How Lumen Technologies Is Utilizing AI to Help Reduce $1 Billion in Network Costs

(SeaPRwire) –   Just before last Thanksgiving, Kate Johnson, the president and CEO of Lumen Technologies, contacted Jim Fowler, then Chief Technology Officer at Nationwide, to discuss recruiting a new lead technologist for the telecommunications firm.

Fowler, who had been a member of Lumen’s board since 2023, quickly realized that Johnson’s call was not about a board director and CEO collaborating on succession planning. Instead, he was being considered for the role.

Within two weeks, Fowler departed insurer Nationwide after more than seven years to join Lumen (ranked No. 325 on the 500) as chief technology and product officer, immediately stepping down from the board to assume the C-suite position. He took over from Dave Ward, who had served as CTO for two years and left in January to become president and chief architect at software giant Salesforce.

Fowler joins Lumen’s leadership team as the provider of internet, cloud, IT, and communication technology services undergoes a strategic overhaul led by Johnson, who came to Lumen in 2022 after a brief retirement. Her focus has been on reducing Lumen’s debt and narrowing its scope to prioritize serving private companies and public sector organizations. The $5.75 billion sale of Lumen’s consumer fiber businesses to AT&T supported both objectives. The transaction concluded in February, and Lumen has stated it would allocate approximately $4.8 billion of the proceeds to debt reduction.

Another critical area of focus, and where Fowler’s expertise becomes vital, is Lumen’s commitment to Wall Street in 2024 to achieve annualized run-rate savings of $1 billion from its network by the close of 2027. Fowler asserts that AI is “at the heart of how we’re going to do that.”

“Each of our senior leaders has a specific goal they are pursuing,” he adds. The legal department is concentrating on implementing AI-enabled applications to accelerate the contracting process, while marketing is exploring how to use AI to generate more personalized marketing materials.

For Fowler’s technology team, his objective is a 50% reduction in the development cycle time for new products. “That’s what my teams are going to march toward,” Fowler states.

Many aspects of Lumen’s internal technology strategy have impressed Fowler as he settles into his position. He notes that his predecessor had a strong vision for cloud computing, and there has been encouraging progress with AI. Over 90% of Lumen’s employees possess a Microsoft Copilot license, and the tool is being utilized for various purposes, including meeting support, strategy development, and research.

Lumen’s engineers employ the AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot and are authorized to switch between different AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Consequently, Fowler reports seeing up to a 50% improvement in productivity for certain tasks, like re-platforming applications.

He mentions uncovering a “hidden gem”: Lumen’s engineering team has developed an agentic AI framework already deployed company-wide. Employees can create their own AI agents on an internal, proprietary dashboard built by Lumen. Workers can deploy custom AI agents using large language models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. They are encouraged to explore the models they believe will yield the best results at the most efficient cost.

Still less than 90 days into his new role, Fowler has identified several projects he will prioritize moving forward. These include modernizing Lumen’s disparate operations, which result from its history of growth through acquisitions. To extract the maximum value from Lumen’s AI investments, Fowler’s team will need to continue rewriting and reimplementing these systems.

Other initiatives involve expanding the physical layer. Lumen plans to more than double its fiber infrastructure, from over 17 million miles currently to over 47 million miles within the next two years. Additionally, there’s the digital layer, aiming to simplify customer access to Lumen’s various services through agentic AI-enabled support.

“This has been a network infrastructure company for 50 years,” Fowler remarks. “Getting it to think like a tech company—with software development and engineering practices that scale with demand from our customers—has been a focus of mine in the first two months that I’ve been here.”

John Kell

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