Great! Thanks everyone for joining. I'm Batya Levi from the communications team at UBS, and our next speaker is Kate Johnson, President and CEO of Lumen. Kate joined Lumen about 18 months ago, and she's had a long career in the tech world, including Red Hat, GE, Oracle, and more recently, President of Microsoft. And before that, we were actually colleagues at UBS.
That's right.
About 20 years ago.
We didn't know it, but we were.
Yes.
Yeah.
That was, that was good. So very excited to have you here. Women in Tech Conference is a unique conference that Taylor put together from our software team, bringing women in finance that are investing in tech companies with women executives in the tech, technology world. So I thank you so much for joining us, Kate.
Thank you for having me.
I just wanted to start maybe your background and how you ended up in tech, and you've had a long career here, and why did you stay in tech?
So yeah, I studied electrical engineering. I always loved math, science, physics, and I wanted to be an engineer, or so I thought. I got a job at Bell Labs, and I was there for maybe like 11 minutes before I realized I was a terrible engineer. But that I loved the human connection part of developing technology and deploying it and making change. I fell in love with the art of change and the science of it. I love psychology, I love human behavior, and let's face it, tech, there's a lot of opportunity to drive the big impact.
So I've just happened to find opportunity after opportunity in that context, you know, and I'm very much purpose-driven, so I kind of dive into these opportunities and, you know, attach it to a purpose of making a change, moving an org from point A to point B, or driving a certain set of business outcomes. And I've just always found tech to be a great playground for those kinds of opportunities.
That's great. And Lumen, I've covered Lumen for many years.
Mm-hmm.
From my perspective, it's a plain old telephone company.
Mm.
And I know you've been-
You're killing me. You are killing me.
You are making changes. That's definitely clear. What brought you to Lumen? From your perspective, wasn't Lumen a plain old phone company?
This is not your mama's Lumen, Batya. It's not your mama's Lumen. We are changing everything about the company and, you know, same kind of thing. What brought me to the company was really simple. I started my career at AT&T-
Mm.
Right? Selling T1s and T3s to McCaw.
Yeah.
When I got the opportunity, you know, whole career later, to, to come back into telco in a CEO role, it was pretty exciting, and it kind of felt like synchronicity. But I think the opportunity itself was really, really compelling. I see things that maybe not everybody sees yet, but I think they're going to, which is that telco as an industry is really the final frontier for digital transformation, okay? Healthcare is changing, journalism is changing, financial services is changing, you know, retail is changing. There's not a single company on the planet that hasn't really made huge progress in terms of changing the way that they operate, right? In, because of digital. And what's the one lesson we learned in digital, right? Amazon taught us that the customer experience is the product, right?
It's like, here, you know, it's not about buying the book or the WD-40 or the frozen shrimp. It's about instant gratification, any product, anytime, anywhere. And, you know, you apply that to cloud, it's still just servers and network and storage and connectivity and everything, but they changed the customer experience to say: "We'll worry about the innovation, and we'll plate it up for you simply, you know, any cloud, anytime, you know, anywhere, and we'll make it completely effortless for you." That's the opportunity in telco, is to completely change the product by completely changing the customer experience, to connect people, data, and applications quickly, securely, effortlessly. That's our opportunity. We could talk more about that, but there's this third thing that's come along recently that I think might resonate with people in this room, which is that I really sort of...
Maybe it's my age. You did mention, not once, but twice, that I had a long career, which I think is your way of saying: "Wow, you're old." But with that perspective, with that context, I've come to learn that we have a lot more room to grow in terms of making leadership available to women. And, you know, if we're successful in transforming this company, which I believe that we will be, then I think it might give me the opportunity to show that women are suitable for these roles, that it might make a bit more space for women in that context.
I've got a daughter, and I don't know, maybe one day I'll, I'll be lucky enough to have granddaughters, and if I could make more space for them, then this won't just be the most fun I've ever had, because it definitely is, it'll be the most important thing I've ever done. But that's why I'm at Lumen, and that's why I'm staying.
