Ericsson Chief Technology Officer, Erik Ekudden, is as excited as anyone by the potential of AI and other emerging technologies to transform home, work and social lives for the better. But he says it will not happen without connectivity.

His 2026 Technology and Telecoms Trends report, published today, addresses the path to the intelligent fabric: programmable, intelligent and autonomous mobile networks that will meet the security, performance and efficiency needs of AI at scale.

Pointing to rapid change, Ekudden’s vision of the next decade sees a fundamental shift in the role of mobile networks: from transporting data to sensing and acting at the speed of intelligence to support automation, human decision making and enterprise systems.

Ekudden says four interrelated developing trends are shaping the intelligent fabric.

• Physical AI is reshaping who and what uses the network, as autonomous agents become significant actors operating at machine speed
• Security in Transformation defines the conditions under which the intelligent fabric earns trust, including AI-native security and the transition to quantum-resilient cryptography
• The Programmable World is turning networks into platforms that can perceive, expose and act on the physical world
• Heterogeneous Compute provides the performance, energy efficiency and economics needed to make this transformation viable on a global scale.

Ekudden says: “The intelligent fabric is to the AI economy what best-effort mobile broadband service was to the internet economy in the past: the connective layer that makes everything else possible, and the differentiator that determines who leads and who follows.”

Ekudden says collaboration across an ecosystem of committed partners is required to turn the vision to reality.

“Ericsson will not build this alone, and we have never intended to,” he says. “The intelligent fabric will be shaped through deep collaboration across communication service providers (CSPs), enterprises, developers, governments and academia, all aligned on a common architecture and a shared direction.”

Ekudden says decisions made within the next three years will determine how the transformation will progress who will define it.

“Ericsson is committed to leading that effort,” he says. “We invite all ecosystem players to help shape it with us.”

Read the full Ericsson Technology Review: CTO Technology and Trends 2026 report via this link.