Lumen Technologies, Inc. Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Thanks. It's always great to be with you.

I was there for a hot second.

Sure. Coincidentally, I started in November of 2022, November 7th specifically, and ChatGPT was the first publicly available instance of AI that we could all download to our phones, and that launched on November 22nd of that same month. I think when we talked in January, we were just starting to hypothesize this notion of really pivoting the network in support of enterprise data consumption growth. I think we are there. We have created a platform for enterprise networking for AI. I think while none of us could see it so clearly in November of 2022, what we have now is people, data, and applications are dispersed geographically. They sit in buildings, they have applications and data sitting in clouds and data centers and at the edge.

Then you add billions of AI agents, billions of them, and each one of these agents is generating and consuming huge quantities of data, and that data resides everywhere and needs to be shipped everywhere. The new problem that we are solving for customers is they have the need to ship data from anywhere to anywhere in real time to fulfill their AI ambitions.

In order to do that, you need three things. You need a massive physical network, you need a programmable network, so a digital platform sitting on top of that. The cool thing about ours is it is agnostic to whose fiber is underneath, so we can leverage our great network, but also other people's. Then you need a connected ecosystem because what you are connected to really matters. It is not just the buildings, the edge points, the clouds, and the data centers, but also you need to be connected to other technology companies. We have got all three working together, and it has given us a growth engine.