The New Backbone Of AI

Alex Romanovich 0:25

Hi, this is Alex Romanovich and this is GlobalEdgeTalk. And with us today I have Jim Fowler, who’s an EVP chief technology and product officer at Lumen. Hello, Jim.

Jim Fowler 0:34

Hey Alex, thanks for having me.

Alex Romanovich 0:35

Thank you for being with us. And you know, what a great topic that we picked, which is AI infrastructure, your background in all of this, and of course your role at Lumen, which is a you know, a company that is solving very, very difficult and interesting infrastructure, data center based, telecommunication based challenges that we have right now with AI, with growth in AI and so forth.

Alex Romanovich 1:01

So let’s dive right in. Let me introduce you first. you had a up until this point, you had a very interesting, very diverse career. and you continue to have a very diverse and interesting career at Lumen as an EVP chief technology and product officer, dealing also with security challenges and and so forth. And you’re also leading a product strategy, and we will talk more about the services to product.

Alex Romanovich 1:26

Transformation and so forth. But you’ve covered quite a bit of ground in in the past 25 plus years. You have been a CTO at Nationwide insurance. you had an amazing technology transformation, digital transformation experience in Fortune 100 companies, including General Electric, where you were a CIO. And your earlier roles at Accenture and AT&T. so you’re also were on Lumen’s board of directors

Alex Romanovich 1:52

And then moved back to the operational role. That’s a very interesting topic to discuss as well. Typically that move is the opposite, opposite move. and you also served on the boards of Miami University, Farmer School of Business, and Columbus State Community College and Year Up. So welcome to our studio and let’s dive right in. yeah, welcome. so you I I loved your quote, you know, when you and I spoke earlier.

Alex Romanovich 2:15

One of the quotes that you you told me about it was the illiterate of the 21st century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. And that’s a great line. and that’s you know, often cited line. Nevertheless, what can you tell me more about the need to learn and what kind of learning are you doing right now at Lumen? you know, and you know, tell us a little bit more about that.

Jim Fowler 2:39

You know, I I love that quote. And I’ve kind of found that at different parts of my career, it repeats itself. And I think with artificial intelligence right now, we’re all right in the middle of this. when when I look around, you know, everybody asks me, What, you know, why are you qualified to talk about artificial intelligence? And my answer is, I don’t know that I am. I think I’m as clueless about the ultimate outcomes that we’re going to see from this as everyone else. But

Jim Fowler 3:02

You know, we’re we’re we’re making educated guesses. I think anybody who claims certainty right now is probably overestimating what they know. I so I when I think about that quote, it just challenges me. It it challenges me to challenge what I believe to be true, what my experiences have been in the past, to make sure that with with the role that artificial intelligence is playing and changing the way that we work and the way that we can solve problems, that I’m making sure that I’m I’m not getting stuck in.

Jim Fowler 3:29

Kind of what might be the ways of the past or really thinking about what the opportunity is for the future.

Alex Romanovich 3:34

I totally agree. And what’s interesting is that learning, you know, as we’re learning, humans, the machines are learning too. That’s what’s kind of interesting, right? And now we’re we’re talking about almost being scared, about superintelligence, about machines turning against us for the first time, about security and so forth. Now you’ve been involved with the infrastructure almost your entire career. how you know, I’m not asking you to predict anything.

Alex Romanovich 3:57

But if you were to measure the level of security today within the you know, major companies environments or mid size company environ environments, how would you rate that? How would you rank that and what those companies should do and can do to just to make sure that they’re ready?

Jim Fowler 4:13

You know, I think everybody’s been talking about Alex, the next generation of of models and the threat that they pose to the way that we work. You know, in the press, just even in the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of people coming out saying, you know, that that AI is is really going to upend security and it and it acts as a threat. I actually I actually look at the other way. I actually think it’s an opportunity. You know, what when you talk to my peers and you think about what we’ve been even doing in Lumen and what my team has been doing.

Jim Fowler 4:43

We’ve been taking these next generation of models and applying them to our internal technology. For us, it’s both the software that we build and the hardware that we use to run the networks around the world. And what we’re finding is yes, these models are really powerful. They’re helping us find vulnerabilities and configuration issues that exist within our infrastructure that we didn’t know about. That’s a great thing. Yes, that could be used against us, but the way that we’re using it is the opportunity to.

Jim Fowler 5:12

Automate the way that we think about security. So how do I rate security right now? I think those companies that are not embracing AI as a way to automate the way that they do security, they’re going to be left behind and they’re going to find themselves woefully behind. I think as a CTO right now, you’ve got to be you’ve got to have a positive outlook. You’ve got to think about the opportunity that’s in front of you. So those companies that are embracing these technologies, that are applying them with the right test harnesses to their infrastructure, that are using them

Jim Fowler 5:39

To find the vulnerabilities and automate the the improvements, I think those are the companies that are going be successful long term.

Alex Romanovich 5:45

Let’s go back about fifteen, twenty years. You’re a CTO C level technical technology position in GE or, you know, other companies, and here you are today. What’s different? Tell us what’s different between you, the CTO of that time, and you the CTO and CIO of this time.

Jim Fowler 6:01

You I I I remember my first chief technology officer role at General Electric. I was running kind of the infrastructure components for a large portion of the GE business. in and I thought my world was complicated. I had, you know, I was serving with a group of about forty to fifty thousand people that sat in about forty different countries around the world. we had a set of applications that ran into data centers.

Jim Fowler 6:27

We had this distributed architecture of the way data flowed across all of our manufacturing and service plants. you know, we ran the network globally that connected all those things together. And I remember thinking how complex and difficult I thought my job was at that time. And today I look back and go, my gosh, I don’t realize how easy it was. I owned the network. I had a perimeter that I controlled that nobody could get through.

Jim Fowler 6:52

All of the people that worked for me sat in offices that I owned. at the end of the day, if we had an application that went down for an hour, it might have been a little bit of a productivity hit that we’d make up the next day. And today, you know, that has all changed. I have people sitting in every location possible around the world. We have a distributed workforce working out of their house. I have customers who are working with us on a seven by twenty-four basis that expect complete uptime.

Jim Fowler 7:18

I’m dealing with an ex existential threat from a security perspective of everything from nation states to cyber criminals who are constantly knocking at the door trying to find a ways to to break through. and an artificial intelligence is just complicating all of that. It’s accelerating the threat, it’s accelerating the development process. It’s it’s business partners who are more educated asking for more sophisticated technical ability. So what I’ve seen happen.

Jim Fowler 7:44

Kind of over my thirty year career was go from a world that was, I think, really controllable, Alex, where you could kind of put a box around it to one where speed and agility and innovation are not just important from a technical perspective, but they’re critical to business success. And so it’s been a lot of change that I’ve seen in my career.

Alex Romanovich 8:04

Absolutely. And there’s some great opportunities to supplement or even in many cases replace the service delivery with a product delivery. Let’s talk about that because your title says Chief Information and Product Officer. Now tell me more, coming from the services background, and that’s my background as well, IBM Global Services, Bertelsmann in Germany, and a few other companies out there.

Alex Romanovich 8:26

And what we’re seeing right now is a tremendous move away from the service delivery and productization of that service delivery. Tell me more about that. Tell me how you’re approaching it at Lumen or in general what your feelings are about.

Jim Fowler 8:39

Y you know, when I made the decision to take this role at the beginning of last year, part of what attracted me to the role is I I I never really run commercial products. I’d obviously run a product architecture within inside of of large enterprises like Nationwide and GE, but I never really owned the customer before. and so for for me, I think the

Jim Fowler 9:02

The biggest opportunity that I saw was the ability to come in and build a set of products that not just solved problems for us inside the company. I’ve been doing that for years, but to be able to also be able to provide those similar products and services to my customers, the the commercial side of the business. And the the biggest change that that I saw was we were going from providing use the Lumen example circuits. I provide you connectivity from point A to point B.