Right... it requires a lot of change. Do you, do you believe that people at Lumen are ready for that change?
Yeah. Well, when I got there, but look, the assignment was clear. The Board was very clear. I was hired to turn the company around.
Right.
They didn't necessarily say that in the press release, but those were the conversations, and our agreements were, if you wanna drive a turnaround, you have to change everything, and it starts with a mission and a vision. It starts with clarity of purpose. It, it's about culture. It's about recapitalizing the company. It's about changing everything. Do you have the patience, board, to do this? Because I'll, I wanna do it with and for you, but we have to be in agreement. So it starts there, and getting everybody signed up is about getting the right leaders in, right? Who bring in some of their leaders and so on and so forth. And, you know, when you first start any change project, Batya, it's a third, a third, a third. A third of the people are psyched you're there, and they wanna go for it.
A third say, "I hate this; I'm out." The middle third are deciding which group to join. We're past that. We are now at the point where the opt-outers are gone, the opt-inners are growing, and the people left there, it's like skill versus will. They have the will to do it. The question is, can we retrain and reskill them so we can shape the company to do what we, you know, need to do? That's more of the, of the cultural nuance that we're fighting now.
And you're also bringing in new leadership-
Mm-hmm.
to drive that change.
Mm-hmm.
Are we done with that process? And what are some of the changes that they're making right now?
So you're never finished recruiting and retaining and developing and growing talent. I have sort of very publicly now completely revamped the senior leadership team, and we've got some world-class athletes that have joined. You know, Dave Ward, think about like somebody who's had you know a renowned career in networking. He's an expert there, incredibly innovative. He's the only person who's ever been a tech fellow at two different companies, Cisco and Juniper. And so you know he is one of the founding fathers of the internet and understands the opportunity as I do, only he understands it with that technical lens. You know, Kye Prigg, world-class leader from Vodafone and Rogers, revamping you know our operations delivery model. Satish Lakshmanan, leading product and instilling...
He led AI at AWS, and leading, you know, sort of our transformation to a product lifecycle management process. And then Ryan Asdourian and Ashley Haynes-Gaspar from Microsoft, they helped me build the engine at Microsoft U.S. for us to be commercially intense, and they're doing the same thing with our go-to-market engine here. Each of those leaders has a halo. They're bringing in people, and they're taking the people who are here, and they're blending it for better together. So it's tech plus telco with commercial intensity, and we're delighted with our progress.
That's great. I do wanna talk and dig in, a little bit more what your-- what these new services and products that-
Mm-hmm.
They're developing are gonna look like. But just if you could give us an overview of what you're seeing generally from a maybe a macro perspective and, sort of the enterprise segment. There is a bit of a view on the health of the enterprise right now. There are a lot of changes coming in, and we, we seem to hear that, they are some of the enterprise spending is on pause because they don't necessarily know what they need to invest in.
Mm-hmm.
Let's just wait and see, and then we'll pick up whatever the AI is gonna bring or kind of like keeping the status quo going. Your sense, how do you see the health of the enterprise segment?
Yeah, I've heard that in some earnings releases from some of the cloud companies recently, you know, that there's a hesitation. We are not seeing that. Maybe on the legacy telco services side, it's still, you know, sort of secular headwinds, and it's tough. However, we're seeing an unprecedented spike in demand for custom private networks and AI. This AI hype cycle is really unprecedented. It's remarkable, not just how intense and prolonged it is, but also the diffusion curve of the technology is pretty profound. So all of us, even just a year ago, you wouldn't have seen the level of adoption of AI in Lumen that you do today.
It's been a very short time to having it become a part of our everyday lives, and I think from what I read, it's universal across the, you know, the world, across industries, et cetera. And so, there's something that's happening, which is just incredibly fortuitous to Lumen and our turnaround. You know, think about our story is we are doing a fixer-upper. We're making sure our company does the digital transformation work, people, process, technology, and becomes efficient in the markets that we serve. There's something outside, which is this opportunity to completely disrupt the industry. Like I said before, this digital transformation and customer experience being, you know, the product. But now put that in the context of, we'll start with hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are training the models, right?
