It was the weekend before last Thanksgiving when Kate Johnson, the president and CEO of Lumen Technologies, called then-Nationwide Chief Technology Officer Jim Fowler to discuss hiring a new top technologist for the telecommunications company.
Fowler, who had served on Lumen’s board since 2023, quickly realized that the conversation with Johnson wasn’t about a board director and CEO working together on succession planning. He was being recruited.
Less than two weeks later, Fowler left insurer Nationwide after more than seven years and joined Lumen (ranked No. 325 on the Fortune 500) as chief technology and product officer, departing the board immediately to take on the C-suite role. He succeeded Dave Ward, who had served as CTO for two years and left in January to become president and chief architect at software giant Salesforce.
Fowler joins Lumen’s leadership as the provider of internet, cloud, IT, and communication technology services undergoes a strategic transformation led by Johnson, who joined Lumen in 2022 after a brief retirement. She has focused on reducing Lumen’s debt load and narrowing its focus to prioritize serving private companies and public sector organizations. The $5.75 billion sale of Lumen’s consumer fiber businesses to AT&T helped on both fronts. The deal closed in February and Lumen has said it would use about $4.8 billion of the proceeds to pay down debt.
Another key area of focus, and this is where Fowler comes in, is a commitment that Lumen made to Wall Street back in 2024 that it would achieve annualized run-rate savings of $1 billion from its network by the end of 2027. Fowler says AI is at the “heart of how we’re going to do that.”
“Each one of our senior leaders has a single target that they are going after,” he adds. Legal’s focus is on deploying AI-enabled applications that can speed up the contracting process, while marketing is looking at ways to use AI to create more personalized marketing materials.
For Fowler’s technology team, his goal is a 50% reduction in the cycle time for new product development. “That’s what my teams are going to march toward,” says Fowler.
Many elements of Lumen’s internal technology strategy have impressed Fowler as he settles into the role. He says his predecessor had a strong vision on cloud computing and there has been encouraging progress on AI. More than 90% of Lumen’s employees have a Microsoft Copilot license and the tool is being used for a variety of purposes including meeting assistance, strategy, and research.
Lumen’s engineers use the AI coding assistant GitHub Copilot and are authorized to switch between different AI models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. As a result, Fowler says he is seeing up to a 50% improvement in productivity for some tasks like re-platforming applications.
He says one “hidden gem” he uncovered is that Lumen’s engineering team has developed an agentic AI framework already deployed across the entire company. Employees can build their own AI agents on an internal, proprietary dashboard that Lumen created. Workers can deploy custom AI agents using large language models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. They are encouraged to explore the models that they believe will produce the best outcomes at the most efficient cost.
Still less than 90 days into his new role, Fowler has identified a few projects he will prioritize going forward. They include modernizing Lumen’s disparate operations that stem from its legacy of growing through acquisitions. To extract the most value possible from Lumen’s AI investments, Fowler’s team will need to continue to rewrite and reimplement those systems.
Other projects include expanding the physical layer. Lumen is planning to more than double the amount of fiber in the ground, from over 17 million miles today to over 47 million miles over the next two years. Then, there’s the digital layer, making it easier for customers to opt in to Lumen’s various services through agentic AI-enabled support.
“This has been a network infrastructure company for 50 years,” says Fowler. “Getting it to think like a tech company—with software development and engineering practices that scale with demand from our customers—has been a focus of mine in the first two months that I’ve been here.”
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com