Jim Fowler 9:29

To a solution, a connectivity solution. How do I help you connect all of your cloud environments together? How do I help you get your data moved to the model more efficiently? I I had a meeting this week with the CIO of a large, a large company that runs big assets, and those big assets upload, and they have thousands of them, and they upload about five terabytes of data every night. And every night they’re struggling with the fact that

Jim Fowler 9:55

That causes a surge of network activity that lasts for about a couple hours and then they get it into their models and they run their models and then they push back instructions back to those assets. that’s that CIO I was talking to, he he’s not looking for a network line anymore. He’s looking for a programmable network of connectivity that allows him to ramp up and ramp down the connectivity when he needs it, where he needs it. He he needs a solution that’s multi-carrier. He needs

Jim Fowler 10:22

To be in every cloud environment because he’s a multi-cloud shop. that that solutioning for me is is where we are all headed from a product perspective. That’s what I think is driving this move towards a product operating model for most companies as they think about going forward. I think that’s the the shift that we’re seeing from kind of services and individual features to really long-term solutions and products that that we provide to our customers.

Alex Romanovich 10:46

There is a notion out there that you and I discussed this before, that innovation and entrepreneurship is only the the faith in the destiny of smaller companies, startups and and so forth. The larger organizations cannot really be called the considered innovators. why don’t we sort of demystify that myth a little bit and talk about what

Alex Romanovich 11:09

Innovations, what entrepreneurship opportunities there are in the larger organization like Lumen or many others out there. And because it’s almost seems to me that with all this tremendous amount of innovation that’s taken place outside of any one organization, one has to really respond to it with the same level of innovation. What do you think about that?

Jim Fowler 11:32

No, I think it’s absolutely true. I think right now you’ve got to find ways, whether you’re a large organization or a small organization, to act like a startup when you’re trying to drive change. And I think that’s absolutely what what Lumen is doing right now. It’s again one of the other things that attracted me to this role is it is a hundred-year-old company when you look at the entities that made it up, that’s really acting like a startup inside. and as somebody who kind of came out of 30 years of working in really large enterprises, I would say this has been a new experience for me.

Jim Fowler 11:59

As I’ve come in, I go back to that. I I’ve had to unlearn and relearn a few things, right? Go back to my quote here for a second. I had to learn action over analysis. I think that’s one of the the big changes that comes when you start to think like a startup. getting myself used to making an 80% decision today and fixing the 20% later. When you’re in a large enterprise or you’re thinking about large established products that you’re you’re not really trying to drive an innovative major shift.

Jim Fowler 12:27

You couldn’t afford to do that. And I think that’s one of the big differences in kind of this world and today is you’ve got to think about action over analysis. I I’d say the other thing that’s been I you know what was a surprise for me when I came into this role is that ownership has become more personal to me of the product. You know, when you’re in a a a startup environment inside a large company.

Jim Fowler 12:49

Inside a large company, you you might have multiple people who own the strategy and execution. When you think like a startup, that really moves down to one person or one team. and you are really focused on not only just the strategy, but the strategy, the execution, the customer support, the product feedback, those all become really important. And you realize that speed beats perfection. my my takeaway as I’ve come into this role is that.

Jim Fowler 13:15

A startup assumes, like if you’re really acting like a startup inside a large company, you assume that the system is broken and you have to change it. And like Lumen has really taught me that in the last nine months, and that’s different than the rest of my career. The large corporation I was work for, they taught me that the system exists for a reason, and it’s really my job to improve it carefully. And neither one of those is right or wrong. Like I think some people think you’ve got to be one or the other. I actually think there’s a mix of both.

Jim Fowler 13:41

I think there’s a right time and place to act either way. they’re optimized for just different stages of maturity. the the flip to that is like if you go back to my GE career, the the lesson I learned there is that technology only creates value if if the people trust it. I think that’s one of the reasons why today in my role I talk about trying to create the trusted network for AI. Trust isn’t

Jim Fowler 14:01

Just a marketing slogan. It’s it’s operational excellence, it’s resilience, it’s predictability. That’s what people want on the other side of a startup. They gotta make sure that you can scale for them. So and it’s a long-winded answer, Alex, but I think there are benefits to acting like a startup in a large company, but also understanding the resiliency, the reliability, the trust that has to come if you’re gonna do business with large companies that have major operations.

Alex Romanovich 14:24

But does that mean but that’s a great, by the way, that’s a great answer. But does that mean that you know, the historical or traditional approach to hey, technology organization is a cost center, marketing is a cost center, administration is a cost center. So the only revenue center or the only revenue producing or customer facing organization is maybe sales or service delivery or something like that. Does that mean that

Alex Romanovich 14:50

The your organization is no longer a cost center, but it’s a revenue producing, innovation driving, entrepreneurship driving type of an organization.

