How Calix built a culture designed for perpetual transformation

By pairing a customer‑first culture with an AI‑native platform evolution, the company helps service providers win customers, grow revenue, and reduce churn.

As internet and mobile services are increasingly bundled and sold on price, commoditization has become a defining force—blurring brands and making price the loudest signal.

Calix was built to help companies serving this market rise above that pressure and win loyalty with both residential and business subscribers. The company exists to help them transform at scale, a mission reinforced by a simple cultural principle: When customers win, Calix wins.

Calix president and CEO Michael Weening believes that standing still is the fastest way to fall behind. Today, that means a focus on activating agentic AI-driven workflows across the two constituents that matter most—customers and employees—while enabling governance, security, and the scale required for real-world use. 

“Throughout our 26‑year history, our success has depended on helping communications service providers succeed with their customers,” says Weening. “That is why we evolved from a hardware company into a platform company that enables our customers to get the most out of software, cloud, and now, AI.”

For Weening, a culture designed for transformation shapes how its organizations make decisions, how consistently they execute, and whether they maintain trust as expectations rise and markets change. More importantly, that culture understands that transformation is not a one-time thing—it is constant as captured by the company’s mantra: better, better, never best. 

“Change is the only constant. Our teams know that, to succeed, we must keep learning, challenging assumptions, and operating with discipline as markets, technology, and customer expectations evolve,” says Weening.

That culture yields real business outcomes. The company’s Calix One™ platform, for example, brings together network and Wi-Fi appliances, cloud intelligence, and AI into a single system. This enables providers to shift away from competing on connectivity alone and instead differentiate on experience. 

This approach works. For Calix customers, it has translated into Net Promoter Scores^® as high as 94, an indicator of successful differentiation and loyalty in a category where these components are notoriously hard to earn.

“We’ve invested more than $2 billion over 15 years to build and evolve our platform so customers, regardless of size, can adopt AI‑driven capabilities with confidence—securely, responsibly, and at scale,” says Weening.

A culture built for transformation comes with high expectations. Calix supports long‑term performance through programs such as no‑internal‑meeting days and clear norms around unplugging while a fully remote model enables the company to recruit top talent regardless of location. 

“Employees find purpose in doing the hard work together—listening closely to customers, taking feedback seriously, and solving real problems that result in customers succeeding” says Weening. “It is not easy, but it is highly valuable and why we are different as a company. After all, nothing worthwhile is ever easy.”