Engineering Operational Confidence at Global Scale
How Lumen Built a Foundation for AI-ready Network Orchestration with Itential
Industry: Telecommunications • 
Employees: ~28,000
Challenge
Lumen needed to unify fragmented automation and eliminate manual change risk across one of the world’s most complex global networks.
Solution
With Itential, Lumen built a governed orchestration layer that safely executes millions of network changes and powers AI-ready network operations.
Impact
Lumen achieved measurable reliability and scale – 21% fewer customer-impacting incidents, near-zero downtime, and millions of orchestrations annually.
How Lumen Transformed Network Operations from Scripts to Safe Autonomy
Lumen operates one of the world’s largest, most interconnected networks, with decades of growth across acquisitions creating a vast, heterogeneous estate (IP, optical/transport, metro, voice). Operating at this scale means every change must be safe, explainable, and auditable.
Leadership recognized that success at this scale required more than tools – it required a measurable transformation. Lumen set out to modernize operations with a clear business mandate: accelerate service delivery, reduce risk, and create a foundation for AI-ready autonomy.
Lumen’s automation, orchestration, and AI strategy is driven by a senior leadership charter that spans end-to-end network operations. The program combines software engineering discipline with deep network expertise, establishing an operating model that measures progress in business terms and earns autonomy one workflow at a time. The result is a program that treats automation not as a tool rollout, but as a new way of working – governed, measurable, and scalable across every network domain.
The Lumen Network
One of the Largest, Most Deeply Connected Networks
#1
Peered Network
~340,000
Global Fiber Route Miles
~163,000
On-Net Fiber Buildings Globally
4 Million
Quantum Fiber Locations in 16 US States
350+ Tbps
Global Backbone Capacity
Scaling Automation Across One of the World’s Largest Networks
Lumen operates one of the most interconnected networks on the planet – a global backbone that can’t afford downtime or delay. But as the network grew through decades of mergers and modernization, operations became fragmented, scripts multiplied, and change controls slowed everything down. Engineers spent more time firefighting than engineering.
The turning point came when Lumen leadership made automation not a side project, but a skills mandate and a cultural reset.
To make that real, Lumen needed a foundation of governance and orchestration strong enough to handle production networks, cross-domain workflows, and – eventually – machine-to-machine operations.
Challenges that mattered:
The Mission
Automate the mundane. Take the 2 a.m. work off human hands.
Scale & Heterogeneity
Reconcile legacy and modern networks and east-west systems (activation, inventory, change portals, assurance) into callable, governed services.
Culture, Not Just Tools
Convert skeptics into contributors; make automation a skills pivot, not extra credit; show progress in working software, not decks.
Speed With Safety
Ship automations quickly without creating new failure modes; make pre/post-checks and rollback non-negotiable.
Adoption Where People Already Work
Publish automations into frontline systems (e.g., ServiceNow) instead of forcing a new console.
Leadership recognized that achieving service agility at this scale required an orchestration layer capable of turning automation into a governed, measurable operating model.
Build a Governed Platform, Not a Collection of Scripts
In 2018, Itential became the orchestration backbone for this transformation – the action engine beneath Lumen’s automation-first program.
Early on, Lumen challenged Itential to prove integration agility across a sprawling toolchain. Itential connected systems within hours, establishing credibility that it could evolve as fast as Lumen’s network.
The decision came down to three differentiators that set Itential apart:
Success would be defined by measurable outcomes:
- Fewer incidents
- Faster time to resolution
- Proven cost avoidance and value creation
- A clear runway to safe autonomy
Integration Speed
Itential connected and orchestrated across legacy and modern systems within hours – proving agility at enterprise scale.
Governance as a Design Principle
Every workflow runs through Itential’s model-driven guardrails, with pre- and post-checks, rollback paths, and AAA permissions – ensuring every change is verifiable, reversible, and compliant.
Extensibility
Low-code and high-code options allowed network engineers and developers to contribute equally, creating a cultural bridge between operations and software engineering and accelerating delivery velocity across teams.
Lumen’s leaders reframed automation as an operating model, not a tooling project.
With these foundations in place, Lumen re-platformed its network operations around Itential’s governed orchestration layer – transforming how change is designed, executed, and measured.
01 Establishing a Governed Framework
Process Design Documents (PDDs) and Solution Design Documents (SDDs) became mandatory before code was written. This discipline reduced rework, standardized delivery, and made reliability a built-in outcome – not an afterthought.
02 Breaking Work into Atomic Actions
Teams decomposed common diagnostics into reusable functions – ping, trace, interface check – that could be composed upward into complex runbooks. These “atoms” now power thousands of orchestrations safely and consistently.
03 Meeting Users Where They Already Work
Instead of creating a new portal, Lumen surfaced orchestrations through ServiceNow for request, approval, execution, and audit. This approach shortened publishing cycles, improved adoption, and eliminated shadow tools.