They're training those AI models, and they're seeing, "Holy cow, we, we can never get enough data," and it's not 5x, 10x. It's, you know, it's multiples that, frankly, they're unprepared for. So, there's a massive decentralization of data centers that's happening and any periodical you read about the decentralization of those data centers, what do they talk about? Power, space, and cooling. You gotta connect them, Batya.
Right.
The fourth ingredient for success is fiber, and the hyperscalers and the cloud companies have recognized that, and they're coming to us, and we have a pipe that is incredibly material, and we believe that we will have, you know, the evidence of those new demands in the marketplace in the coming months. And that is something that is, you know, important to our turnaround story. It gives us a growth vector that people didn't expect, and the reason why these companies are choosing us is because we've done that digital transformation preparedness work. So they're buying a network with a digital capability on it that no one else has.
Okay. I definitely wanna touch on a lot. You made a lot of points, but maybe just starting with the digital transformation piece.
Mm-hmm.
What does that mean, truly, and where are we at Lumen in terms of that?
Yeah. So, you know what? I always wanna be respectful to prior management. Prior management was not given the assignment to turn the company around. Prior management's assignment was play not to lose, okay? Secular headwinds, be the last man standing. When I came in, they said: "Okay, that won't. That's not gonna work. We need to do something different," and so the assignment was transformation. I say that because we had to do some pretty important things: new mission, cut the dividend, restructure the company, brand-new management team, shut down all of the extraneous projects that don't accrue to, you know, what our mission really is, and focus like a laser on the things that really matter in terms of driving that new experience. And the internet does not serve the digital economy.
It's not prepared for AI, and we run a large portion of the internet, and we are going to be expanding it in a material way and making it infinitely more consumable. And so digital transformation means making sure we have the people, process, technology, and skill sets to be able to do that, and that's what the past 18 months have been about, and we've done the remedial work. So I'll give you a great example. The remedial work is to say we were in service of the dividend in the past. Now, we're in service of trying to build our future. Let's take deployment of a platform in service delivery. We're implementing ServiceNow. We tried that 4 times in the past, apparently, before this new team got here, and we failed. Why did we fail?
Because our processes were so complex that and we didn't know how to remediate them. So now we have the team, we have the tools, we have the capital to say, "What does a great process look like? Let's do it one time and prove to these teams that this is the way we do business now." We took Lumen DIA, Direct Internet Access, and we examined the process. It was 48 days on average. We cleaned it up. We got it down to single digit as the target in terms of number of days and put it in ServiceNow, and it works end to end, and the Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction went through the roof.
We're doing that every day and chipping away at it, but the real next big block of, you know, strategic digital transformation is to integrate the four separate networks that we have from the various acquisitions. That's the next opportunity.
Surprised to hear that there are still four separate network architectures because I know Lumen has come together to this day from integration of different assets over the years. But every time there was one, there was a synergy target. It was about cost-cutting and integrating those networks. So from our seats, we thought that was done.
Yeah, you know, as I said, I think the low-hanging fruit was what management was talking about, still in service of the dividend. "Hey, we're doing a cost reduction. It's the things that we should be doing, but not the really, really hard ones that require capital to do." And if you're gonna unify and standardize a network across four very different architectures, it takes capital.
Now, here's the cool part. This is where we got the, I feel, sometimes I feel like we're cheating 'cause we have, you know, this amazing team, and they're like: "Hang on a second. If we put together what you know, what you know, and what you know, we have a fast path to get there," and we believe we... and I won't quote the number, but a material amount of our net new revenue will be on a unified architecture by the end of this year, okay?
And what that enables us to do is compress the number of order management systems we have from the teens down to one, the number of inventory management systems we have from the high teens down to one, and the number of billing systems we have in the multiple dozen down to one, and that is going to provide this efficient, you know, galvanized, unified network to basically crack open our ability to provide NaaS anywhere, network as a service anywhere.
That's the huge breakthrough. It's very strategic 'cause it doesn't just take out cost, but it provides that digital platform for the next sort of version of Lumen.
Right.
The new Lumen.
How long does that take to go to a unique one network architecture?
Well, like I said, it's about the path for net new revenue. So if the old things are still-
Right.
... you know-
I know.
... flowing through the old ones, it becomes a data portability and a tech debt cleanup story. And, but if you're focused on- ... Lumen Digital is about growing these net new services, and if we're able to provide, you know, those services on this unified network and push through that J-curve of adoption really quickly, it won't be that long before we start making material progress in that. And that's exactly what's happening. Think about it this way: number one, there are three types of tech debt. There's network tech debt, which is, like, the complexity of the architecture, then there's the product proliferation because you have to have, you know, lots of different product combinations to be able to sell circuits across the four different environments. You know, and then you have all these systems that are still around.
If we nail the first one, the other two will simplify very quickly after that. And so, you know, while it's a multi-year journey, we can take the cost out in the short term and, you know, like I said, build, build the future for pushing through that J-curve as quickly as possible.
Right. For network architecture, are you referring to maybe, like, the old Qwest as one, Level 3 as one, those?
Yeah, so inside of Lumen, and this is something that, you know, I've learned over the past year and a half, is, the, the logos, where we came from typically matters a lot because it's our identity and our product sets and our architectures. And so each one of those logos was a different color, and so we have four different colors, and we're driving Lumen to be colorless. So I don't like when people say, "Hey, my name's, you know, Bob, I'm from CenturyLink," or, "My name's Fred, and, you know," and Sally and Sue, "and I'm from Qwest," or whatever. I'm like, "No, you're not. You're all from Lumen.
Right.
Come on, this is one, one jersey, one team, one unified network, et cetera.
Right.
And so that's part of the cultural-
Yeah.
... nuance that we're working through.
I mean, it's been integrated for a long time, supposedly, like, time to call it one.
From a business veneer perspective.
Right, yeah.
Business veneer is very different than-
Than the actual..
... cables and servers and routers.
Right.
Right?
Talk about the fiber connectivity. Yes, it's definitely. All the capabilities at a data center will just stay there unless you have the pipe taking them somewhere else. What we hear is that it's a commodity. Everybody can provide that fiber. So what you do mention that we're unique, like, how is Lumen unique?
In a bunch of different ways. So the first thing is, I talked about, you know, play not to lose. Part of that strategy was constantly investing in the fiber and the network, so it's actually been refreshed, which is great thing. Because not only do we have great coverage and great routes, but we've got state-of-the-art and modern fiber. We've also got really great supply chain relationships-
Yeah.
... where we're co-innovating, and we have hopefully some announcements that are coming up this summer that will show the fruits of that labor, which will continue to differentiate in the context of fiber networks. But time is of the essence here, Batya, and so we have a huge headstart. To recreate what we have would cost $150 billion and a hell of a lot of years, right? So while it might be that there's been commoditization pressure on fiber, it's a proprietary gift that we have, that we have such a vast network with unique routes, with this kind of coverage, that makes it worth coming to talk to us to see if we can quickly stand you up.
But what's different now is that we are the only company that's had the courage in this space to cut the dividend and to recapitalize and start focusing on providing a different customer experience, and having it be quick, secure, and effortless. And wrapping a digital halo or cloudifying the network, as I like to say, is truly differentiating right now. I know that because I'm in conversations with all the hyperscalers and all the cloud companies, and nobody else is doing this. Nobody else has an ExaSwitch, nobody else has true NaaS as we're providing it, and the vision is capacity on demand. Give me any port, any service, anytime, anywhere. That customer experience becoming the product. And so companies that need to connect all these data centers, they want waves on demand.
There's only one company that's gonna be able to do that, and that's us, unless some really big changes are made in some of our competitors in the legacy telco-
Right.
... market space.
They have the capabilities, but what you're saying is that they're really not focusing on this, and they have other-
They have, they have the fiber.
Right.
But capabilities is about people, it's about the architecture, it's about the vision, and it's about the capital injection, and it's about the head start.
Yeah. And when you talk about your competitors and you're entering this new world also, who do you think your competitors are? The old legacy telcos, the tech world? And in that sense, does it matter if you have on-net access, so you own the fiber, or you just have good access-
Peering?
... to somebody else's?
Such, such a great question, and deeply, deeply relevant to the story. A couple months ago, an analyst said to some of our executives who were on stage doing a presentation, like, "Y'all are overqualified." And we just laughed, and that was the one moment, Batya, where I realized that, "Oh, my God, people really don't understand what we're trying to do." We are overqualified for the transformation of a telco company in the legacy context. You don't need this team. This team is not here for that. This team is to fix the internet. We're going to expand it, and we're gonna make it suitable for consumption in the digital economy, and that is completely different. So when you ask me who we compete with, I compete with AT&T and Verizon and Zayo in the context of legacy services.
Then in the context of the new world... I like to think of it as there are three main areas where telco ceded innovation to tech, and that's in, in voice, it's in connectivity, and it's in security. If you just think about it from, like, voice, think about companies like Bandwidth and Sinch and Twilio. They exist because telco didn't innovate for the cloud world, right?
Yeah.
But we own the IP addresses, we own the phone numbers, and we own the ability to provide true single point of contact for identity, and, you know, that is going to be one of the ways that we disrupt the industry. If you think about connectivity, we ceded that to the data centers, right? We ceded the digital experience to companies like Megaport, PacketFabric.
Right.
But what's really interesting is, in that space, we started working on NaaS about a year ago, and we launched in Q3, which is faster than we ever thought we could. Part of the reason why we were able to do that is because we have all the pieces together, and the digital companies that are going after the better experience and have been innovating, they don't own the fiber.
They have to lease it from the bigger providers. What we own the fiber and that digital experience, and we're integrating it natively into layers one, two, and three of the network. And you might say, like, "Well, why do I care about that?" It's because we can inherently provide more capability right out of the gate. A great example, just think about the friction associated with being assigned routing numbers versus bringing your own, you know, and having APIs to integrate everything. We give you that right out of the gate, so you can literally fire up a circuit and use your own routing numbers instantaneously. We're the only company that's providing that digital capability natively in the fiber, and it's hugely differentiating.
And so I, I think of it as we have a right to win in, in voice, we have a right to win in connectivity, and then the final place, we have a right to win in security. And, again, we kind of used everybody else's security products and didn't innovate and started stitching them into the network. That is changing with Black Lotus Labs. That is changing with Lumen Defender, the product that we just launched after only 90 days of putting together what we already had and making it commercially available.
So, so that is when, when you say, "Who's your competition?" It's these digital upstarts that are in existence because telco didn't innovate, and it's the traditional players who frankly just really aren't focused on the business segment at all 'cause they're going after those wireless returns, and I get that, and I'm happy to have them continue to be distracted.
Leave you alone. In terms of... So there was a perception that, yeah, you do have the connectivity, but you're just a dumb pipe, and you are introducing all these new services to change that perception. How easy is that? How... Do you have the mind share of the enterprises that you're talking with, and how do you prove out that you have those capabilities?
Yeah. So, it's called, I have a new way of counting: 1, 2, 3, 10, 100. I use this with the team. I use this with the team all the time. When you're innovating and you're launching net new capabilities, the goal is: How many net new $50 million businesses can we create a year? Okay, because it's really hard to go from 0 to 50, from 0 to 100. It's easier to go from 100 to a billion, and it's really hard to go from a billion to 5 billion. So 1, 2, 3, 10, 100 math is, every time we have a net new capability, we maniacally focus on getting three customers to adopt it, 1, 2, and 3, either all on the same use case or three separate use cases.
