How Lumen Technologies is using AI to help cut $1 billion in network costs

Fowler, who had served on Lumen’s board since 2023, quickly realized that the conversation with Johnson wasn’t about a board director and CEO working together on succession planning. He was being recruited.

Less than two weeks later, Fowler left insurer Nationwide after more than seven years and joined Lumen (ranked No. 325 on the Fortune 500) as chief technology and product officer, departing the board immediately to take on the C-suite role. He succeeded 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 as the provider of internet, cloud, IT, and communication technology services undergoes a strategic transformation led by Johnson, who joined Lumen in 2022 after a brief retirement. She has focused on reducing Lumen’s debt load and narrowing its focus to prioritize serving private companies and public sector organizations. The $5.75 billion sale of Lumen’s consumer fiber businesses to AT&T helped on both fronts. The deal closed in February and Lumen has said it would use about $4.8 billion of the proceeds to pay down debt.

Another key area of focus, and this is where Fowler comes in, is a commitment that Lumen made to Wall Street back in 2024 that it would achieve annualized run-rate savings of $1 billion from its network by the end of 2027. Fowler says AI is at the “heart of how we’re going to do that.” 

“Each one of our senior leaders has a single target that they are going after,” he adds. Legal’s focus is on deploying AI-enabled applications that can speed up the contracting process, while marketing is looking at ways to use AI to create more personalized marketing materials.

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

Many elements of Lumen’s internal technology strategy have impressed Fowler as he settles into the role. He says his predecessor had a strong vision on cloud computing and there has been encouraging progress on AI. More than 90% of Lumen’s employees have a Microsoft Copilot license and the tool is being used for a variety of purposes including meeting assistance, strategy, and research.

Lumen’s engineers use the AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot and are authorized to switch between different AI models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. As a result, Fowler says he is seeing up to a 50% improvement in productivity for some tasks like re-platforming applications. 

He says one “hidden gem” he uncovered is that Lumen’s engineering team has developed an agentic AI framework already deployed across the entire company. Employees can build their own AI agents on an internal, proprietary dashboard that Lumen created. Workers can deploy custom AI agents using large language models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. They are encouraged to explore the models that they believe will produce the best outcomes at the most efficient cost.

Still less than 90 days into his new role, Fowler has identified a few projects he will prioritize going forward. They include modernizing Lumen’s disparate operations that stem from its legacy of growing through acquisitions. To extract the most value possible from Lumen’s AI investments, Fowler’s team will need to continue to rewrite and reimplement those systems.

Other projects include expanding the physical layer. Lumen is planning to more than double the amount of fiber in the ground, from over 17 million miles today to over 47 million miles over the next two years. Then, there’s the digital layer, making it easier for customers to opt in to Lumen’s various services through agentic AI-enabled support.

“This has been a network infrastructure company for 50 years,” says Fowler. “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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NEWS PACKETS

Increased cyber risk arises from the Iran war. Last week, medical devices maker Stryker became the first American company ensnared in a cyber attack linked to an Iranian group since the start of a war between the nations. As NBC News reports, Iran’s cyberattacks have historically focused on national targets, but the attack on Stryker reportedly resulted in work-issued phones not working properly, halting communications at the company. Banking regulators have warned financial institutions of increased cyberattack risks, while the Associated Press has reported that there is increased risk that defense contractors, power stations, and water plants could be among the targets of such attacks. “Something is going to happen because the gloves are off,” Kevin Mandia, founder of cybersecurity companies Mandiant and Armadin, told the AP.

Meta mulls massive layoffs; Atlassian links job cuts to AI. Reuters reports that Meta could trim 20% or more of the company’s workforce, due to soaring costs for AI infrastructure and anticipated workforce efficiency from AI tools. Meanwhile, Australian software company Atlassian announced it would trim 1,600 jobs, or about a 10th of its workforce, citing AI as affecting the mix of skills it needs from  and a broader post-pandemic industry slowdown, according to a staffing memo that was cited by Bloomberg. Atlassian also announced that Rajeev Rajan, who had served as chief technology officer since May 2022, had departed. Layoffs have put the broader IT industry on edge, with more than 33,000 jobs eliminated in the sector so far in 2026, an increase of more than 51% from the same period a year ago, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Adobe CEO departs amid pressure to deliver on AI. Adobe on Thursday announced that CEO Shantanu Narayen would step down after 18 years in the role, a leadership change at the top of the creative software company that coincided with fiscal first-quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations and annualized revenue from AI-first products that more than tripled year over year. And yet, Narayen’s exit was linked to AI and fears that software sales are at risk as agentic AI could undercut their per-seat pricing structure. “Investors will likely focus on whether incoming leadership maintains a balance between disciplined execution and aggressive AI investment, especially as competition in creative and enterprise AI intensifies, Grace Harmon, an analyst at Emarketer, told Bloomberg.

