Davos 2026: India has opportunity to transition from AI-powered 5G to AI-native 6G, says Ericsson’s Erik Ekudden

The World Economic Forum ( WEF) 2026 draws to a close in Davos, and talks surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) are only getting interesting. In a recent interaction with Business Today at Davos, Erik Ekudden, CTO at Ericsson, talked about how AI is no longer limited to data centres and is distributed across devices, infrastructure, and the network. 

AI has already started to power 5G systems, and India has the opportunity to transition to AI-native 6G, said Ekudden.

“There is opportunity to make a further evolution from AI-powered 5G to that AI native 6G.” He further added, “India is really showing the way here, with a better 5G, taking these steps wisely, introduction of 6G.” 

“Think about India, where past 400 million 5G subscriptions are going for one billion… in just another five years’ time,”  Ekudden told Business Today,

Ekudden emphasised that India’s efforts in preparing for 6G will act as a global confidence booster. He believes that if such complex, AI-native technology could efficiently work in India’s high-density and geographically diverse landscape, it would provide a blueprint to the world that 6G can be adapted anywhere else in the world.

He added, connectivity is booming in India, saying that “To be able to handle all these service categories (application, agents, connected homes, fixed wireless access), what to make people do it autonomously in the network.”

Ekudden told Business Today that AI is creating new revenue opportunities for telecom operators. “The speed of doing business, creating new businesses, setting up new network slices, all of these things is really where the big… getting will come.”  He also emphasised on AI bringing tailored network experiences for applications, agents, sensors, and enterprises. “With AI, we can do it in the network,” he said.

India is playing a crucial role on the global front as it is not only solving connectivity challenges, but also transitioning to a high-performance, autonomous "intelligent fabric” as per the executive. 

Ericsson is actively expanding its services in India, and in November 2025, it also announced a new Radio Access Network (RAN) Software Research & Development (R&D) unit in Bengaluru. The unit focuses on developing 5G and 5G Advanced features for the Ericsson 5G baseband in India.

Watch the full interview here: