Promoter Scores shot from a modest +8 to a remarkable +41. Over 90% of…

People in this episode

Host: Kathi Enderes

Guest: Laurent Aufils

Topics covered

• AI transformation
• people-first approach
• reskilling
• upskilling
• employee engagement
• generative AI

Keywords

• AI transformation
• people-first
• generative AI
• reskilling
• employee engagement
• contract management

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Orange Business

More episodes of The Josh Bersin Company

• Irresistible Wrapup, New Economics of AI, And Why AI is Like Traditional IT · June 12, 2026 · 16 min
• Irresistible Kickoff: Preparing You For HR 2030 with The Josh Bersin Institute · June 8, 2026 · 6 min
• Why Does HR Exist? AI Redefines Everything, And Here's Why. · June 6, 2026 · 18 min
• Addressing High Cost of AI, Frontier Fine Tuning, Edge Computing, Microsoft and NVIDIA · June 3, 2026 · 17 min
• Understanding The New Words of AI: Harness, Layer, Fabric, Surface, And More... · June 1, 2026 · 20 min
• Google I/O Enterprise Strategy, HR 2030, Avoiding A Bag of Doorknobs · May 29, 2026 · 17 min