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Interview: Orange Business’s Jérôme Goulard on making telecoms greener and cleaner | Computer Weekly
In under a decade, chief sustainability officers (CSOs) have become key to synthesising cross-domain knowledge and technical mechanisms that drive organisational environmental, social and governance (ESG) frameworks – and Orange Business’s Jérôme Goulard has been there throughout.
Joining Orange’s B2B division sales team in 1995, Goulard’s roles included head of banking and insurance large accounts, head of the IT services business unit and vice-president of B2B customer experience. Ultimately, he became CSO “a bit more than” five years ago, adding: “I used to be on sales, proposing services. Now I see the impacts of what we propose from another angle.”
Goulard currently heads up the Orange Business approach to sustainable IT, liaising with teams across sales, operations, human resources (HR) and sourcing. The role appealed for its ability to give him a new perspective on the business, he says.
Goulard’s global view of all job lines means he has been able to lead changes in hardware lifecycle management, reducing carbon impacts by scaling up use of refurbished network kit from routers to switches and Wi-Fi terminals. In 2023 alone, 50,000 out of 130,000 units deployed were refurbished, saving the company €15m (£13m) in capital expenditure.
The questions that keep Goulard up at night these days are less about how to drive sales that contribute to the bottom line and more about how he can help the company design its offers to customers in a different way.
Post-Paris 2024, Goulard has been overseeing the redeployment of IT equipment used at Olympics events. So far, around 90% of the Wi-Fi terminals and 78% of network switches have been moved to La Poste locations across France, preventing thousands of devices from becoming e-waste as well as supporting the national post service’s network modernisation efforts.
“The initial commitment was to reduce by 50% the impact per customer. At that time, and we are still in that trend, we know that digital services are growing – the current trend being generative AI [GenAI],” Goulard says. “Therefore we wanted to measure it per customer. Around 2010, we began to launch our Green IT&Networks [ITN] programme about all the infrastructure, equipment and networks we use.”
In 2024, the Green ITN programme saved 1,358 GWh of electricity and 127 million litres of fuel oil.
Strategy builds on results
Strategy has evolved in the past five years or so with Goulard at the helm. Sustainability is now a “major pillar” of Orange Business’s strategic Lead the Future plan, including updated milestone commitments for 2025, 2030 and 2040 reductions in Scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions. Latest figures suggest their targets are within reach, he says, putting Orange Business firmly on track for 2030’s goal of Scopes 1, 2 and 3 of -45% versus 2020, with net zero a “final milestone” in 2040.
“We will reduce Scopes 1 and 2 by 30% in 2025 when compared to 2015, and Scope 3 by 14% compared to 2018,” Goulard says, noting that five years ago the key ESG topics comprised just 20 PowerPoint slides.
Orange has also pledged to increase European recycling of mobile devices in Europe to over 30% by end 2025.
Goulard agrees that AI is one of the major sustainability challenges. He has been supporting Orange partner Mistral AI in its quest for transparency to deliver the data needed to manage impacts, then applying similar thinking to Orange Business’ Live Intelligence product. The idea is that customers can see the carbon impacts of their usage. The principle is to encourage the choice of lower-impact approaches wherever possible.
In Goulard’s case, he focuses most on environmental aspects, with the HR team taking on more of the “social” in its ESG targets. And that has been “quite exciting”, he says, adding: “Sustainability was more of a cherry on the cake, rather than embedded in our activities, processes and products. I really had to create a whole ecosystem, internally and externally.”
“Sustainability was more of a cherry on the cake … I had to create a whole ecosystem, internally and externally”
Jérôme Goulard, Orange Business
Of course, sustainability isn’t just about marketing, sales and sourcing. However, increasingly, sustainability entails close work with financial teams, customers, suppliers and all the various job lines. Managing financial and extra-financial topics together can be key to multiple business objectives. Deloitte has described the CSO role as being a “chief sense-maker” – making sense and connections out of myriad sources of truth and requirements.
“Indeed, that’s what I do today,” Goulard says. “In the past, I had people saying they like sustainability because they like nature, trees and so on. Rather, what we actually have to do is mobilise the impact of our services.”
For Goulard, that includes working with suppliers to get data, then organising and structuring that to define trajectories and their levers. He concentrates on identifying services that affect sustainability and how to reduce their environmental impact.
That has meant developing multiple tools for interacting with the entirety of information in Orange Business databases and working out how to share key data in a structured way. Transparency, one of the major obstacles to efficiency and savings across supply chains, is being realised now after years of work.
