Lumen CMO on cloudifying telecom: fiber demand tripling as AI agents generate unseen data volumes

I'm John Ryan. Pleasure. You hold this microphone. Uh why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and what brought you here today? Perfect. I'm Ryan as Dorian. I'm the chief marketing and strategy officer for Lumen. Okay.

And we're here at AIPCON talking about all the great things we're doing together to modernize telecom. Uh Lumen's a Let's give it up for modernizing telecom. Yeah, exactly. Finally, finally. It's it's fun because it's decades of complex operational.

I mean, Palanteer is helping us modernize into this new world that you need for AI ready multicloud world that is what everyone's here talking about. Yeah. How do you define uh h break down more of what you do in telecom specifically? Yeah.

So, Lumen is you know for for decades we have basically been connecting the world. Okay. It starts with connection and then in the last uh in the last bit of time yeah the world has needed new ways of connecting. Yeah. We're bringing that infrastructure. We're bringing control.

If you think about the way it was before, it was like fiber in the ground. All fiber, right? Everything that's running across fiber, those super fast connections you need, one port, one connection was the way of the was the way of the world. We're changing that.

We're getting it cloud ready, cloud enabled, remote controlled, all of those things that give you that redundancy, latency, all the things that power AI. Yeah, that's what Lumen is doing and we're connecting the world. Okay. Uh who's the customer right now? We have lots of customers.

So it start so we're really focused on the enterprises the enterprises that are building these capabilities data center operators hyperscalers of course and so we've announced some of the work we've done on the backbone the infrastructure backbone of the AI economy but what we're really doing is enabling businesses new things new new technologies that they want to give them a technological advantage we're disrupting this industry to help them disrupt their industry.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so I mean obviously there's like an immense amount of money flowing into data centers.

Is a lot of that actually going into like new bandwidth requirements between data centers like the basic narrative is like yeah they might spend a billion dollars training something but it's all happening within one data center.

Well so the the thing you hear about a lot and you guys have talked about a lot as well is compute storage cooling all those things that are needed. Yeah. The missing link is connectivity.

And realistically, it's something that has really emerged as of recent to say there are new types of connectivity, new nextgen fiber. Yeah. That has way more capacity Sure. than the world has ever needed before. Sure. We're we're growing leaps and bounds over by 2028, we'll have about 66 million uh route miles of fiber.

And that is growing, you know, 3 to 5x what we've had before. Okay. And that is the capacity the world needs. Yeah. So there's uh some and is that capacity being used inefficiently today or or is or or is demand still way out stripping supply? The demand is completely maxing out.

It's why we are putting these investments in the ground and we're not only the hyperscalers I'd say the tip of the spear. They're consuming a lot of this.

They're looking for a lot of this data center to data center connectivity, but it's really enterprises everywhere that are now saying, you know what, we also need that type of bandwidth.

And some will take it dedicated, some will take it shared, but the need is completely outpacing what the needs of the last couple decades have been. Yeah. Try and make that more concrete for me. Uh because I feel like most people's interaction with AI is uh I send the most condensed packets possible across the internet.

Just a couple lines of text. Yeah. And then a bunch of GPUs light on fire at the AWS data center, Azure if I'm using uh GBT. And then uh it sends back text. This is not rich video. This is not VR.

I I buy I im immediately like intuit intuitively understand like if we're in the metaverse world and we're streaming 4K stereoscopic that's super bandwidth heavy. How is AI bandwidth heavy?

So, it's actually great listening to the customers that have been here at AIPCON because you hear American Airlines, you hear BP, you hear some of these customers that are talking about their infrastructure, all of the scheduling, the inferencing, the the planning that is happening in real time and adjusting.

That is not just people typing in their prompts into the text. It is systems talking to systems. And this is where the data explosion has come from. It's all happening in the background. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so even though I fire off one query to GPT5, it if it's doing deeper research, it might be pinging 75 different websites and that's driving up total internet use. Yes. And the systems spanning out are also creating their own queries. Yes. Like Yeah.

We saw that with the demo from Palunteer like you know he he typed one line of text like help optimize this airport. That's right. Okay. Yeah. And so this is where the disruption in telecoms. And if you really think about what has changed in telecom over the last 25 years, the answer is not much.

When you can take one port and you can put lots of services on that port and put the control in the customer's hands. You've changed the way people inter it's cloudifying telecom. And in this new world of what is happening with cloud like cloud 2.

