It’s time to ‘get physical’ on AI with private 5G
With Mobile World Congress (next week) creating a huge flurry (well, it’s a firehose really, isn’t it?) of news and activity, it’s not always easy to find a path through the noise.
Of potential interest to software application developers is early news of NTT DATA and Ericsson announcing a new multi-year partnership to help enterprise software engineering teams scale private 5G, edge AI and physical AI into real, production environments.
Let’s just define those terms.
As we know, 5G is known as a mobile network iteration that offers low latency, ultra-fast speed and massive connectivity for all devices. Going deeper, a private 5G network works as a dedicated cellular connection point tailored for a specific business’s bandwidth needs with specific security provisioning, specific controls applied over all internal data and local operations.
Edge AI is of course the application of predictive, generative and agentic AI services in remote devices across the Internet of Things – and we can define physical AI as any intelligence service that interacts and works with real world entities that typically manifest themselves as robotics units, but can also be smaller remote sensors that are now capable of autonomous perception that enables them to reason and perform complex tasks in physical environments.
Let’s get physical
As AI moves into the physical world, we will see it applied across manufacturing facilities, factories, ports, vehicles and energy infrastructure locations. This is good news, but… today (so says NTT DATA & Ericsson), organisations are struggling with fragmented systems and deployment complexity.
The firms want to address this gap with a fully managed global private 5G service that pairs secure, reliable connectivity with AI‑enabled edge operations built for production.
Real‑time AI inference at the edge
Analyst house IDC forecasts global spending on edge technologies (including AI, IoT and robotics) will reach £280 billion by 2028, driven by the shift from cloud‑based [data and inference] “training” to real‑time AI inference at the edge, where decisions must be made instantly.
“Private 5G is the backbone for scaling AI in production, where autonomous systems must operate reliably and at scale, but integration complexity often remains the final hurdle,” said Alejandro Cadenas, associate VP of worldwide telco research at IDC. “The combined expertise of NTT DATA and Ericsson integrates edge AI and physical AI with enhanced connectivity, overcoming operational, scalability and accountability challenges and accelerating the deployment of AI with confidence.”
The partnership will focus on four areas: global private 5G managed services with consistent architecture and security; NTT DATA Edge AI agents embedded directly into Ericsson’s enterprise edge platforms; repeatable edge AI and physical AI use cases across manufacturing, mining, ports, airports, energy and smart cities; and a unified global go-to-market model.
All of which dovetails nicely with one of the key themes at Mobile World Congress 2026: AI for enterprise – vertical use cases with measurable return on investment (ROI). NTT DATA (hereafter NTT Data) says that there is now a real spotlight on AI, autonomy and intelligent networks, so this announcement shows how private 5G is becoming the backbone for physical AI at scale and enabling real‑time autonomous operations across industries.
P5G-as-a-Service?
In technical terms, it sees the companies provide private 5G delivered as a fully managed global service with consistent security and operations worldwide. That’s not known as P5G-as-a-Service (P5GaaS) yet… and to be honest, that never will be. Also here we’re seeing edge AI and physical AI embedded directly into enterprise connectivity for real-time, autonomous decision-making.
“As enterprises adopt AI at the edge, they need partners who can bring connectivity, intelligence and security together in a way that actually works in production,” said Shahid Ahmed, global head of edge services, NTT Data, Inc. “Together with Ericsson, we can deploy these solutions faster, operate them at scale and deliver outcomes. Private 5G gives enterprises the foundation they need to achieve real, measurable impact with edge AI and physical AI deployments.”
By combining Ericsson’s Private 5G and Edge platforms with NTT Data’s full-stack enterprise network services, wireless network expertise, IT/OT security and managed services, the companies say they will deliver industry-ready solutions that help enterprises deploy private 5G networks at a global scale.
Proven production practices
NTT Data will act as Ericsson’s global system integration and managed services provider, delivering Private 5G as a fully managed service with consistent architecture, operations and security worldwide. The companies will deliver what they classify as “proven” private 5G, edge AI and physical AI use cases across manufacturing, mining, ports, airports, energy, transportation and smart cities.