“And we see it more in the requests from our customers. They give us some Excel files, information that they would like to collect on what we do, and we do the same with our suppliers,” he says. “So, we are beginning to optimise a bit of this information, so that we can mobilise the whole activity.”
Understanding data is essential
Additionally, Goulard believes that everything done in sustainability should be public information, from methodologies to data. Data formats must be defined so they enable supplier and customer interactions that are mutually beneficial because sustainability is ultimately about ecosystems, he points out.
“We have also begun to create a consulting practice around data and managing ESG. We just had our first launch customer that is working with us on that topic,” he says. “We are working with their factories to get all the information and to organise it in software.”
Goulard is also involved in the Orange partners to net-zero programme, which is about formalising progress plans with suppliers, and is the first such Orange group programme to include large suppliers. For example, there’s a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for decarbonisation of common services to its customers with Cisco, which is about identifying “key levers” where the companies can work together.
“Again, it’s about data, and Cisco will be our first partner to have an application programming interface [API] connected directly to the software that we are implementing to manage carbon trajectories and modernisation of our services,” says Goulard.
“Before, I tended to see sustainability fragmented into carbon, energy, water, biodiversity and waste. But working as CSO, I now see sustainability as systemic, deeply tied to issues like digital inclusion, responsible innovation, ethics in AI, and social and societal impacts.”
In addition, Goulard works with the Orange innovation and R&D team on eco-design. Again, that’s about measuring what you do and working out how to reduce it, modernising customer and partner proposals. One result has been improvements to nickel designs for private mobile network solutions.
“We have launched a practice and I have my team working on eco-design of our services. How do we measure the impact, identify the key components, and what we could do in the infrastructure, equipment and services to reduce the carbon impact?” Goulard says.
Most countries understand that sustainability may be key if they are to remain competitive in the mid-term, even if not directly. Many companies in Asia as well as Europe are working to reduce their impact or developing adaptation plans. Today, many accept that climate change is happening as shown by impacts on activities, infrastructures, floods, extreme heat and so on, Goulard points out.
He strongly believes that sustainability should cross all teams, activities and services, and says he is most proud of his “transversal team, the Green Act Leaders” representing all entities and job roles of Orange Business.
Drawing many threads together
The cross-division, broad-perspective approach has been crucial in driving efficiencies and new operational models as well as savings – for instance, when it comes to sourcing. It adds up to real results, including an enriched relationship with customers, providers and partners, as well as employee engagement, Goulard says.
He is proud that Orange was rated 84 out of 100 by EcoVadis, a France-based sustainable-procurement platform and ratings provider, in 2025, including 100 out of 100 for environmental aspects, adding: “Globally, we see that there are ’some geopolitics’ in ‘communication’ that suggest there’s a backlash [against net zero]. But there are still a lot of companies working on sustainability, and I see that in the requests from our customers. We still see a lot of information requested on that topic.”
Unsurprisingly, a CSO having access to the Orange board of directors can be crucial. Goulard confirms that sustainability is now a board-level topic at Orange, not a side conversation as it has sometimes been seen in years past. He works directly with the board to ensure sustainability goals align with business strategy, services portfolio, operations and risk management.
“Having that seat at the table means we can embed sustainability into the company’s long-term vision for net-zero and supporting clients on their own ESG journeys,” says Goulard. “This is also about preparing for the future – for instance, through our climate risk adaptation plan, rare resources planning in our sourcing and development of innovative solutions.”
It remains a difficult task to develop sustainability initiatives that can touch on everything from security to employee relations. Focus on short-term benefits and short-term activities can come naturally to many organisations as a matter of survival. It can also become habitual, but that’s why the challenge satisfies.
Further, what Goulard sees in France and around Europe is that there is interest in more long-term thinking. Specifically, most companies continue to maintain their commitments, activities and requests for information on how to work together on reducing environmental impacts, including at the international level, he says.
It’s nearly summer. Birds are migrating, flowers are blooming, and REI is kicking off its annual anniversary sale.
It’s the outdoor retailer’s biggest sale of the year. This year’s REI sale starts May 15 and runs through Memorial Day, May 25. Many items are up to 30 percent off, but REI Co-op members save up to 20 percent on any full-price item and an extra 20 percent off any REI Outlet item. To get the discount, add the promo code ANNIV26 at checkout.
We’ve highlighted the best deals on gear we’ve loved over our years of testing. There’s something for nearly all our favorite summer activities: tents, stoves, sleeping bags, and plenty of outdoor apparel. Be sure to look at our guides to outdoor gear, like the Best Tents, Best Sleeping Bags, Best Backpacking Sleeping Pads, Best Rain Jackets, Best Backpacking Water Filters, Best Merino Wool, and Best Binoculars.