0 I know that is the necessary bandwidth control and uh precision yeah that you need in connectivity. What does cloudifying telecom mean? Does that mean like more like multi-tenant on the actual fiber lines like instead of a hyperscaler owning one route then they're they're bidding it out and spot rates or something.

Yeah, multi multi-tenant is a good way to think about some of the services on top of you know in the past you've literally if you think even back to old telephone switches you've had you know the the one wire to one wire it's been one port to one service you add a service you add a port it's a truck roll it's a person coming out cloudifying it is bringing all of that technology to the users giving them that interface that portal where they can say I need these services I need them in these locations I need this speed I need the bandwidth turned up it's network as a service.

Yeah. So higher level of abstraction. Yes. And uh yeah more like almost like a virtual machine on top of the the the telecom infrastructure. So can we be be provisioned like on an ad hoc basis. Yeah.

And and one of the biggest changes I think in the economics this AI economy is also if you think about a network subscription if you will of the past you sign up you get a certain amount of bandwidth.

But if you look at the companies of today, if you look at the sports industry, manufacturing industry, healthcare industry, they have these spikes that are massive. And so we're providing that network as a service where it turns up, turns down. And then customers are paying for what they it's a consumption model.

And again, that's part of this cloudifying model which has not hit telecom till what we're looking to transform. So yeah, help me understand the the new shape of the uh telecom industry in your business.

Like I imagine that there's some genius scientist that comes up with a faster fiber optic cable that is manufactured somewhere.

Then someone purchases that, they buy some land, they bury it in the ground, maybe they get some rights, and then at a certain point someone's uh you know leasing or essentially charging a toll along that toll road. Uh do you sit all are we completely vertically integrated?

So we we sit vertically integrated but I think what you do R&D on on new fiber optic technology. We work with a number of partners on that and then we're also thinking about the AI optimizations on on that fiber.

So if you think about intelligent routing if you think about redundancy if you think about all those things where you could have something as simple as a fiber cut in the ground. Sure. Maybe it's on purpose maybe it's not on purpose but you're aware of that and then you need to dispatch someone to go fix it.

you can't have any interruption to the services you're running. So we have to have that redundancy. Y on top of that our customers and enterprises everywhere I think they started mostly building with one cloud.

Now if you think about this multicloud world where they're hitting Azure, GDC, AWS, they're hitting all of them at the same time with the same applications in different regions across the US. They have to seamlessly let those systems talk to each other. And they don't want a direct connection to each of them.

That's where we started. But now they want to be able to live in this fabric where their systems can talk to all of these in all the regions, get all of the data and process faster because that's part of the disruption they want. Uh last question for me. Um uh how how does Palunteer fit into that? Yeah.

So if you think of the operational complexity of the decades of past. Yeah. Uh you know you've built all these networks. We we talked about fiber in the ground. Think about the systems over those decades that have been built up. Yep.

One of the things Palanteer is helping us with is this managing this operational complexity. You sort of see an abstraction of this in LA when there's the fire and like the the boxes with the telephone lines just explode. Yeah. You're like why didn't they build a box that doesn't explode?

And so you imagine that, okay, that's where that's how the power lines work. The fiber optic lines. Yeah, they're newer, but there's probably still some stuff that might go wrong if it was installed 30 years ago. Yeah, you got to identify that early.

There's that and there's the software layer that is running all of those. Got to make sure that that's up to date, not crashing. And Palanteer is helping us optimize those, helping us bring them together.

And and what we are building for customers is then a system that they don't have to think about the optimization they need in their network. We're going to help automate that. We're going to help bring AI to that network. And that's part of this partnership.

And it's also frankly the most exciting part about disrupting telco. It's not an industry that too many have talked about disrupting for a while. It's ripe for it. It's needed. and this AI multicloud era, Lumen's here for it. That's very exciting. Anything else, Jordy? Love it.

Uh, we're running late, so thank you so much for having me. All right, I'll grab this. Thank you. Uh, we have our next guest coming into the studio. Uh, Drew Cukor. I think we actually have multiple. We might need to pull up an extra chair. Um, we have lads. We have lads coming in.

Uh, if if we want to bring everyone in, we can. We'll we can pass the mic around. Whatever, whatever you guys want to do. Um, we have multiple. Just Oh, okay. Hey. Oh, hey.