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Bias Toward Action: Driving AI Innovation Across Global Networks with Greg Freeman

What does it take to lead innovation across one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks? In this episode of Next-Gen Network Heroes, host Bob Slevin sits down with Greg Freeman, Vice President of Network and Customer Transformation at Lumen Technologies, to explore how AI, automation, and curiosity are reshaping the future of network operations.

Driving Innovation: A Bias Towards Action with Greg Freeman

AI is changing network operations faster than ever. In the latest episode of Next-Gen Network Heroes, Bob sits down with Greg Freeman of Lumen Technologies to talk about what it takes to innovate across one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks. From deterministic workflows to agentic AI, Greg shares how his team is using automation, analytics, and AI to improve network reliability, customer experience, and operational efficiency at scale.

What kind of correlations become impossible without depth and breadth?

Most teams don’t have a data problem. They have a correlation problem. When visibility is fragmented:→ Marketing sees conversion drop→ Engineering sees API latency So the wrong call gets made. Example: Checkout drops → pricing gets blamed → discounts applied. Reality: a backend API timeout was killing transactions. That’s what happens when you can’t connect: user impact (what) to system behavior (why)

Introducing Chunk sidecars: Inner loop validation that keeps up with your agents

Local development and remote validation were always meant to work together: developers iterate on their machine, run a few manual checks, then push to CI to clear code for production. But AI development broke that balance, flooding CI with a volume of commits no developer has read, let alone tested. Chunk sidecars restore the balance: lightweight, preconfigured environments that run alongside your local workflow and validate changes as they happen.

Powering Autonomous IT with Edwin AI in ServiceNow Now Assist

Edwin AI extends ServiceNow Now Assist with real-time incident intelligence, acting as a context broker between observability data and ServiceNow incidents. Responders get the context they need inside the IT operations workflow they already use. Edwin AI now: The Edwin AI Agent for ServiceNow brings real-time incident intelligence into Now Assist and Workspace, giving ITOps teams root cause, impact, and recommended next steps directly inside the ServiceNow incident record.

The paved road to production: what good internal developer platforms look like

When was the last time you asked a developer if they actually use the platform you built for them, or whether they’ve found a faster way around it? We talk with companies every day who deal with this exact scenario. They spend months or even years building their IDP. Then a new project requires a stack or workflow that the IDP doesn’t support. The developer is under pressure to deliver, so they spin up their own solution. This is why most IDPs fail quietly.

New enhancements to PagerDuty's SRE Agent: triage faster without waking a human

AI promise and AI capabilities often diverge, with developers often reporting much faster code production, but not enough change in how incidents are handled. When the rate of change is faster than ever, but the rate of recovery from incidents isn’t moving, developers wind up stuck in firefighting mode. And, when these systems fail, it’s costly. According to PagerDuty’s State of AI-First Operations, over a third of surveyed companies report losing $500K per hour of downtime.