The Company That Wants to Be the Plumbing Under Your AI

Ask any chief digital officer, or chief data officer, in Asia-Pacific to do the math on this, and the numbers stop adding up fast. You’ve spent years, and a small fortune, making sure your data stays where regulators want it: Localized, residency-compliant, and audited within an inch of its life. Then you plug it into a large language model trained on someone else’s data, hosted under someone else’s laws and governed by someone else’s values.

Congratulations. You’ve built a sovereign data lake that feeds a decidedly non-sovereign brain.

A 2026 Accenture study of more than 750 senior leaders across the region put a number on the problem: roughly 60% of Asia-Pacific (APAC) organizations apply sovereignty controls to their data, but only about a quarter extend those same controls to the AI models making decisions with it. Analysts have started calling this the “intelligence sovereignty gap.” That’s not a rounding error but a hole in the floor of the AI era big enough to swallow a compliance department.

Edmond Wong has a front-row seat to that gap. He took over as president of Asia-Pacific for Orange Business in April 2026, stepping up after nearly six years running the region’s business management, and inheriting a pitch that sounds almost contrarian in an industry obsessed with model benchmarks: the hard part of enterprise AI was never the model.

“The operating environment for APAC enterprises has grown more volatile compared to previous years,” Wong told CDOTrends. Hyper-accelerated tech cycles and disruptive business models have left companies facing what he calls a “brutal dual mandate”: modernize rapidly while tightly managing security, privacy and costs. Under that pressure, most enterprises do what seems sensible at the time: bolt on best-of-breed tools for cloud, connectivity and cybersecurity as problems arise, solving today’s fire without fixing tomorrow’s wiring.

That’s the industry’s “stitch-it-later” trap. We’ve been discussing its demise for years, and it still isn’t dead. Wong’s version of the postmortem is specific: isolated telemetry data, security blind spots, inconsistent policy enforcement, and what he calls “swivel-chair operations,” teams pivoting between a dozen vendor dashboards just to figure out why something broke.

The pitch: Not the AI Company, the plumbing company

Orange Business isn’t trying to beat Anthropic on models or Google DeepMind on compute, and Wong doesn’t pretend otherwise. “Our most defensible value is not in trying to compete with hyperscalers or specialist AI vendors on every layer of the technology stack,” he says. “They bring world-class platforms, models, compute power, and innovation at scale.” Fine, let them.

Where Orange plants its flag instead is underneath all of that: connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, data governance and now AI, run as one operating model rather than five separate contracts. Think of it less as a tech vendor and more as a structural engineer. Nobody hires an architect to admire the steel beams; they hire one so the building doesn’t collapse when the AI floor gets added on top.

That pitch runs headfirst into the region’s actual regulatory topography, which is less a single set of rules than dozens of countries improvising their own in real time. “Trusted AI starts with trusted foundations,” Wong argues. For a multinational CDO, that means having “the right data architecture, secure hosting options, clear access controls, local data residency where required, and governance that can operate across borders without losing sight of local obligations.” Orange frames this as “trust by design,” anchored to the E.U. AI Act and its own internal ethics charter. It’s a very European answer to a very Asian problem: either a strength or an irony, depending on which regulator you ask.

The skeptic’s question: Integrator or just a well-connected reseller?

Any CDO who’s sat through a vendor pitch featuring the word “ecosystem” will recognize the skepticism it invites. Orange name-checks Microsoft, AWS, Google, Nvidia, Snowflake and Databricks. The fair question is whether that makes Orange a genuine integrator or simply a well-connected reseller of other people’s platforms.

Wong doesn’t flinch from it. “Being ecosystem-led does not mean ‘brokering’ other companies’ platforms,” he says. “The value is not in adding another layer of complexity. The value is in making the ecosystem work for the customer.” The tell, he argues, is accountability. Orange stays on the hook for the end-to-end outcome, not just the introduction.

On production AI, he points to Orange’s internal deployment of its Live Intelligence assistant: more than 57,000 monthly active users, 2 hours and 48 minutes saved per employee each week, and 20,000 user-built agents since launch. It’s evidence, he suggests, that the model works before it’s sold. The next act, Live Intelligence Studio, pushes further into agentic territory: AI that doesn’t just assist, but acts. “That is where AI starts to move from assistance to action,” he says.

Where the buck stops

The most revealing thing Wong says has nothing to do with technology. It’s about where his company’s job ends. “There are decisions the customer must make,” he says. “The customer must define the business priorities, acceptable risk level, governance principles, and ethical boundaries for how AI is used in their organization.” Orange builds the foundation; the CDO still owns the roof, the risk and the blame if it leaks.

It might read like a smaller claim than most vendors make, but it is a more honest one. Wong’s benchmark for success in three years has nothing to do with project counts. He wants customers to see Orange as part of their operating model, not a vendor they once hired. In a region where “sovereign” has quietly become the most contested word in enterprise tech, that’s not a bad definition of trust: not who built your AI, but who’s still answering the phone when it breaks.

Image credit: iStockphoto/Rafa Jodar