WIRED Featured Deals
Deals on Camping Gadgets and Gear
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
Goal Zero’s new Yeti 1500 is one of the best camping and overlanding power stations we’ve tested. The new LiFePO4 chemistry battery is rated for 4,000 charge cycles (about 10 years of average use) and there’s a new high amp output (30 A) for tying into van and overlanding setups. Goal Zero also engineered it to be able to handle the high vibration environment of off-roading. With 4 AC outlets and USB charging at up to 140 watts, the Yeti 1500 can keep your wired world running for well over a week, no grid required.
Yes your phone has some features of a dedicated satellite messenger, but we still think you’re better off with a dedicated device. Garmin’s new inReach Mini 3 now offers some of those phone features—like voice and photo messaging—along with the emergency features and excellent service world wide. It’s also still tiny, well built and it has great battery life. The cheaper Garmin Inreach Mini 3 (which does not have the new photo sharing features) is also on sale for $400 ($50 off).
The Garmin Instinct Solar is our favorite rugged and affordable outdoor watch powered by the sun. It has long battery life and yes, recharges any time it’s in the sun. GPS is enabled and there’s tons of sports tracking and navigation features. It’s cheaper than a Fenix and just as reliable.
Courtesy of Coleman
My favorite of Coleman’s current lineup, the Cascade 3-in-1 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) features heavy-duty cast iron grates, comes with a cast-iron griddle and grill, and can fit a 12-inch pan and a 10-inch pan side by side. It’s sturdier and all-around more robust than other Coleman stoves, well worth the extra money if you’re serious about camp cooking. That said, the much cheaper stove below will get you by if you’re only using it a few nights a year.
This is our favorite camp stove for most people. Technically this version is a little fancier than our top pick, with electronic ignition and a nice pale green paint job. Is it worth an extra $30? That’s up to you. If it’s not, snag the less fancy version for $59 at Walmart.
The thing to keep in mind when you shop REI brand gear is the company’s basic proposition: you get 90 percent of the designer item for 70 percent of the price. It’s a strategy that works quite well and has generated some really great, affordable gear. This chair is a good example of that. It’s not as nice as the Nemo above, but it’s still comfortable (it does wobble a little, side to side when you move) and nearly half the price.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
Whenever I can, I like to cook over open flame using my firebox stove, which often means cutting wood. The best portable saw I’ve found is this Silky folding saw. It’s light enough to bring bike packing (5.3 ounces), and it folds down to about 9 inches long, which slips in a pannier no problem. This thing is razor sharp though, be careful when using it in the backcountry.
Petzl’s Tikka headlamp is one of our favorite headlamps. It provides plenty of light to cook by in the backcountry, runs on three AAA batteries (we recommend Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable batteries) and lasts over 5.5 hours. It’s also compatible with Petzl’s USB-rechargable Core battery ($30).
The thing to keep in mind when you shop for gear bearing the REI brand is the company’s basic proposition: You get 90 percent of the designer item for 70 percent of the price. It’s a strategy that works quite well and has generated some really great, affordable gear. This REI chair is a good example of that. It’s not as nice as the Nemo above, but it’s still comfortable (it does wobble a little, side to side when you move) and nearly half the price.
Deals on Tents
REI tents are some of the best deals around, even more so during sales. If you’d like to learn more, see our guide to the best backpacking tents and best car camping tents.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
REI’s Base Camp tent is WIRED’s favorite car camping tent. It’s extremely well designed and proved plenty weatherproof in our testing. The traditional dome tent design, with two crossed poles and two side poles, holds up well in wind, and the tent floor is high-quality 150-denier (150D) polyester. There’s loads of storage pockets, double doors, great vents, and huge windows, making it comfortable even in summer heat.
The REI Half Dome 2 is the best budget two-person backpacking tent. I’ve toted it on many a backpacking trip and found it to be plenty sturdy, quick to set up, and capable of fitting two people and their gear. It even comes with a footprint (which I never bother with, but it’s nice to have it if you have to deal with prickers or pointy rocks).
The Big Agnes Copper Spur series is our top pick for freestanding ultralight tents. This is a high-quality, well-designed tent that’s lightweight, easy to set up, and roomy enough to be livable in the backcountry. The “awning” design (where the front fabric is held aloft with trekking poles or sticks) is a nice extra and the mix of 15D nylon, and 20D ripstop, while to feels fragile, as held up well over time. The 4-person version, which is one of the lightest 4P tents on the market is also on sale.