04 Measuring Impact At Every Level
Every workflow is tracked for count, execution volume, success rate, and business impact – visualized in Splunk dashboards that show both OpEx avoided and new value created through faster, safer operations. This visibility connects automation directly to business outcomes – reliability, efficiency, and customer experience.
From Scattered Scripts to a Governed Orchestration Platform
Lumen’s transformation has delivered measurable, cross-domain impact. What began as a technical modernization has evolved into a business operating model – one that drives faster delivery, higher reliability, and quantifiable ROI across the global network.
Transformation by the Numbers
Lumen’s automation and orchestration program has delivered measurable results across reliability, efficiency, and customer experience – proving that disciplined orchestration can drive both operational and business value.
Millions of Actions
Orchestrated Annually
99.99% Reduction
in Actionable Alerts
1,000+
Workflows Identified
300+
Workflows in Production
<2 Minutes
of Platform Downtime (YTD)
21% Reduction
in Customer-Affecting Incidents
Days to Minutes
to Provision Workflows
80%
Machine-to-Machine Target by 2025
Translating Automation into Enterprise Value
These results mark more than incremental efficiency – they represent a fundamental shift in how Lumen runs its network.
What began as a technical modernization has evolved into an enterprise-wide operating model that links automation activity to measurable business performance.
The following areas highlight how Lumen’s orchestration framework delivers reliability, speed, and financial clarity at scale – and how those gains are building the foundation for AI-safe autonomy.
Growth with a Path to Safe Autonomy
Over 1,000 workflows identified, with 300+ built and running, and ~700 identified for autonomous execution once confidence criteria are met. Each workflow is tested and governed with pre-/post-checks before deployment. This disciplined approach has transformed reliability from aspiration to evidence-based practice.
AI-Enabled Event Reduction & Cognitive Readiness
Through its orchestration and AI program (Itential & Selector), Lumen has reduced over 1 billion raw network alerts to ~57,000 actionable events. This data precision is what makes closed-loop action possible and giving operators full explainability for each automated decision.
Faster, Safer Changes with Fewer Maintenance Windows
Guardrails and pre-/post-checks have shifted non-impacting work out of maintenance windows, reducing downtime and risk. Regular ops reviews rebalance asynchronous jobs to off-peak times, cutting time to repair (MTTR) and preventing issues before they surface.
Productivity & Efficiency Gains
Complex network workflows now execute in minutes instead of days, moving from “day 0 to day 2” activities to near-real-time orchestration. This has freed engineers to focus on innovation rather than repetitive tasks and accelerated delivery for customers.
Customer Experience & Service Reliability
Self-service capabilities give customers hands-on control for safe diagnostics and service restoration. In parallel, Lumen’s proactive monitoring tools (RAM / PHR) have reduced construction-related customer impacts by 21%, directly improving experience and trust.
Financial Framing Leaders Can Defend
Every automation is tracked for both OpEx avoidance and value creation, capturing not only labor savings but also reliability-driven business outcomes – such as avoided outages, faster activation cycles, and higher customer satisfaction. These results are reviewed in Splunk dashboards visible across leadership, linking operational excellence to enterprise performance.
Operational Reliability of the Orchestration Estate
The Service Assurance Itential instance has maintained less than two minutes of downtime year-to-date, even through data-center failovers – demonstrating that the orchestration platform itself is as resilient as the network it governs.
Looking Ahead: From Orchestration to Agentic AI
Looking forward, Lumen is extending the same grammar to agentic patterns without compromising guardrails. The Itential Model Context Protocol (MCP) runs northbound agents through governed Itential actions, preserving permissions, stage gates, and audit while enabling a tool-calling experience from AI systems. Multi-agent governance (A2A) will formalize who can call what, with which proofs, under which triggers – starting with read-only and reversible actions, then expanding by evidence.
This enables a new operating model:
- Agents reason, Itential acts, and governance ensures safety.
- AI correlations identify incidents; Itential executes approved remediations.
As APIs mature and agent-to-agent governance expands, Lumen’s north star remains clear:
80% machine-to-machine operations by 2025 – with customer self-service and zero-trust guardrails at every step.
This evolution positions Lumen as a leader in AI-safe autonomy – proof that governance and innovation can move together.
The Itential Impact
Lumen’s transformation proves a simple but powerful principle:
Autonomy is not about replacing humans – it’s about freeing them to focus where judgment and creativity matter most.
Itential provided more than orchestration – it delivered the operational fabric that connects human ingenuity with machine precision. By helping Lumen measure, govern, and scale automation safely, Itential enabled a transformation that unites technical performance with business impact – a model for the industry’s move toward AI-driven operations.
This is what it looks like when network operations become intelligent, governed, and truly autonomous – one workflow at a time.
Itential provided the orchestration backbone – governance, velocity, and scale – to make safe autonomy practical at enterprise level.
Greg Freeman | Vice President Network and Customer Transformation – Lumen
