Lumen Highlights AI-Era Transformation and Path to Growth at Analyst Forum
Company spotlights bold strategy, financial progress, and early look at product roadmap to reimagine digital networking for the AI economy
In its ongoing mission to unleash the world's digital potential, Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) today shared highlights from its 2025 Industry Analyst Forum, where analysts engaged with the company's leadership team around the Forum's theme – The Trusted Network for AI. Key moments spotlighted the company's comprehensive blueprint for transformation, financial progress, and a preview of new innovations and programs designed to strengthen Lumen's position as a digital networking services company for the AI era.
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Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson spotlights the company's bold strategy, financial progress, and early look at product roadmap to reimagine digital networking for the AI economy at a gathering of industry analysts.
"Lumen is determined to lead the transformation of our industry to meet the demands of the AI economy," said Lumen CEO Kate Johnson. "With ubiquitous reach and a digital-first platform, we are positioned to deliver next-gen connectivity, power enterprise innovation, and secure our own growth. This is how we build the trusted network for AI and deliver exceptional value to our customers and shareholders."
Highlights included keynote remarks from Johnson, who outlined the three pillars of the company's strategy:
- Building the backbone for the AI economy with a physical network designed for scale, speed, and security – delivering connectivity anywhere and for everything customers want to do.
- Cloudifying and agentifying telecom to reduce complexity and simplify the network for customers as an intelligent, on-demand, consumption-based digital platform.
- Creating a connected ecosystem with partnerships that extend Lumen's reach, accelerate customer-first, AI-driven innovation, and unlock new opportunities across industries.
Johnson also noted how Lumen's growth is powered by a set of unique enablers that turn the company's network into a true digital platform. With near-term product launches like self-service digital portal Lumen Connect, a universal Fabric Port, and new innovations in development that extend intelligence into the network edge, Lumen is making connectivity programmable and effortless. Combined with the company's Network-as-a-Service business model and a connected ecosystem of data centers, hyperscalers and technology partners, these enablers give customers the speed, security, and simplicity they need to thrive in the AI economy.
The company also outlined continued progress to reset its financial foundation and create significant capacity for growth. Following the anticipated 1H 2026 close of Lumen's mass-market fiber sale to AT&T, in just over 2 years the company is projected to have:
- Fully funded its future strategic plans, reduced gross debt by over 35% to $13.2 billion, reduced gross leverage to below 4x, and reduced annual interest expense by nearly 50% to approximately $700 million.
- Reduced approximately $1 billion in capex associated with the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) buildout of divested consumer assets.
- Delivered $350 million in annualized cost savings by the end of 2025 and $1 billion by year end 2027 through the company's modernization program. This, in conjunction with improving product mix, should lead to continued margin and FCF improvement.
Chief Financial Officer Chris Stansbury said 2026 is expected to mark an inflection point as new digital revenues, growth in IP and Wavelengths, and long-term hyperscaler contracts begin to outpace legacy declines – setting up what he called a "trampoline moment" for expansion. Lumen projects business segment revenue growth in 2028 and a return to overall top-line growth in 2029, establishing a clear path from stabilization to value creation.
With a strengthened balance sheet and greater financial freedom, executives highlighted the bold investment in the company's three strategic pillars, each designed to accelerate innovation and position Lumen for long-term industry leadership.
Building the Backbone for the AI Economy
Lumen's strategy begins with the physical network, which carries a significant portion of the world's internet traffic. With construction underway coast-to-coast, the company is executing a multi-billion-dollar program to expand its intercity and metro fiber backbone:
- Adding 34 million new fiber miles by the end of 2028 for a total of 47 million intercity and metro miles.
- Connecting data centers, clouds, edge, and enterprise locations in any combination.
- Delivering 400G today and plans to scale to 1.6 terabits in the future.
Lumen's substantial investments to expand high-speed connectivity ensures customers have the network scale, speed, and reliability to confidently innovate and grow without constraints.