Nemo’s Dragonfly tents are great. I really like the generous amount of mesh at the top, which provides some nice ventilation on warm summer nights and is perfect for falling asleep under the stars when the weather permits. The Osmo fabric continues to live up to the hype, with much less water absorption than nylon tents in rainy weather, and there’s a good amount of room for storing all your stuff.
Sleeping Bag and Sleeping Pad Deals
Whether you need a cheap car camping bag or something more robust for fall and spring trips, we’ve got you covered. Be sure to read our guides to the best sleeping bags, best camping sleeping pads, and best backpacking sleeping pads for even more options.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
REI’s Magma line of down gear are some of the best deals around. The Magma 15 sleeping bag has long been an affordable bag that’s perfect for shoulder season trips when the temp potentially swing lower than you’re expecting (the comfort rating is 21 degrees Fahrenheit). There are three lengths and three widths, making it easy to get something that’s perfect for your body, and the 850-fill-power goose down (Bluesign-approved) packs down nice and small. If you don’t need the shoulder season coverage the Magma 30 is also on sale for $262 ($87 off), and makes a great summer sleeping bag.
I just spent a week sleeping under this quilt at the Biggest Week in American Birding. The Magma quilt was surprisingly warm. I did have on an puffer jacket, but I managed to stay comfy down to 30 degrees. Like the sleeping bag version above, this is 95 percent of what you get from far more expensive quilts. It’s light (20.3 ounces for the medium), packs down small, includes straps to keep it on your sleeping pad, can be completely unzipped and used like a comforter or snapped up in a proper foot box on colder nights.
-SOURCE-Scott-Gilbertson.jpg)
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
This is one of my favorite ultralight sleeping bags. There are lighter quilts out there, but when you need the warmth of a mummy bag on those colder nights, this is what I use. It also has the smallest pack size of any bag I’ve tested in this temperature range. With the included compression sack, this thing is truly tiny. The down fill is PFC-free, 850+ hydrophobic down. The zippers are on the small side, but they slide well and rarely if ever snag on the bag. I’ve slept in this bag down to 20 degrees and never been the least bit cold.
Nemo’s Forte 20 is a 20-degree synthetic-fill sleeping bag, but the comfort rating is 30 degrees. In my testing, this feels more like where you’d want to stay temperature-wise with this bag. The outer shell uses a 30-denier recycled polyester ripstop with an inside liner made from 20-denier recycled polyester taffeta. The fill is what Nemo calls Zerofiber insulation, which is made from 100 percent postconsumer recycled content fibers. The Zerofiber packs down remarkably small—this is the most compact synthetic-fill bag I’ve tested in this temp range.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
I had to surrender my ultralight cred to the Reddit mods for carrying this robust pad, but it is totally worth the improved sleep. The 6 or so extra ounces is more than made up for by how well I sleep—rest and recovery are a key part of long miles, kids—on this pad compared to, well, every other backpacking sleeping pad. It’s that good. Alas, it is also kinda pricey … which is why you should grab one now on sale.
The Tensor All-Season hits all the sweet spots. It weighs an acceptably light 18.2 ounces, provides a good 3 inches of padding, and has an R value of 5.4. (The R value of a sleeping pad denotes its level of insulation; the higher the number, the warmer you stay and 5.4 is enough insulation for colder spring or autumn nights.) That works out to the best padding and R rating for the weight. It’s also mercifully quiet—none of that annoying crunching noise every time you roll over.
If you’re gearing up for a winter trip, this is a good deal on a great winter sleeping pad. The Tensor Extreme Conditions has the highest R value of any pad we’ve tested (8.5) yet somehow manages to pack down to about the size of a Nalgene water bottle and weighs just 21 ounces (587 g).
Courtesy of Exped
This is my new favorite winter sleeping pad. It doesn’t have quite the R-value of the Tensor Extreme above, but I find it more comfortable and when paired the a Therm-a-Rest Z-lite, I stayed plenty warm even on a night spent at minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit this past winter. I like it so much a bought a second one for whomever is foolish enough to come with me on such trips.
The big fat camping pad that started the trend of big fat camping pads, the Megamat is a revelation. Trust me, you have no idea how comfortable tent camping can be until you sleep on a Megamat. The 4-inch-thick Exped MegaMat is soft and surprisingly firm thanks to the closed-cell foam inside it, which relieves pressure and feels about as close to the mattress in your bedroom as you’re going to get in the woods.
When I sold my Jeep, I had to give up my overlanding dreams and return to being a mere camper. But this Megamat, which cuts in to fit around the wheel wells of an SUV, has brought some of those overlanding dreams back to life. I throw this in the back of my wife’s Rav4, and while it’s not a perfect fit (check Exped to see which vehicles are supported), it’s close enough that I can get a good night’s sleep in the car.
