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AI agents are changing the way enterprises buy bandwidth. Lumen's new Internet service aims to pick up where capacity planning falls short.
For decades, buying enterprise connectivity has started with headcount. You have to count the number of people, the sites they work in, the apps and programs they use, and maybe a few dozen other factors. Then you estimate what a busy traffic day would look like, price out that peak capacity and sign a three-year contract. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but Ryan Asdourian, Lumen's EVP and chief strategy and marketing officer, thinks those days of layered, nuanced guesstimation may be nearing an end.
"The next users aren't people," he told Light Reading, ahead of Lumen's launch of Intelligent Internet. "No one's budgeting for the amount of agent traffic. They're budgeting for human traffic."
From Cloudflare's perspective, the agentic Internet has already arrived. "This year, agent traffic crossed a historic threshold for the first time: more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human," the company said in a July blog post. Asdourian's point is that if the things generating the bandwidth load are not employees, then headcount is no longer one of the most reliable input variables, and forecasting bandwidth demand suddenly gets weird. "When you sign a circuit agreement, you're not taking a three-year bet against a curve that, frankly, nobody can predict," he said.
Lumen's answer is a service that lets customers buy premium Internet connectivity in minutes and resize it through a portal or an API, at more than 10 million US business locations, on-net and off, up to 100 Gbit/s.
"Lumen's selling point to enterprises is that they will spend less and gain more control," wrote Channel Dive earlier this week. "Intelligent Internet is priced so customers stop paying for peak capacity they don't use."
Strip away the product language, and Lumen might be admitting something else: Carriers are also having a tough time guessing what enterprise Internet demand might look like and then pricing it. Flexibility is needed to both make the math work and to reduce customer churn.
Lumen's mid-market enterprise revenue fell 8% year over year in the second quarter, while strategic revenue grew 14% and became more than half of its total revenue. Mid-market businesses can churn quickly, but a service that can shrink to fit their immediate needs is tough to cancel.
Stephen Hancock, founder and CEO of Socium IT, a Lumen partner, told me via email: "Customers shifting from DIA (dedicated Internet access) to NaaS [network-as-a-service] reduce their costs, which also reduces their commissions." Hancock's firm sells a tool that helps Lumen customers make those adjustments, so he has reason to like the model. Still, he describes it as a haircut for any partner holding a big book of Lumen dedicated Internet.
For a carrier, this is a very interesting gamble. Lumen has spent the last two years pointing every dollar at an AI backbone, taking more than $8 billion from Big Tech and accelerating a multibillion-dollar expansion to carry the traffic it expects. A year ago, Light Reading's sister company Omdia called Lumen's AI network buildout "bold, audacious and underappreciated." Intelligent Internet is the on-ramp for the enterprise side of all that investment, the north-south complement to the cloud-to-cloud plumbing Lumen bought when it acquired Alkira. Lumen is accepting less revenue per connected customer now, in exchange for keeping the customer attached to a network that it bets it will eventually flood.
That works if the agent traffic shows up in enterprise egress the way Asdourian says it will. It works less well if the burst patterns he describes turn out to be customers who always had peaks but never had a way to pay just for those heavy-usage hours.
The New York Yankees, one of the four launch customers, will dial up capacity on game days and dial down when the stadium is dark. For them, Lumen has solved a real problem, but it's not the same as the agentic AI problem Lumen was describing earlier.
So now we're left with something to watch over the next few quarters. We can watch Lumen's product roadmap, of course, to see what comes next. It's also worth watching whether enterprise network budgets evolve to include more moving parts than branch offices and headcount. If they do, every carrier selling fixed capacity may have a pricing problem, and Lumen may have solved theirs first.