Networks Aren’t Built Anymore — They’re Consumed: The Wide Area Reimagined for the Agentic Era – Main Stage Keynote
For forty years we built networks for one purpose: human-to-human communication. Ask an AI to design a network for what’s actually coming — agents talking to agents, machine-speed flows with traffic patterns no one can fully predict, full-mesh communication returning at a scale telephony never imagined — and it would not build what we built. That gap is now the defining problem of the wide area network. The center of gravity has already shifted: applications moved into the clouds, the WAN’s spokes now point at the enterprise rather than out of it, and the agentic workloads arriving next will demand connectivity that can be summoned, shaped, and secured as fast as the machines that use it. Meanwhile, as data center buildout collides with political and physical limits, the network — not the facility — becomes the layer that determines what enterprises can actually deploy.
In this keynote, Amir Khan lays out Lumen’s answer: the wide area network as something you consume, not construct. One fabric that abstracts every cloud to look the same from a networking perspective, virtualized cloud exchange points interconnected across the highest-speed physical infrastructure in the industry, and network infrastructure-as-a-service that turns intent into global deployment in an instant — with zero-trust segmentation built in, so autonomous agents operate inside enforceable boundaries rather than an open field. Then the argument leaves the slideware: senior infrastructure leaders from Fortune 100 enterprises join Amir on stage to describe what they’re actually running — why they stopped building WANs, what consuming the network changed about their operations, and what they need next as agentic traffic arrives. The morning’s story — autonomous operations, the new operating model, the new compact — ends here, in the wide area, where it has to work across the world.
Amir Khan is an experienced entrepreneur, a leader and a computer networking visionary who created the multi-billion dollar SD-WAN market with the founding of Viptela, and its subsequent acquisition by Cisco. He founded Alkira in 2018, with the vision of transforming the network for the cloud era by delivering the industry’s first on-demand, as-a-service, unified multi-cloud networking service.
Giovanni Pizzoferrato is the Chief Digital & Technology Officer at BDO Canada. He leads the firm’s digital and technology strategy, including the evolution of the client digital experience, the firm-wide technology roadmap, cybersecurity, and innovation enablement.
Gio brings more than 25 years of leadership in digital transformation, cloud modernization, AI enablement, and enterprise technology. Known for connecting vision with execution, he works across IT, data, digital, service lines, and business units to help BDO adopt secure, scalable technologies that improve how teams work and how clients experience the firm.
His leadership supports BDO’s human-led, AI-embedded approach to transformation, where technology expands capacity, strengthens trust, and keeps people accountable for decisions and outcomes. With a background that bridges creative and technical disciplines, Gio brings a practical, collaborative approach to building future-ready platforms, teams, and digital experiences.
Nick Lippis is an authority on corporate computer networking. He has designed some for the largest computer networks in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on network strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation including Hughes Aerospace, Barclays Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Eastman Kodak Company, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Liberty Mutual, Schering-Plough, Sprint, WorldCom, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and a wide range of other equipment suppliers and service providers.
Mr. Lippis is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe computer networking industry trends and developments.
