Lumen Technologies accelerates dev productivity, sees financial gains with GitHub Copilot, Azure DevOps, and Visual Studio

Lumen Technologies is a global communications company with a mission to “ignite business growth by connecting people, data, and apps—quickly, securely and effortlessly.” Enterprise companies around the world rely on Lumen’s cutting-edge communications solutions, network services, security and cloud solutions, voice technology, and managed services.

Lumen also applies that mission to its employees, fostering a workplace culture that supports employee wellbeing, growth, and innovation. “At Lumen, we have a vision of empowering people in all aspects of business and day-to-day life by unlocking the potential of modern applications and infrastructure,” says Ryan Asdourian, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Lumen Technologies. “We want to empower businesses with effortless digital experiences, but to do that effectively, we also have to do it for ourselves.” That’s why an important aspect of Lumen culture is ensuring its employees, especially developers, work with modern tools to deliver solutions its customers need most. 

With an increase in the amount of data companies are managing, rapidly changing user preferences, and new devices with higher data requirements, communications companies face the challenge of meeting rising demand while navigating a competitive landscape. For Lumen, customer demands catalyzed a need to streamline developer workflows, accelerate problem solving and defect management, and increase developer productivity to build customized solutions quickly and seamlessly. 

Additionally, Lumen developers and cloud engineers needed an efficient way to learn new or unfamiliar scripting languages, like Terraform, Arm, Bicep, and others, to deliver on specific customer needs more efficiently. The onboarding and setup of new projects was time consuming because developers needed to tailor environments for different projects on a single machine, risking configuration conflicts that can cause downtime. The alignment of different tools demanded more time and effort, and adapting to updates in third-party tools further extended the setup process.

“There is always a steep learning curve with new developer tools and technologies. The training and integration process can stretch over weeks,” explains Nikita Rathore, Senior Software Engineering Manager at Lumen Technologies. “We needed to increase productivity fast, despite a limited headcount.”  

Supporting developers to upskill and code faster

Lumen was already using Microsoft Azure capabilities on its platform and was part of the early deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also recently established a strategic partnership with Microsoft to shape the next generation of enterprise applications delivery. “With our trust in Microsoft, we knew we wanted to put GitHub Copilot to use,” says Avi Reddy, Senior Vice President, Technology – Mass Markets at Lumen Technologies. “We knew that developers all over the world are using GitHub Copilot to code faster and focus on specific business logic over boilerplate solutions and build great applications for our customers.”

Working with Microsoft, Lumen sponsored a full developer population pilot for GitHub Copilot at its location in Bangalore, India, with nearly 600 engineers. In addition, Lumen used Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code and appreciated the way GitHub Copilot seamlessly connected with the different technologies. “Across GitHub Copilot, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, and more, we saw that our team of developers gained efficiency, flexibility, and security in getting to our ultimate goal—delivering great code faster than ever before,” says Rathore. The success of the India pilot prompted Lumen to globally scale the solution to all of its 2,400 engineers.

Rathore says that GitHub Copilot can integrate seamlessly with Azure DevOps projects—and when writing code in Visual Studio, GitHub Copilot acts as a pair programmer. It understands natural language prompts, including comments and method names, and provides coding suggestions across multiple languages. Rathore adds that this, along with GitHub Copilot generative AI–assisted workflows, from simple code suggestions to full assembly, are empowering the dev teams and accelerating innovation. Copilot analyzes code context as developers are writing it and can provide suggestions for completing it. It can even auto-fill as they type, providing entire lines of code, function definitions, or variable names. Copilot automatically understands the programming language that a developer is using, the libraries being referenced, and the patterns commonly used in that language and adapts its suggestions accordingly.

“Autocomplete, in particular, saves developer time. It gives suggestions for multiple solutions with different code complexity, resolving issues that used to take half a day in less than an hour,” says Rathore. “It not only helps give developers ideas, alternatives, and solutions, but we’re also seeing how it helps developers understand each other’s code and ultimately everyone becoming better programmers.”

Adds Rathore, “I’m a seasoned developer, and I’m often amazed at the solutions GitHub Copilot delivers—things I wouldn’t have thought of. It’s like having a partner or collaborator in programming.”

Asdourian agrees, “Copilot has been trained on a large dataset of code from open-source projects, which means you’re able to not only lean into the knowledge of the developers that are on your staff, but you’re also able to lean into the developer knowledge of the world.”

Increased productivity and cost savings

For Lumen customers, this means accelerated delivery of both customer solutions and services. With developers learning new scripting languages quickly, teams are increasing speed of innovation to efficiently deliver on specific customer requests and create solutions that support better customer experiences. In addition, Lumen developers are reporting reduced mean time to repair by using Copilot for faster issue grouping and resolution. GitHub Copilot does this by identifying correct natural language processing libraries, then grouping the unstructured text. 

Reddy says that Lumen developer teams love working with GitHub Copilot—and the learning curve has flattened. Onboarding new projects is much more efficient, security is enhanced, and configuration conflicts and the challenges of managing and updating third-party tools have been minimized. Using Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, and GitHub Copilot together is streamlining the software development process. “We are accelerating our team’s skills every day. And it’s great for new hires—they can contribute to the team faster,” says Reddy.

All of this is translating to earnings and cost savings. “We’ve achieved significant productivity gains, and this is having a positive impact financially,” says Asdourian. “Embracing GitHub Copilot has put us on track with potential financial benefits between $95 million and $300 million.”

In tandem with this, Reddy sees another benefit of GitHub Copilot. “I think it’s a tool to help democratize development and accelerate technology education. For us, that means the ability to also bring in our business units, because they are the ones who really talk and live and breathe the customer experience.”

Adds Asdourian, “With that, GitHub Copilot is right in line with our mission of empowering human progress—both for ourselves and our customers. With it, we know that we can create even better ways to help our customers connect with the people, data, and resources that make a real difference in their lives.”

Find out more about Lumen Technologies on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.