Lumen’s strategic leap: How Copilot is redefining productivity and employee engagement

Committing to culture and cutting-edge technology

As a global communications service provider, Lumen Technologies is on a mission to ignite business growth by connecting people, data, and applications quickly, securely, and effortlessly. The company offers a range of solutions—including networking, cloud, collaboration, and security tools—to help businesses operate more efficiently. Lumen prioritizes user-friendly interfaces and top-notch customer service to make its products accessible and easy to use, helping the company score high in customer satisfaction. Lumen is committed to digital transformation as it pivots from a traditional telecom company to a technology-driven one. This forward-thinking mindset demonstrates the company’s commitment to pioneering new paths to offer more advanced services that provide higher value to customers, such as secure edge cloud capabilities.

A key strength of Lumen is its people, who bring technology expertise and passion for customer success. The company’s “North Star” strategy includes a focus on the operating principles of teamwork, trust, and transparency. To achieve this, Lumen’s Chief Executive Officer, Kate Johnson, has zeroed in on evolving the traditional telecom business model by adopting modern tools and reshaping the company culture. She stresses the importance of ensuring the culture at Lumen aligns with the company’s priorities, which include customer obsession and innovation. “It’s the culture that can enable our pivot from who we are today to who we want to be, which is a telecom company with a bunch of great tech that brings incredible value,” says Johnson. Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, Chief Revenue Officer at Lumen Technologies, explains how an empathetic culture is essential to the company’s transformation. “At Lumen, we believe that empathy is essential to our transformation, and it’s a core management skill set,” she says. “We are training 26,000 employees that empathy is about unlocking people, because when you unlock people you unlock results .”

The leaders at Lumen also understand that for their teams to excel in their roles, it’s crucial to equip them with the necessary tools to help ensure efficiency, safety, and security. And as with company culture, these tools must directly enhance the value of Lumen’s output, benefiting customers and advancing the company. Ryan Asdourian, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Lumen Technologies, notes that the company is always looking ahead. “How can we help customers in new and different ways? And how can we efficiently address the scale of an entire world of customers?” he ponders. “You’ve got to have the tools that help you achieve scale.”

Transforming daily operations with Copilot

The telecommunications industry started as a simple system for voice communication. It has matured into a comprehensive network of technologies that support global communications. Rapidly evolving from analog to digital and then to cloud-based services allows companies like Lumen to serve customers in new and innovative ways, increasing the overall value of network services. But without responding and adapting to new technologies and market demand, business performance declines. “When we think about what our customers can use network services for, it expands the value of what every telecommunication company can do,” explains Asdourian. ”And we want to lead the way with that at Lumen.”

Lumen is undergoing a transformation and needs to prioritize and allocate resources effectively, bend the revenue curve, and create a high-performing commercial organization. The company needed the best tools to make this happen, so it revamped its technology stack and purchased Microsoft Copilot for Sales for several thousand employees, mostly for sales and customer service teams, with plans to roll out Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to nearly everyone. Lumen is one of the early adopters of Copilot, taking advantage of large language models and Microsoft Graph. They also bring in additional data with Microsoft Graph connectors to further enhance the content available to Copilot. “As our enterprise evolves, sales and customer success teams are asked to work smarter and more efficiently,” says Kerrie Davis, Senior Director, Commercial Enablement at Lumen Technologies. “Copilot is helping us do that.”

Copilot is a generative AI companion that enhances users’ creativity, elevating their productivity and helping them stay connected—all of which can augment overall efficiency. At Lumen, Copilot was adopted from the top down as part of a strategic focus on using generative AI such as Copilot to revitalize the company while it aimed to redefine industry standards and enhance the employee experience. To move this journey forward, Lumen engaged “champions,” key people who became pivotal to driving adoption. The champions acted as a first line of support, making sure everyone across departments could realize the benefits of this tool. “The champions were very important because they helped disseminate information among the teams,” explains Delvin Holman, Senior Lead Customer Service Enablement Manager at Lumen Technologies. “We’ve seen that people will adopt these tools a lot quicker when they see their teammates or partners actually use the tool and save time,” he says. “We have had a very successful rollout because the champions were such strong advocates for a great product.” This approach was complemented by the creation of a prompt library, crowdsourced solutions, and a focus on “getting it in people’s hands to use,” favoring immediate engagement over prolonged rollout and training periods. “Every time you introduce a new tool, there are early adopters, the people that jump in, and then there are people who slowly learn it,” says Davis. “But for me, Copilot quickly changed everything.”

