Expediting the Journey to Become an Agile and Intelligent Enterprise

Forget the buzzwords and the hype – 5G and AI are finally converging to deliver real-world impact for enterprises. The Six Five is On The Road at MWC Barcelona where Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman explored the intersection of 5G and AI with Ericsson‘s Åsa Tamsons, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Area Enterprise Wireless Solutions, and Niklas Heuveldop, Senior Vice President, Head of Business Area Global Communications Platform and CEO of Vonage, revealing how mobile, AI, cloud and secure wireless edge are the cornerstones of digital transformation. ‍

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹The “connected agentic era” is dawning: Imagine a world where technology anticipates your needs and seamlessly connects with everything around you. That’s the promise of 5G and AI, and it’s closer than you think.

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🔹Beyond best-effort networks: Enterprises need to move beyond “best-effort” connectivity to leverage the full potential of 5G and AI. This means embracing solutions like private networks and network slicing to ensure guaranteed performance and quality of service.

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🔹Developers are key: Ericsson is empowering developers with network APIs that unlock the full potential of 5G, enabling them to explore new use cases and create innovative applications.

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🔹Real-world use cases: From doctors performing remote surgery with the help of 5G and AI to banks preventing fraud and even cities becoming safer, the possibilities are truly transformative. Learn more at Ericsson. Watch the full video above, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

Patrick Moorhead:
The Six, Five is On The Road. We are at Mobile World Congress 2025 here in Barcelona. I think this is my 14th or 15th MWC. It’s great to be back. It’s interesting. Some of the themes that have been very consistent, obviously, is the power of connectivity and networking. And even with this new, newish, newer AI overlay, the power of mobility and network edge computing and even edge connectivity is more important as ever.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah. It’s become so ubiquitous in our lives that we’ve almost come to expect connectivity. But the work that has to be done to make sure that wherever we are, you know, whether we’re in the air, whether we are, you know, on the ground, in a factory, you know, in a container ship, across the seas, the connectivity that is required has become pervasive, has become ubiquitous. But at the same time, the companies here at Mobile World every year, these are the companies that are really driving this future. And by the way, so much of what we’re going to be able to do with AI depends on that connectivity being in place.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, quite frankly, AI at the edge hasn’t even been addressed. I mean, I love some of my new AI smartphone features that I have, but quite frankly, from a commercial enterprise point of view, that really makes the world go around here. We haven’t even seen this.

Daniel Newman:
We’re just getting started.

Niklas Heuveldop:
Yeah.

Patrick Moorhead:
So, hey, let’s dive in. Åsa and Niklas, great to have you both on the show. I know we had you separately on the Six Five, but anyways, great to have you on.

Åsa Tamsons:
Thank you. So nice to be here.

Niklas Heuveldop:
Yeah, fantastic to be here again.

Daniel Newman:
So let’s start with that sort of broad macro topic. You know, you heard Patrick and I talking on the power of connectivity. But businesses are facing a major challenge. They’re trying to transform, the enterprise is trying to transform. You know, what are some of the key business challenges, Niklas, that you think that enterprises are facing that can be addressed right now, that you guys can help transform?

Niklas Heuveldop:
You guys were early on spotting the relevance of AI interplaying with 5G. And I think it’s painfully obvious that businesses need to leverage agentic AI to radically improve operating efficiencies, transform customer experiences, but also really to accelerate business innovation. And if you look at business process reengineering today, it’s fundamentally been built on cloud storage, compute, but has really failed to leverage high performance programmable networks to connect business processes across an enterprise, devices, sensors to really transform the business. And if you look at developers, they’ve been leveraging storage and compute to build applications. But connectivity, to your point, hasn’t really been available to them to leverage in an open, intuitive and programmable way. But now as service providers are doing a better job, I would say in exposing intelligent connectivity to developers on demand, at scale, things are going to change.

