Lumen is trialing Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI tool the company claims can “significantly improve” employee productivity and enhance its customer service capabilities.
A Lumen rep said it started testing Copilot a few weeks ago, with internal testers trialing it before it’s shared with more employees. Lumen is among the first companies to join Microsoft’s Early Access Program (EAP) for Copilot.
How it works is it’s installed alongside Microsoft’s suite of apps and provides real-time suggestions and assistance to employees. In addition to creating presentations and analyzing written content, Lumen is using Copilot to summarize customer tickets and readily access step-by-step repair instructions from manuals.
As for why Microsoft chose Lumen as a Copilot tester, the Lumen rep told Fierce, “We are engaging in technology to disrupt the telecom industry, and AI is an important part of that disruption as we innovate for growth.”
Indeed, Lumen’s CEO Kate Johnson has said the company is looking to bring the technology sector’s focus on solving customer problems to the telecom realm, as well as enhance Lumen’s enterprise offerings.
"Giving our workforce the digital tools they need to deliver dramatically improved customer experiences with greater ease is an essential part of our company transformation,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “Our people are seeing immediate productivity improvements with Copilot, allowing them to focus on more value-added activities each day.”
The Lumen rep added the Copilot tool allows the company to “put customers at the center of everything we do.”
“We’re seeing our communication is clearer, more informative and more engaging,” said the spokesperson. “We are also using it to scan content for simplicity and pull the most relevant content.”
In other developments, Lumen in the last few months launched its first network-as-a-service offering, a data protection service and ExaSwitch, a new optical networking platform created in partnership with Microsoft and Google.