Built to amplify: how Lumen is rethinking teams and technology in the AI era with Greg Freeman

If AI can technically do more every day, but organizations aren’t ready to use it, where does the real leverage come from?

In this session, Greg Freeman shares how Lumen — the company that owns Autonomous System One and millions of miles of fiber — is rethinking both its technology stack and its org structure to put AI to work in network operations, arguing that the harder problem isn’t the tooling, it’s the people.

He covers:

• Reframing “what jobs will AI replace” into “what jobs can AI amplify” — and what that means for the human sitting at the console amid a flood of network data
• The difference between deterministic network orchestration (built and guardrailed by humans) and non-deterministic AI (machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI) — and why Lumen still leans deterministic wherever a mistake would be costly
• Four organizational models for the AI era — pyramid, diamond, inverted pyramid, and hourglass — and why the hourglass (investing in both junior talent and subject-matter experts while pinching the middle) is the only one that sustains a long-term expertise pipeline
• Why Gartner’s data shows AI technical capability outpacing organizational readiness, and what closes that gap
• Live demos of Lumen’s modular agent ecosystem — Ask Greg (internal engineer assistant), Nora (customer-facing email agent for network diagnostics), the chat-based customer portal, and disaster-response overlays combining AI with NOAA wildfire, hurricane, and flood data
• Real lessons from production, including AI-to-AI email agents getting stuck in a “courtesy standoff” loop, and the risk of overloading a supervisor agent with too many sub-agents

The session lands on a historical parallel: superior technology alone doesn’t win — it’s the people who know how to wield it. Lumen’s bet is that orchestration ability, not access to the latest model, is the real strategic advantage.