Åsa Tamsons:
And I think it comes down to very foundational, I would say basic problems that companies always try to solve. They try to compete, they’re trying to serve their customers. And I think with progress we’ve seen in technology, but also innovation over the last couple of years in a number of fields we started, they need to get more efficiency, faster. At the same time they need to make better decisions that are data driven and they need to be more responsive and serve the customers better. And if they don’t, someone else will. So it’s become one of these. It’s not a luxury, it’s actually a necessity to survive and it’s really needed if you want to differentiate.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. So Åsa, Ericsson has an amazing history of organic innovations, a lot of investment, and acquisitions. Niklas, hello. But this is a very open, wide open question here. What are some of the ways you are addressing some of the newer needs of the enterprise? And I just say newer because if I look at what enterprises look at, I mean in the last 25 years the themes have been similar but the way we deploy them and the rate at which they want them has been changing.

Åsa Tamsons:
I think it’s really down to what Niklas was into a bit earlier. It’s about being able to connect the data and intelligence. Right. And I sometimes say, well, if you want to use AI or any type of analytics for real time, automated or better decision making, data is gold. Right. That’s the Gold mine. And for that connectivity is king. And we haven’t really leveraged it. So most are actually still relying on a best effort connectivity and best effort, I mean either in performance or in cost or in convenience. And convenience if you think about it is still a lot of fix which doesn’t give you the flexibility. And now when we start to see problems progress of how you use video analytics or you want to use, you know, want to have that capability regardless if you’re on a ship, regardless if you are an AGV, regardless if you’re indoor, outdoor, that’s where I think we haven’t really solved that from a pervasiveness perspective. And if I look then at where Ericsson consciously made investments is to address that pervasiveness, be it, you know, in our credit constellation to connect things that are on the move or a branch or if it’s our private network. But now the form factor to support this could over time be delivered through a slice or if we think about it, I think we’re just really excited for the next level of scale when we can scale the capabilities of the network as easily consumable as any API today. And that’s what journey we’re on. So. So it’s quite simple in my view because it’s all about making it more accessible, more pervasive and not be happy enough with all the cumbersomeness or non performance of the best effort networks.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, particularly when time to market is so important and quite frankly this next generation of consumers and every consumer is a worker. Sorry, every worker is a consumer, they want speed, they just want to get things done quickly and faster. And we have not yet addressed these, maybe we’ve addressed it inside the data center, but that’s about it in this latest wave.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah. It almost feels like in some ways the requirement going forward is going to be companies like Ericsson helping the customers see what they don’t actually know is possible. You know, and we kind of joke with the consumer, right? Because there’s a lot of sort of iterative innovation that goes on and companies sort of, they say always listen to the customer and the customer will tell you. And then they build the next thing. And then you look at some of the world’s most successful companies though, I mean that’s kind of what’s always a step ahead. It was the Apple thing, right. It’s like they built the thing that we didn’t know we needed yet. Like I didn’t know I needed a pocket full of music just yet. I was pretty happy with my boombox. I wanted a better speaker and a smaller boombox or a better Walkman. The point is, I think the same thing is sort of evident inside of the enterprise too, is enterprise. Sometimes these people need you and they need Åsa, you, Niklas, you and your teams to come in and say here’s what’s possible. And so that’s something I know you’re really focused on. NIklas is sort of helping customers see what could be. Talk a little bit about sort of how you and Ericsson are thinking about building use cases that maybe customers don’t realize are possible to sort of accelerate the adoption. Because I’ll say this, you guys sort of indicated it a little bit. I feel like we’ve come here year after year, talked about 5G and its potential and then this is like this sixth, seventh year in a row of talking and in some ways it hasn’t fully reached. Has this moment of AI plus cloud plus 5G. Are we here? Is this what you’re the story you’re starting to help people see?

Niklas Heuveldop:
I think this is going to be the first mobile World Congress where I’m not going to be on stage with service providers talking about all the fantastic 5G can do for you.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right.

Niklas Heuveldop:
But I’m going to be on stage with enterprise customers talking about what 5G is doing to accelerate their transformation.

Patrick Moorhead:
That’s big.

