This episode was recorded on Dec 10, 2025.

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Automation and digitalization were huge topics for decades, but “it’s no longer enough.” Host Daniel Kazani talks with Pascal Faerber, Managing Director, Digital Services Germany at Orange Business, about agentic AI and why it is “fundamentally different” from reactive gen AI. Pascal frames agentic AI as proactive, understanding goals and desired outcomes, breaking them down into steps, executing across multiple systems, evaluating its own output, and learning continuously.

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The conversation moves from digital transformation and cloud, including hyperscalers like Azure and Amazon, to a concrete example: a customer success AI agent that scans incoming customer messages across channels, classifies issues, prioritizes urgency, fetches relevant internal knowledge, drafts proposed solutions, triggers actions across systems, and escalates only when human judgment is required. They also talk about AI as a transformation: leadership mindset, processes, and foundations that enable a network of collaborating humans and agents.

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Pascal Faerber is Managing Director, Digital Services Germany at Orange Business. He describes Digital Services as “top of the spear” in digital transformation, supporting clients with cloud transformation, data and AI, data platform development, and AI use case development. Pascal also mentions being a lecturer and a business angel, as well as being very active in the tech community.

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1. Orange Business Digital Services and “digital transformation,” including cloud transformation and working with hyperscalers like Azure and Amazon
2. A sovereign cloud solution with regulatory requirements and environments operated in Europe by European employees
3. “Agentic AI” as proactive systems that understand goals, breaks them into steps, executes across multiple systems, evaluates output, and learn continuously
4. A customer success AI agent: scanning multichannel messages, classifying and prioritizing issues, pulling contracts, SLAs, documentation, and ticket history, then triggering actions across systems
5. Impact discussed: resolution time brought down from “two, three days” to “15, 30 minutes,” and “60, 65, 70%” reduction in repetitive work
6. AI adoption as a transformation, “mindset first,” and the bottleneck being “permission” rather than technology
7. Clearly defined roles in human and AI collaboration, and AI as “a new colleague.”
8. Moving from pilots to scale: five questions, one high-impact breakthrough, and scaling aggressively with training and change

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1. Orange Business
2. Azure
3. Amazon
4. ChatGPT
5. Gemini
6. Salesforce
7. Nvidia
8. Microsoft
9. IBM
10. Satya Nadella