‘The only way’: How Copilot is helping propel an evolution at Lumen Technologies
The marketing teams faced a near-impossible challenge: Create a website or brochure and social media posts for a product, all within 40 minutes.
This was no regular work assignment for the employees at Lumen Technologies. The products were made up — indestructible clothing for parents, an inflatable car, a dream recorder — and the teams were relying on Microsoft Copilot to spark some quick creativity. As the clock ticked, the teams competing in Lumen’s inaugural “Copilot Olympics” used the AI-powered productivity tool to help with everything from creating images to developing product concepts.
“We wanted to do something to promote creativity, and that’s where Copilot comes in,” says Darwin Hernandez, a senior lead marketing manager at Lumen Technologies who conceived and organized the competition. “Because basically, the key element of Copilot is to be proactive, save time and be efficient.”
Aimed at promoting the use of Copilot for Microsoft 365 among Lumen’s marketing staff, the event epitomizes the company’s enthusiastic embrace of Copilot as an integral tool in its evolution from a traditional telecom to a technology company. Lumen was among the first companies to join Copilot for Microsoft 365’s Early Access Program in spring 2023, and since then has rolled out Copilot across departments and business functions, from engineering to sales.
Ryan Asdourian, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Lumen, says the company saw the value of quickly adopting digital tools to improve employee efficiency and better serve customers.
“Already, we’re seeing how tools like Copilot make our people more productive, so they can focus on more value-added activities every day,” he says. “This boost in productivity lets us create and deliver new ways to wow our customers.”
Copilot Olympics eventually grew to four events within Hernandez’s team, then was expanded to a larger event across Lumen’s 250-employee marketing organization. At the larger event, teams competed to come up with a new product and supporting materials, and were asked to record their successful Copilot prompts for inclusion in a “prompt library” that other employees can use.
“What was cool is that in expanding on this event, we also showcased how we used Copilot in coming up with all of the different things we did — the judging criteria, the guide itself, images,” says Ashley Butler, enterprise account-based experience manager at Lumen, who organized the event. “The use of Copilot was soup to nuts. For the entire event, everybody used Copilot.”
Hernandez and others say Copilot Olympics, beyond fostering cross-team collaboration and a little workplace fun, underscored Copilot’s value and has motivated Lumen’s marketing staff to use it more broadly.
“I feel less afraid to use it when I’m trying to create materials now,” says Becky Hickson, a senior marketing director who was part of the winning team in the larger event. “It was a great confidence-builder.”
‘The only way’
Lumen Technologies offers networking, edge cloud, security, collaboration and managed services to help businesses grow and operate more efficiently. As the telecommunications industry evolved in recent years with technologies such as 5G — and more recently, generative AI — that are enabling new ways to communicate and connect, Lumen has pivoted to enable businesses’ connectivity needs.
Shortly after taking over as Lumen’s president and CEO in November 2022, Kate Johnson announced that the company would bring an intensified focus to solving customer problems as part of a broader organizational reset. Giving employees the digital tools they need to provide better customer experiences, Asdourian says, is part of that shift.
“Copilot fits Lumen’s vision of digital transformation, supporting our company culture around growth, collaboration and customer obsession,” he says. “With Copilot, it’s not about replacing people — it’s about empowering people by simplifying workflows and inspiring a forward-thinking mindset, both of which are crucial for staying ahead in today’s business environment.”
Asdourian sees AI as a differentiator for Lumen. “It makes us faster, more productive and easier to do business with,” he says. “We can’t disrupt the telecom industry without AI — it’s important to us and it’s why we were quick to adopt it on a broad scale.”
Lumen implemented Copilot for Microsoft 365 in 2023 with a methodical rollout that included designating employees as “champions” to help drive adoption, hosting informational Teams sessions, and sharing learnings and best practices. Microsoft Copilot for Sales and GitHub Copilot followed, and employees across the company were soon using the generative AI tool for an increasing range of tasks.
Kerrie Davis, Lumen’s senior director of revenue enablement execution, sees Copilot as critical to helping the company’s 3,000-plus sales organization meet a different set of expectations.
“We’re going from a traditional telecom to a global communications provider, and there’s a lot that goes into that change, from what we’re selling to how we’re selling it and how we’re supporting that internally,” she says. “Copilot helps us do more. To me, it’s the only way we’re going to achieve that transformation.”
Lumen’s sellers are using Copilot for Sales throughout the sales process, from learning about customers and their challenges to summarizing meetings and crafting follow-up messages. Copilot allows sellers to sync Outlook emails with clients into customer relationship management software — a task that previously had to be done manually — which saves time and provides visibility into customer touchpoints and potential opportunities.
