Thread regarding Lumen Technologies layoffs

Unwrapping my CupKate.

Kate Johnson

So you're never finished recruiting and retaining and developing and growing talent. I have sort of very publicly now completely revamped the senior leadership team. And we've got some world-class athletes that have joined.

Dave Ward, think about like somebody who's had a renowned career in networking. He's an expert there, incredibly innovative. He's the only person who's ever been a tech fellow in two different companies, Cisco and Juniper. And so he is one of the founding fathers of the Internet and understands the opportunity. As I do, only he understands it with that technical lens.

Kye Prigg, world-class leader from Vodafone and Rogers, revamping our operations delivery model. Satish Lakshmanan, leading product and instilling. He led AI at AWS and leading sort of our transformation to a product life cycle management process. And then Ryan Asdourian and Ashley Haynes-Gaspar from Microsoft. They helped me build the engine at Microsoft US for us to be commercially intense, and they're doing the same thing with our go-to-market engine here. Each of those leaders has a halo. They're bringing in people and they're taking the people who are here and they're blending it for better together. So it's tech plus telco with commercial intensity and we're delighted with our progress.

Batya Levi

That's great. I do want to talk and dig in a little bit more what these new services and products that they're developing are going to look like. But just if you could give us an overview of what you're seeing generally from maybe a macro perspective and sort of the enterprise segment. There is a bit of a view on the health of the enterprise right now. There are a lot of changes coming in and we seem to hear that some of the enterprise spending is on pause, because they don't necessarily know what they need to invest in. So let's just wait and see and then we'll pick up whatever GenAI is going to bring or kind of like keeping the status quo going. So your sense how do you see the health of the enterprise segment?

Kate Johnson

Yes, I've heard that in some earnings releases from some of the cloud companies recently that there's a hesitation. We are not seeing that. Maybe on the legacy telco services side, it's still sort of secular headwinds and it's tough. However, we're seeing an unprecedented spike in demand for custom private networks.

And this AI hype cycle is really unprecedented. It's remarkable not just how intense and prolonged it is, but also the diffusion curve of the technology is pretty profound. So all of us, even just a year ago, you wouldn't have seen the level of adoption of AI in Lumen that you do today. It's been a very short time to having it become a part of our everyday lives. And I think from what I read, it's universal across the world, across industries, et cetera. And so there's something that's happening, which is just incredibly fortuitous to Lumen and our turnaround.

Think about our story as we are doing a "fixer upper". We're making sure our company does the digital transformation work, people, process, technology, and becomes efficient in the markets that we serve. There's something outside, which is this opportunity to "completely disrupt" the industry. Like I said before, this digital transformation and customer experience being the product, but now put that in the context of, we'll start with hyperscalers.

Hyperscalers are training the models, right? They're training those AI models and they're seeing holy cow. We can never get enough data, and it's not 5x, 10x. It's multiples that, frankly, they're unprepared for. So there's a massive decentralization of data centers that's happening. And "any periodical" you read about the decentralization of those data centers, what do they talk about, power, space, and cooling. You've got to "connect them", Batya.

The fourth ingredient for success is fiber. And the hyperscalers and the cloud companies have recognized that and they're coming to us, and we have a pipe that is incredibly material, and we believe that we will have the evidence of those new demands in the marketplace in the "coming months."

And that is something that is important to our turnaround story. It gives us a growth vector that people didn't expect. And the reason why these companies are choosing us is because we've done that digital transformation preparedness work. So they're buying a network with a digital capability on it that no one else has.

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| 1191 views | | 9 replies (last June 17, 2024) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1t1HtgE2

9 replies (most recent on top)

Lumen can't cut out of wet paper bag with 1,000 razors and 500 scissors.

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Post ID: @3yfb+1t1HtgE2

I had to down vote just for that long a$$ post, not even worth my time

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Post ID: @3wei+1t1HtgE2

all of these touted executive team members have bounced from company to company, Kye, Ashley, etc. that should speak volumes.

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Post ID: @3jrl+1t1HtgE2

" Each of those leaders has a halo. "

You see a halo the board sees a noose.

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Post ID: @3lnu+1t1HtgE2

lol all this cheer leading by Kate on how cutting edge we are becoming. Yet in reality we can’t even put a darn order without involving 5 people for guidance to push it through multiple systems

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Post ID: @1rua+1t1HtgE2

Ole Hoody Noshoes is a founding father of their Internet? What a laughable line. That Kate would say such a thing out loud once again proves what a clueless outsider she really is.

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Post ID: @iir+1t1HtgE2

Oh for gods sake .. lovely writing but having lived thru it let’s see broadwing then level 3 then Centurylink now lumen … none of the back end systems and I don’t care about ai ….wete ever merged so you are asking sales people to sell and they have no clue what legacy network they are using .. so hence failure…only the field knows and a few old timers …so blah blah this is the problem forever set up
To fail

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Post ID: @mau+1t1HtgE2

Clearly smart team with macro industry knowledge. However, every Lumen employee should be able to articulate Lumen's top few product offerings -- preferably in the time it takes to get from first to second floor on an elevator. I cannot, can you?

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Post ID: @mkg+1t1HtgE2

"Fixer upper," that's rich. KJ really doesn't know what she's doing.

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Post ID: @flx+1t1HtgE2

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