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, he said. Lumen’s acquisition of Alkira, a cloud networking platform for multi-cloud environments, reverses that.