Niklas Heuveldop:
If that is any indication, I think we’re getting there. The announcement of our joint venture Aduna creates the platform for operators to expose. My job now shifts to the Vonage part which comes on top of the joint venture to engage developers. To your point. So where we’re seeing interesting activities today, and it’s no big secret because it builds on established go to market behaviors and products, is in the financial services sector, which already uses two factor authentication. It’s an existing API, it’s an existing go to market motion, but it’s prone to fraud. It’s not a great customer experience. So the first couple of network APIs are really in the fraud and security space. So SIM Swap and Number Verify Silent Authentication location are services which you will hear banks today talk about fundamentally enhancing security, which is a $50 billion problem for the industry and at the same time creating much better customer experience. So the authentication goes on in the background, seamless. The network can match your subscriber with the device, the SIM card and will authenticate you without you having to go through any manual interaction. So it’s a hassle free secure transaction. So we’re starting where you would always start any business Transformation existing customers, existing products and then you add on. But then you start looking at the more sophisticated network capabilities, precise location, quality on demand. And also then in the financial services sector, I was on stage with a CTO for the biggest bank in Latin America and he was walking through some fascinating use cases to your point, which I would never have thought about. So we just need to get these capabilities in the hands of developers. And he’s thinking about it.

So assault is a big deal in Brazil. So you can basically combine location with their application. And when you designate a secure location, when you’re in that secure location, all of your capabilities will be available to you, your savings accounts, your, your, I mean everything. But when you’re not in a secure location, those disappear and you will only have your cash account available to you. So if you’re assaulted, that’s all you will be able to work with. So combining location with the end user choice, quality of demand, when you’re at the point of sales, you’re trying to do a cash transaction, it’s instant. So as we start getting these capabilities into the hands of developers, they’re already starting to innovate things that we hadn’t thought about. And you’ll see a lot on the floor here in different sectors. One of our favorites is first responders. So working with a very interesting Israeli company that has started again with voice and video which is available today. So an emergency call center gets a call from somebody that has been in an accident or is seeing an accident at the scene, will send the message, the victim can click on the link and establish a high definition video link so the first responders can connect through the emergency center to see what the scene is like. Reducing emergency dispatch by 40% so less ambulances traveling around, being able to provide first aid on site. Of course here now you see quality of demand coming in, precise location, more and more network and diligence powering these types of high value use cases. So as we start engaging with enterprises, they are kind of starting to lead us to new places that we hadn’t thought about.

Patrick Moorhead:
I really love the first thing you said that just shows progress of okay, we were talking about what could be and then how to put some things together and now people are actually doing it. But there’s a lot more people not being able to leverage the full capabilities of advanced networking and AI enterprises, developers and CSPs. There’s progress but a lot more to go and maybe Åsa. I’ll start with you, what are some of the recommendations that you’re making? To those Enterprises, developers and CSPs to better take advantage of the advanced network capabilities.

Åsa Tamsons:
And I, I mean I think like any, this may sound generic but I think for any company, but through any type of transformation, you need to be very clear on what is the problem you’re trying to solve. You’re not using AI because for the.Patrick Moorhead:
Sake of AI, it comes back to.

