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.
