Ericsson CEO Highlights AI and Cloud Role in Future Networks at MWC 2025

Ekholm said the digital stack – the combination of these technologies, including mobile connectivity – needs excellence in all component parts to deliver on its potential.

He said that is why future mobile networks need to be high-performing and programmable, with the ability to be exposed to developers for innovation. Without connectivity, he said, Cloud and AI can’t scale.

Ekholm said mobile connectivity is going beyond the traditional consumer market to become a central driver of digitalization.

High performing networks are criticalWhat do we mean by high performing? It’s superior coverage. It’s superior speed, low latency, very cost efficient and energy efficient.

They are going to be even more important as we move forward into AI applications. Programmability is even more important, I would argue. So what is it? In the past we have had one network for consumer applications. We had another one for mission critical. We had one for enterprise as well. Every application had their own network. In the future it will be the same network. That means we need to manage networks much more flexibly and easier. That’s where the programmability comes in.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson  

Ekholm pointed to recent portfolio enhancements and launches  to evidence how Ericsson continues to invest in R&D to deliver the programmability and high-performing cabapilities needed to drive digitalization.

Telstra’s Progammable Network

The opening session heard from Telstra CEO, Vicki Brady, about the recent announcement that the company is partering with Ericsson to pioneer the first programmable network in Asia-Pacific. 

Customers see connectivity as a criticial thing. Whether you’re a consumer, or all the way through to an enterprise customer, the experience on the network matters. At the very foundation, this investment will absolutely mean that the performance, the resilience, the reliability  it only keeps getting better on 5G.

– Vicki Brady, CEO, Telstra

Brady also reflected on network programmability and network APIs, saying opening up the ecosystem and having APIs to expose network capabilities, alongside changing commercial models, provides new opportunities in the industry.

Differentiated connectivity use case – AR Glasses

Ekholm gave an example of how communications service providers (CSPs) could benefit from differentiated connectivity.

Take AR glasses. How would that work? First, you have to know the application. In this case it’s AR. Secondly, you need to know the specific service levels you need. In this case you’re going to need ultra low latency. You’re going to need very high uplink and downlink. You’re going to need capacity that will be told to the network. That will then create a network slice that will happen dynamically.

That will then be adjusted to the service levels required for this application. And the way to do that is through a network API. That means that the developer that works on an application for AR glasses all of a sudden can call up the network API and actually use that in their application and thereby bring that to market.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson  

Ericsson Private 5G

Ekholm also adressed Ericsson’s enterprise strategy and portfolio, saying Private 5G has a key role in industry digitalization.

Pointing to the recently annouced partnership with JLR  (formerly Jaguar Land Rover) at its Solihull complex in the UK, Ekholm said it was an example of the transformative capabilities of Ericsson Private 5G.

It enables use case automation, something you couldn’t really see using fixed connectivity in the past. You need the wireless connectivity. It has a lot more flexibility. So that’s a nice enterprise use case, but we are also thinking broader – with mission critical use cases, such has the first responder case we have on the show floor.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson  

Network APIs and Aduna

Ekholm went on to address the recently created venture, Aduna , of which Ericsson is a founding member, aimed at creating a new ecosystem to access advanced network features through network APIs.

As vendors, we’ve been talking about the capabilites of 5G, but we haven’t created monetization. That’s what we’re in the process of doing now. By forming a JV together with some of the leading operators in the world, we’re now creating the supply of network APIs. That’s the first part that has to be in place. There is no demand until there is a supply. It’s a chicken and egg problem, but we’re trying to address that.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson  

He pointed to several recent Aduna announcements – with Japan’s KDDI , EnStream in Canada , U.S. CSPs,  – as evidence of how the ecosystem is growing.

The next step – the exciting step – is that we are now creating the demand. We are creating the demand from application developers and enterprises. Here new channel partners like Sinch  and Infobip  are signing, in addition to Google Cloud and Vonage that we alrerady had. With this, we are building the ecosystem around network APIs that will allow the operators to sell global applications. I think that is super exciting.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson  

The launch session also heard from Anthony Bartolo, the recently appointed CEO of Aduna.

It’s a been a real challenge in our industry to be able to develop things and make sure that they work everywhere around the world, not just in a particular location. We are bringing together the carrier operator ecosystem with the network API ecosystem, and we marrying that with the demand side.

Each of the groups know that there is a much bigger benefit by coming together than staying in their own particular spaces around the world. The world gets incredibly smaller when we do things like that. From the innovators perspective – they don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time.

– Anthony Bartolo, Recently Appointed CEO, Aduna

Bartolo also outlined the benefits Aduna’s global ecosystem aims to deliver to business and enterprises.

Most businesses have an aspiration to become bigger, not smaller. And one way to get bigger is to operate in multiple countries around the world. When you operate in multiple countries around the world, you then start to pick up the regulatory frameworks and the different jurisdictional requirements. Are you best as an enterprise to go off and learn those things? Or what if somebody simplified that and basically democratized network APIs and allowed you to consume the benefits of all those networks that are in those jurisdictions wiothout having to work around the detail.

This reduces the coefficient of friction that enterprises have with their customers.

– Anthony Bartolo, Recently Appointed CEO, Aduna

Bartolo said Aduna is looking forward to building on recent rapid momentum and welcome additional partners into the ecosystem – including through more announcements during MWC 2025.

Developers – you’re in for a treat when you see the capabilities that are going to open up in the next year or two. As more people and organizations join the ecosystem, we’ll be able to revolutionize applications, and how they’re written. I’m really excited about the potential.

– Anthony Bartolo, Recently Appointed CEO, Aduna

In closing, Ekholm emphasized his excitement about the central role connectivity holds in the development of digitalization as it moves beyond consumer mobile broadband.

I often say that anything that can go wireless – will go wireless. We’re moving into a world where we have one network with many applications running on top of it. We will see the advantages of high-performing programmable networks starting to translate to real business opportunities. It actually puts the operators that are now investing in programmability, as well as the high-performance of the network, at an advantage. They will be the ones able to tap into this increased revenue pool that we see coming. That is really exciting.

– Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson