Veteran AI and cloud executive to lead co-innovation, ecosystem growth, and enterprise value creation
Lumen Technologies announced the appointment of Sean Alexander as Senior Vice President of Connected Ecosystems. A seasoned enterprise growth leader and founding executive of Microsoft AI, Alexander will be responsible for building and scaling a world-class business development team that drives customer co-innovation, strategic partnerships, and new revenue streams for Lumen.
“Sean brings a rare combination of technical depth, market vision, and go-to-market execution,” said Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Lumen. “He’s the right leader to expand our enterprise ecosystem and turn innovation into growth and customer impact.”
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Reporting directly to Haynes-Gaspar, Alexander will lead efforts to develop and validate customer use cases that shape the company’s product roadmap–ensuring Lumen’s platform delivers product truth that enterprise customers need most in the AI era. He and his team will also focus on building mindshare beyond the product readiness curve, integrating real-world feedback to fuel Lumen’s leading Network-as-a-Service, edge cloud, and AI infrastructure offerings.
In addition, Alexander will lead Lumen’s connected ecosystem strategy, forging alliances that extend the company’s reach and relevance in key verticals. These partnerships are designed to unlock meaningful revenue growth in the fast-growing $15 billion multi-cloud networking market, accelerate adoption of Lumen’s differentiated digital services, and solve real customer challenges.
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“Lumen is redefining what digital networking infrastructure means in the AI era, and that opens the door to new kinds of partnerships, innovation, and value creation,” said Alexander. “I’m thrilled to join a company building the connective tissue between our customers, our technology and the ecosystem around us. This is about co-creating what’s next and doing it at scale.”
Alexander previously held leadership roles at Microsoft, including Principal Director of AI, where he helped launch Microsoft AI and forged landmark partnerships including OpenAI. Most recently, he served as CEO of Phoenician Advisors, guiding public and private sector organizations through large-scale AI transformations.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Tulsa and completed executive programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as a part of Microsoft’s Leadership program.
Alexander currently serves as a trustee of the University of Tulsa and the Philbrook Museum of Art and Gardens, and as an advisor to Endeavor Global Catalyst and Hurricane Ventures Fund.