(Reuters) - Orange has struck a multi-year partnership with OpenAI in Europe that will give the French telecoms operator access to pre-release AI models, group chief artificial intelligence officer Steve Jarrett said on Wednesday.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

Orange will become the first telecoms firm in Europe to have direct access to OpenAI's models.

KEY QUOTES

"OpenAI's models are the most popular. And so it made financial sense for us to have a direct billing relationship", Jarrett told Reuters in an interview.

"We have the ability to have access to pre-release versions of their models. We have the ability to influence the road map .... Those models are all served from secure infrastructure that's hosted in Europe," he said.

He added that over 50,000 Orange employees currently use OpenAI models.

CONTEXT

Orange announced on Tuesday it had signed an agreement with Meta and OpenAI to translate regional African languages for the telecoms group.

The provider will share data samples in Wolof and Pular to train Llama and Whisper, respectively Meta and OpenAI large language models (LLM).

Orange will use the models to include these languages in its customer support, and will also outsource them to non-commercial clients such as governments, universities and startups.