Jim Fowler 14:59

You know, you you and I talked kind of briefly as we were prepping about my title being chief technology and product officer. I spent thirty years being the chief technology or chief information officer for large companies where I was a cost center. I’d say in financial services like Nationwide, you feel a little bit more like product, but because you are the main but it’s more like manufacturing of the product. One of the reasons that this role is combined inside of Lumen is just what you said.

Jim Fowler 15:25

We think about the technology here as a cost of goods sold. It is it is what allows us to deliver the products that we’re talking about. And it is one of the main reasons that my job consists of both the technology to run the company, but more importantly, the technology to deliver the products on the outside. So I measure success on revenue, on margin, on NPS scores, and we think about the investments that we’re making as part of the cost of goods sold of the company.

Jim Fowler 15:52

Not a back office expense to be managed down.

Alex Romanovich 15:56

And that kind of positions you holding not only the technology key and the innovation key, but also the the growth key, right? So I I’ll bet you probably have very often conversation, very frequent conversations with chief marketing officers or sales organizations or other folks, and you you be in the in the product shoes, you have to tell them or you have to basically you know set this the pace, set the stage.

Alex Romanovich 16:22

For how the products are being packaged, how they’re being sold, you know, and so forth.

Alex Romanovich 16:25

Is that a true statement?

Jim Fowler 16:26

It it it is. I think most so let me give you a couple of examples, Alex. I think most companies still think AI is a compute problem. I’ll use this as an example. It’s actually a data movement problem. It’s a business architecture problem. the the data that powers AI right now lives everywhere. ninety percent of corporations today are running their their infrastructure in multiple clouds. So they’re they’ve got

Jim Fowler 16:49

They’ve got data and compute that sit in multiple countries, clouds, applications, environments around the world. And as I’m talking to kind of chief marketing officers or I’m talking to chief executive officers, I what what I have to explain to them is AI scales, the challenge isn’t going to be where you run the model. It’s how you move, govern, and operate the data across those systems. It’s about your business architecture. It’s about how you’re going to market. what’s interesting.

Jim Fowler 17:16

Is that data sovereignty comes up in this conversation quite a bit. And that’s what a lot of those leaders want to talk to me about. And I think this gets labeled sometimes as a data sovereignty problem, but it’s really just a symptom. The underlying challenge is coming up with a business architecture. Global enterprises really naturally want to are going to want to spread their data across regions, clouds, partners, applications. They’re going to want the latency, they’re going to want the distributed nature of the way their business runs. That’s how they run their companies.

Jim Fowler 17:44

Their infrastructure needs to run that way. So back to your comment around talking about us as a cost of goods sold, helping our customers understand that is also a big part of my job right now. And helping them understand that what they’re defining from an infrastructure perspective is actually their business architecture. It’s how they go to market, it’s how they sell products, it’s how they manufacture. This is essentially they’re building the nervous system of the company.

Jim Fowler 18:09

And they need to think about that as part of the product now, not just a back office efficiency play.

Alex Romanovich 18:13

Great. you mentioned global a few times, international, and you certainly have a lot of international background and has done business across Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and so forth. I love the fac the fact that you framed the innovation within the context of global and international as universal, but the difference is access. can you please elaborate more on that and what

Alex Romanovich 18:37

Can what can companies like Lumen and others do to sort of provide more of the access to companies and countries or clients and countries that absolutely need it?

Jim Fowler 18:48

Yeah, it’s a a fantastic question. there’s been a lot of conversation recently about critical infrastructure. You know, in my world telecommunications or power or kind of the healthcare side of of the world that we live in. What the critical infrastructure components? I I would say one of my beliefs is that AI is becoming critical infrastructure. You know, if you look at every major wave of technology that we’ve seen, at least in my thirty years, it ran on increasingly powerful applications until now.

Jim Fowler 19:16

And I think AI is going to be the first technical wave that I’ve seen where the infrastructure itself has become a strategic and competitive advantage. And the companies, and to your point, the countries that get that digital foundation right are going to accelerate ahead of those that don’t. And so think about that for a second. Access is going to become a really important fact.

