In the recent Light Reading webinar entitled "Scaling for the Next Giant Demand Wave", Ciena's Senior VP and CTO, Steve Alexander, examined three real-world case studies on the new era of the empowered digital user. After introducing the key tenets of the Adaptive Network vision, Steve discussed three case studies that support that vision—Liquid Spectrum, automation, and video analytics. This paper recaps the case studies and the webinar attendees' insightful poll results.