When we have three customers that say there's value there, then we put it through a beta program where I'm going for 10, you know, or a couple of dozen at the max, beta customers to say, "You nailed it," and then I go for 100 customers, 200 customers. You know, NaaS, we're up in the multi-hundreds now. Lumen Defender, we're right in that sweet spot of, like, the, you know, the few dozen beta, and we follow that life cycle. That, by the way, that's new.
Mm.
I think that we've seen this movie before. So when you are cloudifying an industry, when you are completely disrupting the way things get consumed, and you're actually taking that dumb pipe... By the way, that hurts me deeply to say your words there, but I'm doing it for you. When you actually make it smart and intelligent and you layer all these services on it, the people that you sell to are kinda like, "Well, I don't want that. I don't need that. My job is to actually buy the pipe and to connect the things." So everything changes.
Right.
Who you sell to changes, the value proposition changes. You know, how you drive adoption has to be very intentional, and we've seen this movie before, right? Cloud, there wasn't a CIO. I was a CIO. I was your CIO. There's not a CIO on the planet that was like: "Cloud's a great idea. I can't wait. I'm gonna put all my data in the public cloud." They said, "Hell no, we won't go!"
And we had to push through that change curve to say, "Hang on a second. We can innovate faster, we can drive the right economics, we can make you agile, and we can actually make your data safer than anybody else can." But it was, like, one customer at a time, 1, 2, 3, then 10, then 100 for each new set of capabilities, and we had to change HR policies and legal and compliance policies. It's all the same. That's why I needed to hire all the tech people that fought that war with me before.
Right. So it's very interesting, and it sort of, there's so much legacy that the new message needs to be out there and kind of, like, absorbed with people because Great. It, it kind of like, it needs to start to show up in the numbers also for, I guess, people to believe in it, I know, but-
I think the custom private networking is gonna have a breakthrough moment, I hope it's soon-
Mm-hmm.
... where you're gonna call me, and you're gonna say, "Okay, you win. It's not your mama's Lumen, you're right.
Right.
My goal is to have that happen really, really soon. in the context of these very large, tech companies and hyperscalers who are making a bet on us.
Right. Very interesting. And in terms of all these capabilities, do you think that they will be mostly in-house driven, or are you looking to build on partnerships as well?
Look, ecosystems are incredibly important. That's the world I came from.
Mm.
Okay? I'm never gonna have a sales force that's big enough to cover the markets that I wanna serve, so I gotta have more feet on the street through partners, you know, in the channel. By the way, when you glue together other people's intellectual property and it works really well with your own, that's a better-together story where you can co-sell, and that's more feet on the street right there. But then this notion of as we become healthy, as we, you know, show the world that we do have free cash flow, pushing through that J-curve to drive adoption of the digital, you know, the Lumen Digital capabilities, we will be more than happy to bring new capabilities together in an acquisitive fashion. So we will both invent as well as, you know, acquire.
Great. Let's see if there are any questions from the audience. I'll continue. I think, as you build these capabilities, they, they don't necessarily serve all the customer mix or that you have.
So is there a customer mix that you're mostly focused on, and that's where all the efforts are going, or do you think that there will be wide set of services and products that it could appeal to?
You know, Batya, it's a really good question. So we do have two masters right now. 25% of our revenue comes from consumer, mass markets, and 75+% from enterprise. And everything we've been talking about today is really focused on the enterprise world, those segments, and it's public sector, it's commercial, and it's mid-markets, and it's wholesale. And each one of them have the same opportunity to disrupt, the same opportunity to cloudify those services, make them easy to consume, the same opportunity to grab share and legacy, but to provide net new available markets, you know, and profit pools that we're going after.
And we're sort of prioritizing large enterprise, public sector, mid-markets, first with the net new stuff, because on the wholesale stuff, a lot of that is, you know, your peering partners and, and competition, and they're a little bit more hesitant to, you know, get excited about adopting the next new thing. When we have all those capabilities, sort of vetted down, it'll, I think that curve will go quickly. If you look on the other side, on the consumer side, we've said many times, our job right now is to make both of our businesses as healthy as humanly possible to drive transformation, net new systems, efficiency, you know, and innovate wherever possible. I think we've done a great job with that with Quantum Fiber.