Jim Fowler 19:41

You know, one of the things within Lumen is we run one of the most peered networks in the world. Sixty-five percent of the world’s traffic is connected through our infrastructure. the places where we don’t have visibility are places like North Korea or parts of Africa that have not developed their underlying infrastructure. And so because they don’t necessarily have the power infrastructure or the telecommunications infrastructure, they’re certainly not going to have the artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Jim Fowler 20:07

To advance those countries. And I think that’s going to be one of the fascinating things to watch is unlike power and water and telecommunications, where there can be a an investment to try to bring those countries along, I think they are they’re going to be so woefully behind because they don’t have those first three components. They’re not going to be able to to embrace AI. And I think that’s going to be a country level problem. I think it’s going to be a company level problem.

Jim Fowler 20:33

And I think it’s gonna separate it’s gonna separate success from failure. I also think it’s gonna be industry specific. I’m already starting to see industries where companies within industries around the world have invested for this future and are accelerating. I see it in pharmaceuticals right now, where there’s some big gaps between some of the companies. I think some are getting it right and some are getting it wrong. So I I don’t think this is gonna fall along the traditional lines of just country lines.

Jim Fowler 21:00

I think it’s gonna fall within industries on company lines as well. Does that make sense?

Alex Romanovich 21:04

Absolutely,

Alex Romanovich 21:05

And I think it’s a great answer as well. let’s go back on the personal side. you walk on the street of Columbus, Ohio, and you meet Jim Fowler of about twenty five years ago. You sit down for a cup of coffee. What do you tell him?

Jim Fowler 21:16

Couple things. One, ke keep taking the jobs that nobody else wants. I I w you I I I look back on my career, Alex, and I think some of the career defining moments for me when I got a call to take a job that I didn’t think I wanted. And when I got into the job, I realized that it was teaching me something that I needed. It was teaching me influence or it was teaching me a new technical space that I’d not worked in before. So I think the first thing I’d say is is is make sure that you are taking jobs that nobody else wants. The second thing is

Jim Fowler 21:44

Never stop learning. You know, I I today I’ll I’ll sit down on a weekend this weekend and I’ll spend some time kind of learning a new technology or or or reading or listening to your podcasts, right? These are things I’m trying to continue to make sure I’m doing to keep myself up to speed on on where change is coming and what’s driving it. and then lastly, have a global view. it’s one of the reasons I I I like your podcast a lot. I I think we can become too insular in looking at what’s happening in our region, our area, our organization.

Jim Fowler 22:12

Having a global view at a company level, at an industry level, and an international level, I think teaches you some things about how other people might be solving problems differently than you are that you need to learn from.

Alex Romanovich 22:23

Absolutely. And we even have a we’ve coined the term, it was coined before us, global, which basically means that, you know, being a local company, being a company anywhere in the world, thinking that you’re local, you’re not. Because any global trend, any demographic movement trend or any geopolitical trend is going to impact you one way or you know or another. another question on the personal side.

Alex Romanovich 22:46

What do you tell a global entrepreneur? What do you tell an executive in the global company that’s growing or it’s maybe downsizing? or what do you tell somebody who is, you know, trying their trying their luck, if you will, inside of a large organization? What is your advice to those individuals?

Jim Fowler 23:05

A couple things.

Jim Fowler 23:06

One, AI is a great equalizer. I have a friend of mine who’s who’s running a software startup right now in the the space of of drive-throughs. And he’s he’s developing AI technology that can automate the ordering side of it. And small company gets to a point where the he’s presenting to customers, gets feedback, and the feedback was so massive that they needed to throw away everything that they had written and rewrite all the code. And they did it in a weekend.

Jim Fowler 23:31

Like that, you know, that that was two years worth of effort two years ago, where they can literally throw out the entire platform rewrite the underlying platform and have a new product ready for the customer on Monday morning. And so I’d say, first off, if you’re an entrepreneur, the time has never been better for you to look for problems to solve. The second is make sure you are thinking about both efficiency and opportunity. I think one of the big failures I see right now is companies are looking at technology and specific artificial

Jim Fowler 23:59

Specifically artificial intelligence, and they’re looking at it from the efficiency play. I need X number less software engineers, I need X number less customer service representatives. I’m going to automate that work. And that will make you successful in the short term. But if you don’t reinvest that efficiency in solving the world’s unsolved problems, you’re going to find that you plateau and you’ve gotten a one-time benefit that you’re not going to build off of. So the second thing is.