Åsa Tamsons:
Do I have a security problem, right? Do I have a customer experience problem or do I have Jagger Land Rover that is actually shown here and we’ll share more about the inside person later tomorrow. We had a problem connecting our pen shop. It’s the biggest bottleneck. It’s the area where most errors are more dependent on manual work and it’s not at all connected because of the situation of such a shop floor just as an example. So I think it comes back to if we demystify everything comes down to little business problems. I think there is also another aspect which you could say is a barrier. And we still, it’s still to some extent a barrier but we’re making progress. That’s about enabling the ecosystem. And I think back to the previous question about, you know, we’ve been talking about this for many, many years, what’s the difference? Well, we’re making progress because we start to see more devices being enabled. The next step is to get more developers having access to these capabilities. Then we start to rip down the barriers to actually be able to solve these problems in an easier way. And I think it’s fascinating. I had one of these aha moments yesterday I went to. It was a kind of pre-dinner mingle and there were some stations showing what are some of the real problems that I solve today with network APIs and with high performing connectivity. And it was a medical doctor talking about Singapore’s National Hospital University, how they are working with Dr. Timingana and it’s a partnership between the two hospitals and he’s assisting remote surgery. You remember when we talked about remote surgery as a big thing and I think that’s been the true example. One of those hype examples that had maybe too much pain people are. But is that really the value? Well now we have a doctor. It’s not the csp, it’s not Ericsson, it’s the doctor saying this is changing how minimal my colleagues are treating patients both in our own country, but also can provide specialist care to other patients boundless. And I think that’s exciting. So while we still have a lot to go, if we continue focusing on those problems and engaging the ecosystem, we will start to scale these capabilities and that will be an even more exciting and longer journey than the last 10 years.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah. Niklas, what about you? What recommendations do you have for those enterprises, developers, CSPs? Your. You’re close to all of them, particularly right now, enabling developers, the Vonage part coming in, having standard APIs and development practices so they wouldn’t have to have a different API for every single piece of equipment that they wanted to connect.

Niklas Heuveldop:
That’s the key. So I’m actually going to start with the CSPs since all of them are here. The message is, and that’s why we created the venture with Aduna, is to continue working on building better programmable networks. Make sure you continue harmonizing on those APIs and how you expose them. Arduna will play a catalyst role in harmonizing APIs across networks. We need more of those capabilities exposed. Then on the Vonage side, we’re engaging with developers and enterprise customers to experiment. To your point, we don’t know what’s going to fly, but we’re going to share these examples with them and then hopefully enterprises come to our developer portal, engage with us, say, I have this problem. Has anybody figured out how to solve that? God knows, you may be looking at a smart manufacturing problem, but then you see what we did in healthcare and say, I can use some of these capabilities to solve my problem. So it’s really getting that experimentation going, which was a success of 4G. I mean the app economy. I mean, we had no idea what was going to take off. I mean, who would have thought about that? It was certainly not me. But when you get those capabilities exposed and you have developers coming to us with their problems, innovating, experimenting, we want to create the sandboxes for them to do that is when the real magic is going to happen. I mean, what gives me great courage is that we’re at the point in time where there is a meaningful amount of network APIs available for developers to start experimenting. And we hear that from our partners. This is awesome. I can totally see how we can turn that into great value added services and solve our problems. Right now I just need global availability, which we’re also working on. Right. So between Vonage and Naduna, we should be able to get this flywheel going.

Daniel Newman:
Actually does feel like we sort of we’re arriving at this inflection though. You mentioned at 4G we hit the app economy. That’s where it really accelerated. And you started this conversation, Niklas, talking about the agentic era and in many ways we’re hearing kind of agents, agents, agents, but really how this manifests in technology as we move away from this sort of self driven interaction with devices to this completely new abstraction where things happen. We’ll get to the point, maybe Pat, where we think it and it happens, but where the sort of workflows are understood and they’re being executed and it’s not being driven by a bunch of point directive clicks, it’s actually being done because it’s got very ambient understanding, sensing understanding, and then of course a series of driven activities through code and through developer programming. Niklas, Åsa this has been a fascinating, fascinating and a fascinating conversation. Sometimes you got to have a little levity here. It’s been a lot of fun sitting down with both of you. Congratulations on the progress on all the announcements here at MWC. I know Patrick and I look forward to continuing to follow Ericsson’s journey, continuing to have conversations with the both of you and it is the beginning of this show. Have a really wonderful rest of your MWC and we look forward to talking to you soon.

Patrick Moorhead:
Thank you.

Niklas Heuveldop:
Thanks for having us.

Patrick Moorhead:
Thank you.

Daniel Newman:
And thank you everybody out there for being part of this Six Five On The Road. We are here at MWC 2025 in beautiful Barcelona, Spain. Click subscribe. Be part of all of our Six Five On The Road here and of course all of the Six Five coverage everywhere, all the time. But for this one, for Patrick, for myself, time to say goodbye. We’ll see you all later.