Nvidia continues to spend big on AI’s ecosystem. While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently announced he likely wouldn’t be putting any more money into AI hyperscalers OpenAI and Anthropic, that doesn’t mean the AI chip maker isn’t continuing to write big checks elsewhere. The biggest headline came courtesy of Wired, which reported that Nvidia committed to spending $26 billion to build open-weight AI models. But Nvidia has also recently announced it would spend a combined $2 billion apiece in optics technology developers Lumentum and Coherent, as well as AI cloud company Nebius. Shares for all three leapt at least 10% when those announcements were disclosed publicly. Nvidia has also made a “significant investment” in Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup that was founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI.

While Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also makes a $1 trillion promise. This week at Nvidia’s annual developer conference, Huang shared that he expected purchase orders for the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin AI systems would see $1 trillion in orders through 2027. “I believe that computing demand has increased by 1 million times in the last two years,” Huang said during his 2 1/2-hour keynote address, in comments reported by Bloomberg. “It is the feeling that we all have. It is the feeling every startup has.” The outlet reports that Huang’s rosy predictions were an effort to ease some Wall Street concerns that Nvidia has had to address for a while now: that lofty growth cannot last forever.

ADOPTION CURVE

The CIO’s role in elevating the C-suite’s tech literacy. While more than half (56%) of 300 U.S. business leaders recently surveyed by Harris Poll reported that data security, privacy, and intellectual property were their biggest concerns when implementing AI and other new technologies, the same study made the case that it is a business risk that technology literacy among the C-suite wasn’t as sturdy as it should be. And yet—even more than three years into the generative AI boom—nearly one in three (28%) say limited board-level fluency in technology, AI and cybersecurity are a top challenge when deploying new technology.

“There’s an increased awareness that improving your tech literacy needs to exist across all functions within the C-suite,” says CEO Aileen Alexander of executive search and consulting firm DSG Global, who backed the study.

She advised that organizations should prioritize tech fluency in executive development programs and that this presents an opportunity for CIOs to advise and teach their non-technical colleagues to bring them along.

Courtesy of DSG Global

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– New York Blood Center is seeking a senior vice president and CIO, based in Rye, New York. Posted salary range: $350K-$370K/year.

– Mag Aerospace is seeking a senior director of IT, based in Fairfax, Virginia. Posted salary range: $129.5K-$240.5K/year.

– Maricopa Community Colleges is seeking a CTO, based in Tempe, Arizona. Posted salary range: $142K-$184.6K/year.

– NeighborWorks America is seeking a SVP of technology operations and performance, based in Washington. Posted salary range: $163K-$173K/year.

Hired:

– Markel appointed Phil Jones CIO, effectively immediately, of the specialty insurance provider’s London-based Markel International division. Most recently, Jones served as global CIO at insurer and reinsurer Aspen Insurance. He also previously served as executive director of service delivery and operations at the U.K. Ministry of Defense and in senior leadership roles at Prudential UK and Lloyds Banking Group.

– Agco promoted Jena Holtberg-Benge to the role of chief digital and information officer, effective March 16. Jena Holtberg-Benge previously served as the VP of afterparts sales for the manufacturer of agricultural equipment since June 2023. Prior to joining Agco, she worked at Agco’s competitor John Deere for nearly 23 years in various director and manager roles.

– Compass International has promoted Shay Artzi to the role of CTO, an appointment that comes just a little over two months after the real estate brokerage acquired Anywhere Real Estate for $1.6 billion. Artzi joined Compass in 2021 as senior director of engineering and was promoted two other times, most recently serving as SVP, head of engineering. He previously held technology leadership positions at Amazon, Zappix, and IBM.

– ServiceTitan announced the appointment of Abhishek “Abhi” Mathur as its chief technology and product officer. Mathur joins ServiceTitan from design and product-development software firm Figma, where he served as SVP of software engineering. He also spent nearly eight years at Meta as senior director of engineering and more than a decade at Microsoft.

– Otelier announced the appointment of Ani Gujrathi as chief technology and product officer, overseeing engineering, product management, data, user experience, and cloud operations. Most recently, Gujrathi served as chief product and technology officer at software-as-a-service provider Conexiom. He also previously held engineering leadership roles at Zenoss, Kibo Commerce, Volusion, and Dell.

– Boxabl named Shanmugam “Shan” Palaniappan as CTO, joining the modular homebuilder after most recently serving as SVP of engineering at Sagent, a mortgage loan servicing software provider. Palaniappan’s previous experience includes serving as CTO of the SaaS platform at DataRobot and director roles at Salesforce.

– Veracyte has appointed Kevin Haas to the role of chief development and technology officer, a newly created leadership position to advance the molecular diagnostics company’s product development strategy. Most recently, Haas served as CTO at genetic testing company Myriad Genetics and held other roles at the company including SVP of engineering at as a VP at the company’s subsidiary Myriad Women’s Health.

Fortune AIQ: One Strategy, Real AI Results

AI transformation can be overwhelming—there are countless tools, strategies, and approaches competing for attention, often without any proven results. But for some companies, AI’s biggest impact can be attributed to a single tool, strategy, or approach. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest playbook below:

–How to decide if gen AI is the right path for your product

–Inside Bank of America’s ‘build once’ AI strategy

–Why Pinterest is going all in on open-source AI

–How cutting out product management enabled Kilo to compete in the hyper-fast AI coding market

–How Seismic’s AI incubation team became its ultimate AI strategy