Lumen Technologies is reducing leverage and reinventing itself as an AI play after completing one of the biggest-ever out-of-court debt restructurings. “We had to keep as many winners as possible if we were going to be able to pull this off,” Chris Stansbury, the company’s president and chief financial officer, tells Bloomberg News’ James Crombie and Reshmi Basu and Bloomberg Intelligence’s Phil Brendel in the latest Credit Edge podcast. “It was a moonshot and it worked,” Stansbury adds. They also discuss capital-expenditure plans, a copper-scrap opportunity worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” and Lumen’s exposure to the AI backlash.