CALIX, INC. ConneXions 2026

On February 15, 2025. We're taking off the gloves.

We'll hit you 'til your had enough. Yeah. You know it's game time. Here we go. Locked in the zone. Welcome to the show. It's time to rise. Get ready for the fight. It's gonna get wild. It's game time. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. This is the battleground. Until the final round. We're gonna elevate. Going up. We'll make you wish you never came. It's time. You know it's game time. Here we go. Locked in the zone. Welcome to the show. It's time to rise. Get ready for the fight. It's gonna get wild. It's game time. Let's go. Let's go. You know it's game time. You know it's game time. You know it's game time. You know it's game time. Get ready. It's game time. Here we go. Locked in the zone. Welcome to the show. It's time to rise. Get ready for the fight. It's gonna get wild. It's game time. Let's go. It's game time. Let's go. Let's go. It's game time.

Please welcome President and CEO, Calix. Michael Fei. You know it's game time.

Here we go. Locked in the zone. Welcome to the show. It's time to rise.

How's everyone doing this morning? Yeah? So before we start, let's have a big round of applause for all the customers and team members, who got on stage in front of all of you last night and kicked the show off with the band. Let's give a big round of applause. For the band. All right. I just got told something that you guys like the pavilion outside more than you liked what we did last year in the other place. So my question, yeah, who wants it there next year outside? Yeah, big round. There you go. Scott looks like that's done. All right. So welcome. Welcome to Connections. I was just reflecting. This is my 10th year at Calix. This is my 10th year at Connections. And if I think about what we've accomplished together, over the last 10 years, it's incredible. And we've transitioned this conference slowly but surely into what's all about you. So it's about how do we innovate with you? And you're going to see thematically throughout the morning that we talk a lot about together, together, together. And then how do we celebrate your success? How do we focus on your success every single day and ensure that we harvest that knowledge so this community of people, which John's going to talk about later today, how do we make this community stronger and stronger and help each other to thrive in what is a crazy time in this world?

You know, and if I reflect back on 2025, October last year, when I stood on stage with you, that's when we unveiled multiple years of work, the work that we started back in November of 2023, where our team started to pivot into artificial intelligence. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested into our platform so that you could be successful with what will be the biggest trend in human history. If you look back in time, and we're going to talk a lot about that, the pace of change that all of us are living in has never been seen before. I was joking with someone, as I walked to the stage this morning, as we were walking in the hallway, and we were both joking about the fact that I grew up with a black and white television playing Pong. Who here grew up with a black and white television? Yes, exactly. To talk now about autonomous cars, if you're in Las Vegas and you haven't taken the time to get into a Waymo, or get into Amazon Zoox and try that out, that's the future. Everything is changing at what is an astronomical pace that humankind is really going to struggle with.

But the good thing is, we saw that in November of 2023. Shane Eleniak and his team, he saw that AI was finally ready where we could make it trusted and secured. We're going to talk about that today. And we made those significant investments so that you don't have to worry about the things that everybody else is freaking out about, which is how do I use artificial intelligence in a safe and secure way to drive predictable outcomes? We made that investment. And in March, at the end of March, every single one of our customers is now AI-enabled. You have exactly zero to do. You just need to use it. Because it's embedded in all elements of our platform. And so I do know that it was difficult. Because let's be clear, think back on your career. I've been working for, I don't know, 40 years, probably since I was 10 years old when I had a paper route. And if I think about all the things that I did through my life, you know what never happened to me? Nothing worthwhile ever happened, easily. Everything that I did, everything that my teammates did, everything that our company has done with you, has required sacrifice, hard work, weekends, pain.

Because the only way something is worthwhile is if there's some pain to get to it. If that wasn't the case anyone could do it. And so this was hard. But it was worthwhile. And today, we're going to walk you through all the ways that is worthwhile for your teams. How we are going to litter AI into everything that you do every day, so instead of thinking about how I have to go build this stuff and worry about, like what Anthropic did and things break out and worried about losing my customer data, you can focus on what's important, which is selling, marketing, building more and winning. Not monkeying around with technology. So it was hard. We know we slowed down some implementations. We had some problems. Because when you're holding a petabyte of data every single day, it's a juggling act. And there's going to be a bit of that. So I want to start by saying thank you to all of our customers, for going on that journey with us. We acknowledge how hard that was. We deeply appreciate it. And my promise to you is now it pays. And it pays big. Because that investment in time and effort and the communications that we've had together, it's going to pay.

So a big round of applause and thank you for everything that you've done. And we're working through that with us. And let's be really clear. There is absolutely positively no version of the future where AI is optional. None. Everything is changing. And you either change or you get run over. You will find my dialogue on LinkedIn this morning with somebody who doesn't acknowledge that fact, quite humorous, because the individual was unwilling to accept the fact that we as humankind need to change. We need to change how we think. We need to change how we learn. And we have to accept this isn't going to stop. Pushing against AI is like the stable carrier the guy who bred horses saying, I don't think cars are coming. The difference between Ford Motor putting out cars and eliminating the horse-drawn carriage and what's happening today is the pace. What happened in decades is happening in weeks. And this is something that we're going to talk about a lot today. How do we embrace that change and make the most of it? Because we will put you to the front. Game on. That's why I've invested all this money, to get to this point.

And that investment is managed by what you tell us. I still remember when Carl, our chairman, recruited me into Calix. And I had multiple choices. I was working for Salesforce. I had another huge company pre-IPO trying to get me. And then I met Carl. And what he described was you. His biggest selling point about why to join Calix is because of what you do every day. You change your communities. You help the police fire ambulance do greater things. You invest in places that no one else invested to ensure that everybody's connected so it doesn't matter what your economic strata that you can be successful. Raise yourself out and do great things. And so when he talked about that, what we really built on in my last 10 years is how to make sure programmatically that everything that we do is a partnership together. Shane and his organization spent a huge amount of time from a product discussion point of view debating with you, talking about things, collaborating. And this is my favorite statistic of the entire show, other than when you all your successes. And it's all the things that we did together over 12,000 engagements, over 352 collaborations.

We're still running massive customer engagement processes that allow us to communicate together. And this becomes really important as we go through the stage of AI, because unless we communicate and do it together, we won't succeed. Again, where you need to come together as a community is when change is at a rapid pace. It's easy when things are going well. But when change is all around you, we must talk a lot. And so if there's things on your mind, I encourage you to call me. People send me a text. People call me. Send me an email. Glad to respond. Might be a little slow on email. Sorry. Plane's getting in the way of that. But I will respond. And if there's things that we can do better, make sure you tell our team. We have a team here who's only job is to make sure we understand what you need, what we're doing well, what we're not doing well. That's what this conference is about. Innovation and your success. And so I want to also say thank you. Thank you. Because if you look at all those engagements, that's a lot of your time. And if we're not listening, then that's not good.

And so what I will show you as we go through this conference is just how much we're going to listen this year. Because we finally have a massive amount of capacity to do what you need to do to be successful. So huge thank you. Big round of applause for yourselves. And thank you for the partnership that you've allowed us to have. One of the speakers who's going to come up at the end of the day of the morning is actually Jürgen, our new Chief Marketing Officer. And what he's going to talk to you about is the massive transition that we're going to have with regards to partners. I talked about this last year, a connections that the future of artificial intelligence is not just language models and those things, but it's also these core technologies that shift us from away from APIs and allow us to engage with partners in a new way. Those core technologies are A to A, which is agent to agent. And MCP, which is model context protocol, which is the ability to leave data where it exists and just harvest what is the context that an agent needs to do great work and share the context and then into knowledge.

And we've put those in place. In fact, we built out an MCP server. So if one of your partners is not actually moving fast enough, you can drop an MCP server in front of it and we can harvest that context. But we've made a big investment. And as you can see, the ones in orange are the ones who are actually moving fast to also ensure that MCP works between our partnerships. The second part of it is these partners are the future. Working together is very important. Not only do they are they making these investments to get to A to A and MCP, but at the same time, they're here at the conference. They're in the partner showcase. Please take the time to go and talk to them. Because every single day, they're focused on making you more successful and driving your business. So let's give them a big round of applause and thanks. And as I said, there's no future that doesn't include AI. And I put this quote up last year: "AI won't replace humans, but humans who use AI will replace those who don't." I would trade humans for companies. AI won't replace companies, but companies who use AI will replace those who don't.

And to all the first movers, a couple hundred of you out there, those of you who have actually jumped in with us and are collaborating deeply on artificial intelligence, you've actually adopted what we're doing end to end from a platform point of view. Thank you. Because what you're doing is you're helping us go faster so that everybody else can benefit, by collaborating very closely with us around all the workflows and the agents that we're releasing at a very, very fast pace. So let's give these first movers who actually have signed up with us and are embedding their business with AI a huge round of applause. Well done. Thanks to the community. And look, I'm a CEO. The pressure just keeps going up. And this pace of change thing, it actually may cause a lot of tension for all of us. Our teams, our customers, our employees, this is a huge pressure cooker. And I was reflecting back is that if you go back five years ago, just before COVID, the big conversation we were all having was, well, I'm going to have a multi-fiber market. That was probably the biggest thing that we were worried about.