At a Glance

  • Lumen Technologies confirmed on Thursday that it has cut positions within its Global Partner Solutions (GPS) team as part of a broader reduction across the commercial organization. Most affected employees were notified on July 1 and are expected to depart on July 10.
  • According to sources close to the company, roughly 90 people were cut in the partner division, including national channel managers and partner success managers. The company will add partner success personnel as it shifts focus from voice to Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) and the newly acquired Alkira portfolio.
  • "Lumen continues to transform to support long-term growth as the trusted network for the AI era," the company said in an email. "We are making difficult but necessary adjustments to align our workforce with business needs and strategic priorities. We recently took further steps to align commercial resources with Lumen's goals, including making the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles within our growth organization."

Deep Dive

The layoffs, tied to the Acceleration and Growth team led by EVP and Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Sharritts, mark the telecom's second major workforce reduction this year. Lumen has not filed any WARN notices, indicating that cuts did not exceed 50 people in any given state. However, the roughly 90 affected GPS personnel are spread across the country and represent a significant portion of Lumen's channel organization.

Lumen faces multiple challenges. In addition to paying down debt, the company is focused on enterprise and public sector customers, and its financial results are shifting accordingly.

Lumen's mid-market enterprise revenue declined 10% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, while large enterprise revenue grew slightly by 1% and public sector revenue grew 5%.

The company is also de-emphasizing transactional legacy products, including voice. Lumen will stop paying commissions on new voice sales, and future voice renewals will no longer earn commissions, sources told Channel Dive on Thursday. Employees in the voice portfolio are also among those being cut.

Replacing voice, Lumen is seeking opportunities to provide connectivity for enterprises and data centers to support AI inference. The company is bullish on east-west network traffic within internal networks and data centers, as well as north-south traffic that Lumen President and CFO Christopher Stansbury describes as "from on-prem to anywhere."

Stansbury said at the TD Cowen conference on May 27 that the Alkira acquisition will make Lumen the first telecom to combine north-south and east-west traffic.

"The intersection is the multi-cloud gateway," Stansbury told investors and analysts. "It can run on-net or off-net, and it's highly programmable—meaning from a single management interface, I can move data from here to there instantly, you design the network yourself, and press execute to run it."

For partners—especially agent-based technology advisors and technology services distributors—the question is whether these layoffs represent a new channel strategy. Sharritts and new GPS Senior Vice President Jim Ortbals both come from Cisco and have deep experience with value-added resellers and systems integrators. The company has also strengthened alliances and technology partnerships with hyperscalers like AWS and data center providers like Digital Realty.

The layoffs hit GPS's agent business hard, affecting directors, managers, and individual contributors. Many of those laid off are channel veterans who have weathered multiple mergers and acquisitions.

"Expect competitors to scoop them up," Janet Schijns, CEO of JS Group, told Channel Dive. "They didn't just cut muscle; they cut into the bone of the channel organization."

CEO Kate Johnson has been advocating for operational efficiency to avoid bankruptcy. Lumen is also leveraging automation, relying on Salesforce agents to boost productivity. However, Schijns warned that the reduction in operating expenses from layoffs may not offset the downstream impact of removing people from the partner organization.

The problem, Schijns said, is complexity.

"For a company like Lumen, the channel is not a low-touch route to market. It relies on experienced people to resolve conflicts, approve deals, handle pricing exceptions, manage escalations, keep systems running, and keep partners productive," Schijns told Channel Dive in an email. "These functions are often viewed as overhead, but they are revenue-generating infrastructure. If these capabilities are weakened, the partner experience will suffer, sales velocity will slow, and competitors will gain opportunities."

Vendors mistakenly believe partners sell products out of preference for the product or in response to financial incentives.

"That's not the case," Schijns said. "Partners don't allocate loyalty. They allocate attention and selling capacity. They invest that capacity where they can predictably win. If partners begin to question whether deals will move efficiently, issues will be resolved quickly, or the customer experience will be good, they will naturally shift more business elsewhere. That's the long-term risk that must be considered with every restructuring."