Building With Lumen: Engineers, FlowAgents, and a Summit Full of Ideas

Thank you to Greg Freeman, Marc Montez, and the Lumen team for welcoming Karan Munalingal and me to the Innovation Summit in Tempe, Arizona. The questions, experiments, and conversations deserve a place here alongside the technical results.

My full workshop recap on the Itential blog was published on October 26. This page brings that write-up together with the public photos and reflections from the people in the room.

Summit participants gathered outside the Lumen building — Outside Lumen’s facility. Photo shared in Greg Freeman’s public summit recap.

Put the engineers at the keyboard

During the busiest 45 minutes of the first workshop, 31 engineers ran 40 FlowAgents across 149 sessions. There were 127 completed sessions, 19 failures, and three cancellations. Those outcomes are part of the learning: a session finishing still requires checking whether it achieved the intended result.

Across our two days of workshops, we moved from individual agents to understanding existing workflows and coordinating a team of agents around an approved change. One participant had inherited seven workflows and wanted to reverse-engineer them into specifications. It was a concrete problem that made the value of readable documentation immediately clear.

Read the detailed workshop results and examples on Itential.

Greg’s view: make room for people to build

In his October 22 recap, Greg describes the wider three-day summit: more than 200 engineers, 45 breakout sessions, and a science-fair-style space for live demonstrations. His message centers on the people who built the kiosks, presented their work, and made the gathering possible.

Lumen engineers beside three demonstration kiosks, including the Lumi assistant — Ideas running in front of the people who can use them. Photo shared by Greg Freeman.

Marc’s view: trust belongs in the design

“AI decides, workflows execute.” That is how Marc Montez describes the operating model. His post connects an agent’s ability to interpret intent and investigate conditions with predictable execution, approvals, and an audit trail.

Marc also commented on the progression of the workshops: each session built on the last, and the labs gave participants something they could apply afterward. That is useful feedback for anyone teaching these tools.

John with fellow summit participants beside a Lumen demonstration screen — A moment from the summit, shared in Marc Montez’s public post.

Keep the conversation going

Itential’s recap brings together the partnership and the workshop results. In my LinkedIn reflection, I also thank Sabrina Duane for the event and John Armstrong for the video memento. You can watch that memento in the original post.

Explore my work at Itential, the event archive, or bring your own experiment to VibeOps.

The summit took place in October 2026. The public sources above describe the event and workshop lengths without giving a complete calendar date range; the event archive preserves that precision.