Cloudifying and Agentifying Telecom with a Digital Platform
The rise of AI is driving unprecedented demands for a new, Cloud 2.0 architecture with distributed, low-latency, high-bandwidth networks that can move and process massive amounts of data across multicloud, edge, and enterprise locations. Lumen is meeting this challenge by cloudifying and agentifying telecom, turning its expansive fiber footprint into a programmable digital platform that strips away the complexity of legacy networking.
Among the key product expansions and innovations shared during Analyst Forum:
- Expanding the company's Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform with investments in new innovations like Lumen Fabric Port (Q4 2025), Lumen Multi-Cloud Gateway (Q4 2025), and Lumen Connect (Q1 2026). Together, these technologies digitize the entire service lifecycle, so customers can provision, manage, and scale thousands of services across thousands of locations, within minutes.
- Scaling Internet On-Demand (IoD) beyond the traditional data-center-to-data-center model by bringing full fabric capabilities directly to customer premise, making it available to millions of off-net locations. This breakthrough provides businesses with a true on-demand network experience virtually anywhere, while opening a 100x market opportunity for Lumen.
- Debuting Lumen's first branded, custom-designed network interface device (H1 2026), a single gateway to future AI-era architecture and the new intelligent network edge. Compatible both on- and off-net, the device marks a breakthrough in how businesses connect and delivers AI-powered monitoring and self-healing insights, zero-touch provisioning, and API-driven control for scalability, programmability, and agility that empowers customers to manage their networks autonomously and custom-fit for their workloads. The new device is designed to lower costs and increase speed and security for businesses to move vast amounts of data across clouds, edge, and on-prem.
"Lumen is taking the network out of its hardware box and transforming it into a true digital platform," said Lumen Chief Technology and Product Officer Dave Ward. "By cloudifying our fiber assets into software and disrupting cloud economics, we're giving customers the ability to turn up services within minutes, scale as their AI workloads demand, and innovate at cloud speed. This is what the future of digital networking should deliver."
Creating a Connected Ecosystem
Lumen's connected ecosystem integrates the company's physical infrastructure and digital platforms with the capabilities of the world's fastest-growing technology companies to deliver customers powerful solutions spanning AI, security, back-up, and recovery. This ecosystem strategy is not about isolated services, it's about creating a fully digital experience that connects customers, technology partners, and platforms.
- Grounded with a test-and-learn approach, enabling the company to pilot innovations with customers, refine them in real time, and scale what delivers the most impact.
- Launching Lumen Validated Designs (LVDs), pretested, outcome-driven configurations with tech partners that eliminate complexity with proven architectures that support our customers' most critical needs.
- In the coming weeks, new ecosystem partners and LVD use cases will begin coming online, expanding the range of services customers can access, while building early commercial momentum.
In closing the session, CEO Kate Johnson underscored that Lumen's strategies are the foundation of the company's momentum today – transforming the industry with innovation to fuel growth, strengthening financial performance, and positioning the company as a critical enabler in the digital economy.
"We're thrilled by the energy and engagement we've seen from the analyst community," added Johnson. "The discussions around how Lumen is delivering an expansive network, digital platform, connected ecosystem and winning culture to meet the exponential enterprise demands of AI demonstrate the urgent need for innovation in our industry, and we're proud to be at the forefront of that conversation."
For a replay of the webcast, visit Lumen's investor website.
About Lumen Technologies
Lumen is unleashing the world's digital potential. We ignite business growth by connecting people, data, and applications – quickly, securely, and effortlessly. As the trusted network for AI, Lumen uses the scale of our network to help companies realize AI's full potential. From metro connectivity to long-haul data transport to our edge cloud, security, managed service, and digital platform capabilities, we meet our customers' needs today and as they build for tomorrow.
For news and insights visit news.lumen.com, LinkedIn: /lumentechnologies, X: lumentechco, Facebook: /lumentechnologies, Instagram: @lumentechnologies and YouTube: /lumentechnologies. Lumen and Lumen Technologies are registered trademarks of Lumen Technologies LLC in the United States. Lumen Technologies LLC is a wholly owned affiliate of Lumen Technologies, Inc.
Forward-Looking Statement
This press release includes certain forward-looking statements about future events. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results, are based on our current expectations only and are subject to various uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated by us in these statements due to several factors, including those referenced in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
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