Orange: Maia and Sharlie Revolutionize Customer Relations

Orange Introduces Maia and Sharlie, Its New AI Assistants for Customer Relations

Last Thursday, Orange unveiled two new artificial intelligence services that promise to transform customer relations. On one side, Maia, an assistant designed to support Orange advisors, and on the other, Sharlie, an innovative voice assistant aimed at Sosh subscribers.

The integration of artificial intelligence into Orange France's customer relations is not merely a showcase of technological prowess. Maia is already operational, providing real-time assistance to the company's 3,000 sales advisors, while Sharlie is set to make its debut to interact with Sosh customers. Although these two tools are distinct, they share a common ambition: to offer a smoother, faster, and more modern customer experience.

Maia: The AI Assistant Optimizing the Work of Orange Advisors

Maia, which stands for "My AI Assistant," was deployed at the beginning of December 2025 among the 3,000 sales advisors at Orange. This new tool, developed in collaboration with Verint, an American company specializing in customer experience technologies, has already become a central part of the teams' daily operations. Maia supports nearly one million conversations each month, and 95% of advisors use it regularly.

One of Maia's main capabilities is to analyze conversations with customers in real time. It identifies customer needs and automatically provides relevant information from Orange's databases, eliminating the need for advisors to juggle multiple software applications. This represents a significant time-saving, considering that previously, one-third of conversation time was taken up by silences. Jérôme Hénique, CEO of Orange France, described Maia as a tool that "augments" the capabilities of advisors.

Moreover, Maia handles automatic call summarization, a task often perceived as tedious by advisors. The adoption of this feature has been swift, even among the most experienced advisors. One advisor with twenty years of experience admitted that she was initially skeptical but now cannot do without Maia.

Sharlie: The Next-Generation Voice Agent for Sosh

The real star of the presentation was Sharlie, a voice assistant specifically designed for Sosh, Orange's budget brand. What sets Sharlie apart is its speech-to-speech technology, which allows it to understand customers' voices directly and respond in a smooth and natural manner, without going through a written transcription. Operating 24/7, this technology is still rare in the market, with only Google and OpenAI, partners of Orange for Sharlie, offering similar models.

The development of Sharlie is based on a sophisticated technological ecosystem. Microsoft, with its Azure platform, provides the infrastructure and AI models, while ILLUIN Technology, a French scale-up, orchestrates the conversational agents. Teleperformance also contributed to the initial learning phases of the agent, in collaboration with Sosh customers.

Sharlie will be commercially available starting March 16, accessible via the MySosh app and the sosh.fr website. Initially, it will cover about 20% of Sosh customer interactions, but Orange plans for rapid expansion, with multilingual support expected by the end of 2026. Ultimately, Sharlie is expected to handle more than 3 million conversations per year, which is impressive for a newcomer.