India’s near-universal 5G coverage, robust digital public infrastructure and accelerating data centre investments have created a “perfect digital platform” to scale artificial intelligence across sectors, Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson’s Global CTO Erik Ekudden has told Moneycontrol.
AI-powered 5G networks can help Indian telecom operators cut power consumption by 10–20 percent and improve spectral efficiency. By hosting AI inference at the network edge, operators can lower costs, enhance performance and strengthen data security for enterprises and consumers.
“The fast rollout of 5G across the nation with some 99.6 percent of all the districts have 5G. If you combine that with what’s already in place — the DPI and the UPI — and then basically the investments that are happening on the data centre side, if you combine those data centres with a strong 5G network, I think it is a perfect digital platform to scale AI use cases,” Ekudden said.
“Manufacturing, perhaps hospitals, education, farming, agriculture” are the areas that can benefit from stronger digital infrastructure.
‘Ericsson is AI-ready’
Ekudden said artificial intelligence is deeply embedded in Ericsson’s products. “Ericsson’s radio products are AI-powered all the way,” he said, adding AI in networks is being used to improve “energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, really using the network in the best possible way”.
According to him, these capabilities are translating into measurable gains for telecom operators. “We’ve already shown that you can increase spectral efficiency, you can reduce power consumption… by significant amounts,” he said, adding on a network scale, that is significant saving.
Beyond cost optimisation, Ekudden said AI will also help operators unlock new revenue opportunities through autonomous and differentiated services.
“Leading operators are moving towards autonomous networks… AI is really helping to form the decisions or forming the base for the decision,” he said.
Networks will increasingly act as hosts for AI workloads. “Networks are perfect hosts for AI. You already have AI in your smartphone, you have AI in your glasses, you have AI in the backend. Now increasingly, you will have AI hosted in the network,” he said.
No need to wait for 6G
Offloading AI inference to the network edge can improve device performance and efficiency.
“If you offload AI inference from glasses, you get better battery characteristics… and you have AI inference running as hosted on the network edge — efficient, but also the best performance,” he said, adding this approach also strengthens “data security, data sovereignty and so forth”.
While the industry is working toward AI-native 6G networks, Ekudden said operators need not wait for the next generation of technology. “There is no need to wait for 6G. You can build AI into networks today. You can run AI on top of networks today,” he said, describing the transition toward AI-native networks as “a gradual evolution”.
Ekudden also highlighted Ericsson’s engagement with India’s academic and startup ecosystem. He said the firm’s collaboration with IIT-Madras’ Centre for Responsible AI is aimed at bringing “trustworthiness into the ecosystem,” alongside advancing cutting-edge 5G and 6G research.
“The upside of using AI to create growth, to create more business, is perhaps more exciting than the very real savings that you can do on total cost of ownership,” he said, underlining that AI-enabled networks could help Indian operators not just reduce costs, but also deliver tailored user experiences at scale across consumer, enterprise and public sector use cases.
Watch the full interview here
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