For more than a year, Tesla has shielded details about its robotaxi crashes from public view. Now, the company has published new details in a federal database about 17 incidents, which took place between July 2025 and March 2026. In at least two of them, Tesla’s human employees appear to have played a hand in the crashes by remotely driving the otherwise autonomous cars into objects on the street.
In both crashes, which happened in Austin, “safety monitors” were in the vehicles’ passenger seats to oversee the still-fledgling self-driving tech, and no passengers were riding in the cars. Both crashes occurred at speeds below 10 miles per hour. The new details were first reported by TechCrunch.
In one incident, which took place in July 2025, the safety monitor experienced “minor” injuries after a remote worker drove the Tesla up a curb and into a metal fence at 8 mph. The monitor, who had requested help from Tesla’s remote driving team after the car stopped on the side of a street and wouldn’t move forward, was not hospitalized, Tesla reported.
The other incident, in January 2026, happened after a safety monitor requested navigation help from the remote team. The remote driver took control and drove the car straight into a temporary construction barricade at 9 mph. The crash left the robotaxi’s front left fender and tire scraped up, but Tesla didn’t report any injuries.
Tesla, which does not have a public relations team, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The new details draw attention to an often misunderstood but safety-critical part of autonomous vehicle operations: the human backstops who remotely monitor the robot cars and intervene when they get into trouble. All US self-driving operators maintain these remote teams, according to letters submitted to a US senator earlier this year. But Tesla appears to be an outlier because it more frequently allows these remote workers to directly drive the cars.
Other companies typically allow their workers to remotely provide input to the autonomous vehicle software, which the system can choose to use or reject. (Waymo says that specially trained workers can remotely drive its cars up to 2 mph, but said in February that it hadn’t used that functionality outside of training.)
Safety advocates have raised questions about remote driving, which can be challenging in places without consistent cellular connectivity and in contexts where remote drivers need a perfect understanding of a car’s surroundings to guide it out of complex situations.
The new details on the two Tesla crashes “raise questions about what the teleoperator can see in both coverage and resolution, and what kind of latency they are experiencing while driving,” Noah Goodall, an independent self-driving vehicle researcher, tells WIRED in a message.
Tesla’s still-fledgling robotaxi service is operating in three Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. But the service has fewer than 100 vehicles operating in total, compared to Waymo’s nearly 4,000. Less than half of Tesla’s cars appear to operate without a safety monitor sitting in the passenger seat. Reuters reported this week that service wait times in Houston and Dallas, where robotaxis launched in April, are upward of 35 minutes. Even in Austin, where the cars have been carrying passengers for almost a year, a reporter for the publication found that robotaxis were sometimes completely unavailable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that autonomous vehicles and robotics are the automaker’s focus instead of manufacturing electric cars. Musk’s compensation—a potential $1 trillion paycheck by 2035—is now tied to vehicle and robot deliveries, as well as sales of not-yet-released self-driving subscriptions and the number of robotaxis in commercial operation.
OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, WIRED has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will now lead the company’s product strategy, in addition to his work on AI infrastructure, OpenAI confirms to WIRED. Brockman was previously assigned to oversee OpenAI products on an interim basis while CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, was on medical leave; the change is now official.
“We’re consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus toward the agentic future, to win across both consumer and enterprise,” Brockman said in a memo to staff seen by WIRED. Brockman added that OpenAI’s products are naturally converging, and that the company has decided to merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified experience.
OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users.
Two other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the core product and platform across consumer, enterprise, and developer surfaces. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into one of the company’s fastest-growing products of all time. OpenAI’s longtime head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, is moving to a new role at the company that aims to revamp enterprise products. OpenAI says Turley will continue his work on ChatGPT, which he has helped grow to more than 900 million weekly active users since he took over in 2022.
The changes are the latest shakeup for OpenAI as leadership aims to refocus the company on a few key product areas, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its forthcoming “everything app.” Last month, OpenAI announced many executive changes, including that CEO of AGI dDeployment, Fidji Simo, was taking a medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI previously said Brockman would oversee product strategy in her absence. The company tells WIRED that Simo remains on medical leave, and worked directly with Brockman on these organizational changes and product strategy.
In the last year, OpenAI has faced increasing pressure from competitors, including Anthropic in coding domains and Google in consumer chatbots. OpenAI leaders are hoping to simplify product offerings ahead of its plan to file for an IPO, which could happen later this year.
Other OpenAI executives left the company entirely last month, including the head of its AI workspace for scientists, Kevin Weil; head of Sora, Bill Peebles; and its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Srinivas Narayanan.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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