Valorem Reply, Lumen’s consulting partner, has been supporting the Copilot adoption and enablement programs for Lumen’s employees, focusing on "art of the possible" workshops and champion programs across various departments.

Magic at work: Copilot and its impact on productivity

Davis explains how Copilot significantly enhances her productivity by helping her to craft messages quickly and efficiently, summarize content, and rapidly learn new technologies, such as a tech stack Lumen had started using last fall. Copilot also assists Davis and her team with communicating strategic shifts to sales leaders and extracting key points from team presentations. “With Outlook and Salesforce, our sales teams can streamline processes like automating financial reports, client health scores, and feedback responses,” Davis says. “Copilot can lift a lot of those time-consuming tasks off their shoulders.“

Holman highlights how Copilot is transforming business processes in sales and customer service teams, significantly enhancing operations. By automating note taking and administrative tasks, Copilot helps sellers and customer service teams spend more time with customers, strengthening sales effectiveness. Streamlining operations with seamless interoperability between Copilot and Salesforce keeps sales data and client interactions aligned. “We’re so customer-obsessed. We want our folks to be really focusing on our customers,” says Holman. “With a simple prompt in Copilot, we can ask questions about personas, the business, even their financials, and it summarizes that into one simple document, saving our folks time because they’re more informed and walking into meetings better prepared,” he explains. “And that’s helping us at Lumen sell more, as well.” Additionally, Copilot assists in creating customer presentations, greatly reducing preparation time for customer calls and elevating the customer experience across thousands of touchpoints within Lumen.

Asdourian adds, “One of my favorite things in talking to employees who have used Copilot is that it’s one of those things that they just refuse to have taken away. I use it all the time for meetings I can’t attend. If I’m double- or triple-booked, I can go back and just say, ‘Tell me what I missed—what should I be focused on and who do I need to follow up with?’” He explains, “I love watching the way our sales, marketing, and engineering teams are using this to really make sure they’re more productive and spending time on the things that they need to do versus getting distracted by anything else. Copilot is magic at work.”

Empowering employees and creating space for humanity

“How do you transform a Fortune 250 company this fast?” poses Davis. “You’ve got to be able to give employees a tool to be able to go achieve those changes, and this is what Copilot does for us.” Haynes-Gaspar puts this all together to focus on what she calls the “math that matters.” She notes, “It typically takes a seller four hours to do research for customer outreach, and with generative ai, they can now do that in 15 minutes. Four hours back each week is worth $50 million in revenue over a 12-month period.” Haynes-Gaspar explains how connectors allow Copilot to bring in data from other applications—in addition to Microsoft data—helping teams combine and analyze information from different sources, improving productivity and getting the job done quicker. “In combination with the connectors, Copilot really helps to meet our sellers in their workflow," she says.

CEO Johnson is a strong advocate for adopting the best technology, but credit is also due to the broader leadership for empowering employees and ensuring they’re proficient with Copilot and other new tools. While working to reshape the company culture, Johnson aims to instill courage and resilience among her employees, equipping them to effectively adapt to new technologies and business strategies. Introducing generative AI technology with Copilot to Lumen’s workforce has markedly changed work processes, allowing employees to accomplish significantly more. “Tools like Copilot give our people the ability to be more productive, more effective, so they can be more human, be more hopeful, and do things that bring them joy,” says Haynes-Gaspar. About her expectations for the coming year, she predicts a promising future: “I would love to say that we have doubled the productivity of our sales teams through the use of Copilot and AI without having to ever add a person.” Davis agrees. “As Lumen is on this journey of disrupting the technology industry and unleashing the world’s digital potential, Copilot is going to be a key piece of how we achieve this,” she says. “That is a big, big challenge, and using Copilot is helping us deliver that and make it a realization.”

In considering the overall perspective of how Copilot and AI are changing the telecom world, Asdourian notes, “When I think about a company that’s disrupting an industry, I also think about how that company can use technology in the right way to accelerate its own progress.” He continues, “And when I think about all the meetings, all the interactions, all the customers—you want to be able to move at the speed of AI, and Copilot helps us do that. It’s an extra tool to help us go faster. I know that’s how I use it, and I know that’s how thousands of Lumen employees are using it, as well.”

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