- Lumen has tapped Blue Planet to roll out AI agents to support data migration, digital twins and device model generation
- Blue Planet is already helping Lumen overhaul its legacy inventory system
- Inventory and data cleanup are setting the stage for Lumen’s broader AI implementation
Ciena’s Blue Planet division is giving Lumen a helping hand with agentic AI adoption. The companies announced today Lumen will use Blue Planet AI Studio to create and run AI agents across multiple network domains.
It’s not the first time Lumen has called on Blue Planet to improve network operations. The operator in 2024 enlisted Blue Planet to undertake a major inventory overhaul, which involved “cleaning, rationalizing and having good data” for future AI capabilities, said Gabriele Di Piazza, Blue Planet VP of Product Management, Alliances and Architectures.
“People tend to jump to the AI and the agent without thinking of what lies underneath,” he told Fierce, noting it’s like wanting to go scuba diving without knowing how to swim.
We’ve heard time and time again about how telcos are drowning in data and that technical debt is standing in the way of AI adoption. To address that, Blue Planet last year unveiled an agentic AI framework for the OSS, which layers on top of all the service types within the optical layer, the IP layer and the mobile layer.
For Lumen’s part, it’s cleaning house as it chases more enterprise cloud and AI growth. With the AT&T deal closed, the company has freed up more resources to do just that.
Di Piazza said Lumen is still in the process of migrating to a new inventory system, but now it can use agentic AI to simplify and automate some of the manual work involved.
Lumen also plans to leverage Blue Planet technology for use cases such as device model generation and digital twin applications.
Device model generation is typically a manual process where an operator is “effectively polling and bringing in different devices, and you're basically modeling this into an inventory system to understand, for example, special characteristics, number of ports, and connections, and connectivity, and so forth,” Di Piazza said.
With agentic AI, Lumen can feed that information to an agent, which will then automatically create models. As for digital twins, the concept hasn’t quite taken off as expected but AI could help make it cheaper to build and maintain virtual network replicas.
Again, Di Piazza reiterated technology like digital twins all comes down to clean data and inventory consolidation.
“An inventory system allows you to have a system of record…basically building a foundation for your single source of truth,” he said. “Once you have that, now you can start applying intelligence to simulate how things could evolve.”
Read next: What Fierce Network is watching for at MWC 2026: AI, 5G and network transformation