Good morning. Lumen Technologies has been transforming from a traditional telecom operator into a key player in AI networking, with clients including Anthropic and the New York Yankees.
“The transformation that we’re driving is really starting to take hold,” President and CFO Chris Stansbury told me, pointing to Gartner recently naming Lumen the company “to beat” in enterprise wide area network (WAN) and connectivity services for AI. Telecom carriers used to sell connectivity and deploy physical networks, then ceded the software layer—firewalls, load balancers and software-defined WAN—to big tech. Lumen’s acquisition of Alkira, a cloud networking platform for multi-cloud environments, reverses that.
“It doesn’t matter who owns the fiber, and it doesn’t matter which cloud your data is in,” Stansbury said. Lumen can move data across networks and clouds it doesn’t own, positioning itself as neutral infrastructure for the AI-driven economy, he said.
The financial logic matters as much as the technology. Stansbury and Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen (No. 354 on the Fortune 500) have worked together for about four years, first stabilizing the company and its balance sheet. Stansbury inherited $10 billion of debt maturing in 2027 across three competing borrowing entities. Lumen cut its dividend, restructured with creditors, refinanced debt and sold non-strategic assets, reducing total debt below $13 billion under a single entity, he said.
