AI Is Forcing Enterprises to Rethink Network Infrastructure, Lumen CEO Says
After selling its fiber-to-the-home business to AT&T, company pivots toward enterprise AI infrastructure.
BARCELONA, March 4, 2026 — Artificial intelligence is driving a redesign of global network infrastructure, as enterprises build faster, programmable systems to handle exploding data workloads, Lumen CEO Kate Johnson said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress here.
Broadband Breakfast
Johnson leads Lumen Technologies, a Louisiana–based enterprise networking and fiber infrastructure company that has repositioned itself around digital connectivity for large-scale computing systems.
“The architectures are changing, the workloads are exploding, and users are getting more impatient,” Johnson said.
Johnson said artificial intelligence is placing new demands on network performance, particularly around latency and data movement. One key benchmark, she said, is the “fastest time to first token,” referring to how quickly an AI model produces its first response after receiving a prompt.
Enterprises are increasingly distributing workloads across multiple computing environments, requiring networks that can dynamically move data between systems rather than relying on static enterprise-to-cloud connections.
“The future isn’t about more cloud,” Johnson said. “It’s about where you put it.”
That shift is accelerating infrastructure investment across the technology sector. Hyperscale cloud providers are expanding data center capacity while enterprises upgrade connectivity to support AI workloads.
Many companies are discovering their existing networks are “not big enough, fast enough, secure enough or smart enough” to support AI-driven computing, Johnson said.
Lumen has positioned its fiber backbone as a key component of that transition. Johnson said the company’s network reaches within five milliseconds of roughly 95 percent of North American businesses.
The company has signed $13 billion in agreements with hyperscale cloud providers to connect expanding AI data center networks, Johnson said, positioning Lumen’s fiber infrastructure as a key link in the emerging AI infrastructure stack.
“We’re selling velocity,” Johnson said, referring to the ability to connect hyperscale data centers faster than companies could build network infrastructure themselves.
Johnson, who joined the company in late 2022, said Lumen has reduced debt from about $21 billion to roughly $12 billion as part of its shift toward enterprise infrastructure services.
She also urged corporate technology leaders to treat networking as a strategic infrastructure decision rather than a procurement function.
“The network has to be promoted to the table,” Johnson said.
Johnson added that the biggest opportunity in artificial intelligence lies not just in automation but in redesigning business workflows and customer experiences.
“You can’t just make existing processes faster,” she said. “You have to reimagine them.”
Member discussion