After completing more than a dozen acquisitions over the past four decades, network infrastructure company Lumen has been operating with more than 22 inventory systems, hundreds of disconnected data sources, and decades-old equipment. This structural debt was hindering basic operations and the company’s ability to serve customers, especially as clients’ technology needs evolve.
As part of a multiyear effort to consolidate these various legacy networks into a single architecture, Lumen tapped AI to simplify the network, modernize workflows, and streamline the disparate data that lives across its ecosystem.
“If there was an equipment that was made in the last 40 years, the chance of it being in our network is fairly high, extremely high,” says Alex Mercier-Dalphond, senior vice president of infrastructure modernization and operations at Lumen. “Trying to transform our network to be more simplified, more agile to support the AI workloads that we’re facing now is not a novel idea. AI just enabled us to deliver on that vision,” he says.
Lumen executives say this effort has delivered measurable business impact in a multitude of ways, including fewer customer outages and reducing the time it takes to answer vital customer questions from months to mere minutes. All together, Lumen says the aggregate impact of the initiative delivered $350 million in annualized cost savings in 2025, with a clear path to $1 billion in savings by 2027.
