How Lumen’s First Woman CEO Drives Giant A.I. Deals With a Culture of ‘Empathy’

Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen Technologies" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen Technologies. <span class="media-credit">Jamel Toppin for Forbes</span>'>

As interest and demand for A.I. applications soar, so does the less sexy but crucial A.I. infrastructure industry—think semiconductors, data centers and everything in between that power A.I. tools like ChatGPT. Last month, Lumen Technologies, which provides network solutions for governments and businesses, announced that it had secured $5 billion worth of A.I. contracts within 100 days, including a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Leading the rapid dealmaking is Lumen’s CEO Kate Johnson, who joined the company in late 2022 from Microsoft (MSFT), where she served as president of Microsoft U.S. for four years. 

“We are helping those huge technology companies get ready to build critical infrastructure for the next 20 years, and so that boring topic of critical infrastructure just got a lot more relevant,” Johnson said at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit in New York City today (Sept. 11).

“I think there are a couple of phases to how I think this A.I. story is unfolding, and we’re in the middle of phase one,” Johnson added. “Microsoft and other hyperscalers are building A.I. models, and they’re training them, and it’s proliferating data centers like crazy. Those data centers need to be connected. Otherwise they are just islands.”

Formerly known as CenturyLink, Lumen owns and operates one of the largest global fiber networks in the world. The company provides a wide range of telecommunication, network and IT services based on its extensive fiber-optic infrastructure.

Under Johnson’s leadership, Lumen created the Custom Networks division in September 2022—ten months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT—aiming to provide highly tailored network solutions for clients, helping them design and deploy custom-built A.I. infrastructure.

Driving these new initiatives is not just the industry-wide hype around A.I., but a new company culture Johnson is building at Lumen. The executive said she decided to take the job in 2022 because she saw an opportunity to “transform a company and disrupt an industry at the same time.”

“At Microsoft, I had a little bit of insight into what was potentially going to happen…I’m a change lover. I love transformation. And this was a company that needed to be transformed fundamentally and also needed a giant hug. And I thought that maybe I could leave it in a uniquely feminine way,” said Johnson, who is Lumen’s first woman CEO and one of only dozens of female leaders at Fortune 500 companies. “And if I can pull this off, this transformation can be a really powerful example of what female leadership can do,” she added.

In the two years since she took the helm of Lumen, Johnson has been working to build a company culture she described as “negative capacity,” or the ability to embrace uncertainties and mistakes. “We’re going to start by focusing on this notion that A.I. introduces an enormous amount of uncertainty and volatility into our world and our ability to process change,” she explained. “Our ability to navigate through it and thrive in it is really dependent on having some very, very basic skills. And these skills can be taught: It’s the courage to speak the truth, having a learning mindset, not being afraid to take a calculated risk, and then failing, and then picking yourself back up afterward. That resiliency is such a key piece.”

Before Microsoft, Johnson held executive vice president roles at GE, Oracle and Red Hat. “I’ve been a part of some amazing companies and trying to do amazing things to transform their business models. The ones that are successful pay specific attention to culture, and the ones that aren’t did not.”

The executive stressed that she’s not trying to build a “soft culture” at Lumen. “Empathy is really important to know your customers, and I want to obsess about customers because knowing what they need enables us to book giant deals. And so this isn’t about building this cushy thing. This is about playing the win, and it’s working.”