Jim Fowler 24:25

What are the unsolved problems that you’re going to invest the efficiency that you’re providing back in to continue to advance the product or the service that you’re providing? The the last thing that I would I would tell that entrepreneur that was out there that’s really kind of thinking about future forward is border borders are shrinking. The regulatory environment is going to spin up to address that. Make sure you’re thinking about how you truly run.

Jim Fowler 24:49

A global company and a global product set and be ready for that as part of your business architecture, not something that happens to you that you’re forced to pivot against later.

Alex Romanovich 24:59

Great answers. Great answers. Final question. and again, a little more edgy. I’m gonna put you on the spot. You’ve held a number of board positions, and you’ve directed the the decisions of the companies, you directed decisions of some of the C level executives are within those companies, and then you moved back to the operational role. First of all.

Alex Romanovich 25:21

Which one do you enjoy more? Number one. And number two, do you see the boards being in the few in the near future to be a lot more operational, a lot more knowledgeable about the business, or do you see that the operational side of the business gaining more and more notoriety, if you will?

Jim Fowler 25:39

You know, about three years ago I had the chance to join the Lumen board. We we kind of talked about that. And at the beginning of this year, our our CEO Kate called me and and asked me to step off the board and into this role, which is an unusual path, right? That very rarely do people kind of step off the board into a management position. which is better? I I don’t know that there’s one that’s better. I I I I appreciated my board position, especially as a working CIO at that point.

Jim Fowler 26:06

Because it gave me a different perspective to risk, to governance, and to how the stockholder, the owner of the company really thought about the role that I was playing. And so it really made me a much better executive by being on a board. I highly recommend it. And by the way, it doesn’t have to be a public board. Nonprofit boards, if you do them right, give you the same experiences. That’s my experience, my experience with Year Up has been fantastic for that.

Jim Fowler 26:33

But what the boardroom in this instance did when I when I stepped back into the Lumen role is it really gave me the confidence in the strategy. I understood the strategy of the company. I understood from my CIO role that I saw the problem so specifically, right? I was living the problem that Lumen is really working to solve. And what surprised me when I came inside, though, was the speed of execution. From a board perspective, you don’t always get to see.

Jim Fowler 26:58

How work is happening. But I could see the market shifting. I could see how enterprises were thinking about infrastructure. I really believed, in this case, that the network was going to become one of the most important and frankly, most underappreciated parts of the stack. But what I couldn’t fully appreciate from a board perspective was how much progress the team had already made in building the foundation of the future. So when I got here into the management seat from the board.

Jim Fowler 27:25

I found a company that was further into the transformation than I probably realized as a board member, that was transforming itself from a traditional telecom operator into a digital networking company that was focused strategically on the enterprise. Like a lot of our peers are focused on the consumer. We are focused on the enterprise. And I didn’t understand that until I got inside. And I said the other thing that became really clear to me very quickly.

Jim Fowler 27:51

Is that enterprise customers are further along than people think in their transformation journey? So I didn’t understand the customer landscape as well. Like you think about today, 90% of our customers already operate in multiple clouds, and AI is pushing even more workloads there. And the data they need to fuel that is an Achilles heel for them. So maybe just wrapping it up, what what convinced me to make this move wasn’t just the strategy that I had visibility to the board, it was seeing that.

Jim Fowler 28:18

Kind of Lumen, had the assets, the talent, and and I felt like I could help because I understood the problem so well from a customer’s perspective to kind of step into this management role. But again, I I highly recommend having both experiences because it makes you a better executive and leader if you have a board experience. And I think going back into a new role, having been on a board within a company, I accelerated into the role faster and I’ve been able to make a bigger impact faster.

Alex Romanovich 28:43

Jim, thank you so much for being with us today. You’ve given us not only a day in the life of of of a very busy CIO, CTO, head of product, and head of innovation in a few minutes, but you also kind of made me think a a lot about a few things on the at the enterprise level and also I’m sure will make thousands to think the same way.

Alex Romanovich 29:07

In terms of their careers, in terms of the transformation itself, in terms of what a CTO and CIO out there can do to transform, to innovate, and to be a true entrepreneur. Thank you so much for being with us.

Jim Fowler 29:21

Thanks, Alex.