I think what we're seeing are signals in the marketplace that there will, at some point, be, you know, consolidation plays for people going for critical mass, a number of, you know, fiber to the homes on their balance sheet. We will not be a consolidator, but right now, I'm just maniacally focused on getting the numbers for coverage and penetration to be the best that they can be, and I'm really pleased with our progress.
Yep. Let's talk a little bit about AI.
Mm-hmm.
What does it mean for Lumen? Is it more of a sort of efficiency tool, or is it a way to change product mix as well?
Yeah, so just, just to be clear, if there's one thing that you take away from today, it's that Lumen is an enabler for AI in the world, right? And that is our opportunity that we're pursuing in the marketplace. We, too, are, you know, adopters of AI at every level of the company. And, and, you know, Satya is a, a friend and mentor. You know, I've, I've, spent time listening to, you know, Jensen Huang speak, and I think one of the most important things he, he taught me, whether he knows it or not, is, this notion of, you don't lose your job to AI, you don't lose your company, you know, to AI. You, you lose your job and your company to other organizations and people that use AI, right? And he's, he-- I thought that that was, like-
Right.
... the most clarifying thing I had heard. I went immediately to Microsoft, and I said, "We wanna be in your beta program." You know, we're working with all of the companies today are embedding AI natively, you know, in their applications, and we're using them across the board. So I think there are two places where we've made a huge amount of progress with the new gen AI capabilities, and that's you know, for the knowledge worker, and we're saving a lot of time. Our people have spoken with their usage and adoption of the tools, but also with the surveys that we send, like, "How much time are you saving?"
And it's like 30, 30 minutes a day per person which is pretty profound when you start to do the math and add it up, and gives you the opportunity to shape-shift, you know, accordingly. In development, you know, Copilot for GitHub, a profound improvement in our productivity. Just over 60 days, 30% increase in the number of stories for Agile Sprint. And it-- you know, we're not stopping there. We're kind of leaning into it in a really profound way, AI operations driving the whole Lumen Digital story, as you know, a foundational principle.... And then we've been on the path for decades, building a self-healing network using AI tools. So, you know, while we're not at that nirvana of no unplanned downtime yet, I think we're probably more advanced than most other organizations would understand.
That's great. Maybe just a couple minutes left. I wanted to ask sort of like, you know, from our seat or investors looking at the progress that Lumen has been making and the changes that's in the pipeline, what are maybe three metrics that we should really focus on to measure your success?
Yeah.
Maybe if you could put a little timing around it also.
You wish. You wish. You know, I do have the team in the background that has, like, some sort of electric pulse if I say something wrong, and I get zapped. You'll know why. So, it's a great question. The first thing I want you to see and feel is free cash flow is not a problem.
Mm-hmm.
And, I believe, you know, that we are on a path to give you that proof point, and I'm hoping that that also is, you know, sort of in sync with the timing around our story, around this custom private networks, with the digital layer being well-received, both from evidence of signed deals as well as a rich pipeline, and I, and I hope to be able to do that very soon. I think the next thing, and I'm, I'm gonna keep going back to this J-curve, show me a company that doesn't have to invest to make money, right? So I want you guys to hold us accountable for adoption. How many new logos do you have on that new platform? How many ports are you firing up?
That's what really matters because if you go and you look at, you know, any entrepreneur over the past decade. But let's pick, like, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Reed Hastings, et cetera. What did they talk about? They talked about obsessing about delivering value to customers to get them to adopt the platform, and then you layer the services on top, and that is the fundamental shift. That's moving from playing not to lose in legacy telco, where there's tons of headwinds, and you're gonna keep having the revenue declines, to playing to win in a net new place, which is called Lumen Digital. And, and that's so free cash flow, and then the adoption curve, and then I'm gonna give you predictable EBITDA and revenue growth, and it's not gonna, we're not gonna be old and gray when that happens. Maybe gray... but not old.
Not old. Awesome. That's great.
Okay. Yeah.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.