“The company can capture a lot of the information that traditionally would stay in someone’s Outlook inbox,” says Delvin Holman, Lumen’s senior lead customer service enablement manager.
Holman says Copilot is especially helpful for summarizing 10-K reports, detailed and comprehensive summaries of publicly traded companies’ operations and financial performance that provide sellers with valuable insights.
“Before, it took a day or two to get through all that data,” Holman says. “Now I’m hearing it’s taking an hour or so to get through it, validate it and be able to share it internally as they go into prep calls for customer calls.”
Davis mentions a customer success manager who took over a large account and had to quickly get up to speed on 18 months of emails and data. The woman used Copilot to pull information from various sources, put it into Excel and create a timeline showing the primary people involved, order of events and next steps.
“It organized an entire account at a very pivotal customer moment in record time,” Davis says. “It put together days and days of work that she said was probably not humanly possible otherwise.”
The company estimates Copilot is saving its sellers an average of four hours a week, equating to $50 million annually. That allows sellers to spend more time with customers and helps with work-life balance, Davis and Holman say. Overall, they say, Copilot is enabling Lumen’s sellers to better serve customers and fundamentally change how they work.
“I feel like sellers are now engaging in different things that they probably would previously shy away from, just from time consumption,” Davis says. “Now they can do things a lot faster, or complex things that they might not have taken the time to do before, and they’re using Copilot to do it. I really believe it’s broadening their skill sets.”
The company is tracking Copilot use, and Holman will “gently tap” leaders whose sellers aren’t using it, but he says that hasn’t been needed much.
“Once people use it and understand the prompts, they love it,” he says. “So it’s not really that much of an ask for most people.”
Flattening the knowledge curve
In late 2023, a team of developers at Lumen was building a new application to help identify network issues before they become problems for customers. The project required a higher level of familiarity with the Python programming language than the developers were used to, posing a potential delay.
Around the same time, Lumen rolled out GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant that provides suggestions as users type. The team of developers used the tool to ensure the code they were writing was in the correct format, which shortened the project’s timeline.
“GitHub Copilot flattened the knowledge curve,” says Nikita Rathore, a senior software engineering manager at Lumen. “It helped in the speed to market of the application we were building, something that would have taken a long time because this was new technology the teams were working with.”
Since then, Rathore says, Lumen’s developers have used GitHub Copilot to make code more efficient, create tests to verify units of code and rewrite code for newer versions of technologies. Developers are also using it to check code before it undergoes a required review by another developer, a process that can get bogged down by calendars and competing work.
“It saves a lot of time from a peer review process. If there are code efficiency issues, that can get captured right away, instead of waiting for that peer review session to be set up,” Rathore says. “With GitHub Copilot, everything is in real time. You have the power at the tip of your fingers and you’re able to perform those reviews right up front.”
GitHub Copilot, Rathore says, has reduced the cycle time of projects, the period from the start of a project to deployment, by an average of 20% to 30%.
“It really helps with the time developers need to deploy a capability to production, to make those products available to our customers,” she says. “That’s where the impact of this tool is.”
‘A huge time-saver’
Since Copilot’s release in March 2023, organizations around the world have adopted AI as a tool to increase productivity, cut down on mundane tasks and give employees more time for meaningful work. A study released by Microsoft and LinkedIn in May 2024 found that the use of generative AI at work nearly doubled over a six-month period the previous year.
Seventy-five percent of knowledge workers now use AI at work, the research found, and more than 80% say AI helps them save time, focus on their most important work, be more creative and enjoy their work more.
Those findings seem to be borne out at Lumen Technologies, where Copilot has become so ingrained that some employees can hardly imagine working without it. Asdourian regularly uses Copilot to fill him in on meetings he couldn’t attend, calling it “magic at work.” Hernandez often starts his week by having Copilot identify key tasks based on chats with his team the previous week.
And Hickson, the marketing director, relies on Copilot to refine communications for executive audiences, bring brevity to emails, recap Teams meetings and hone job descriptions.
“It’s a huge time-saver,” she says. “When I don’t use Copilot, I feel very sad, because I don’t want to imagine a world where I have to take notes manually ever again. It’s an exhausting step backward.”
Top photo: Delvin Holman, left, Lumen’s senior lead customer service enablement manager, chats with Kerrie Davis, Lumen’s senior director of revenue enablement execution. (Portraits and Copilot Olympics images courtesy of Lumen Technologies)