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This article is part of: Network Innovation
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How the NaaS world is preparing for agentic AI and its impact on internal operations, customer relationships, security and partnering across the ecosystem.
Introduction
Mplify is a global alliance of network, cloud and cybersecurity organisations, previously known as MEF. It has been at the forefront of accelerating the development of network-as-a-service (NaaS) via the standardisation of application programmable interfaces (APIs) and promotion of more flexible, on-demand networking services. STL Partners attended the Mplify Member Summit in Lisbon in June 2026, which offered a closed-door opportunity to see how NaaS providers are adapting to serve and accelerate the AI-powered digital economy.
Our key takeaways from the Summit:
- The NaaS for AI opportunity is real and growing. It is being driven in the immediate term by the ongoing build out of data centres and in the medium term by increasingly distributed AI workloads across regional, and potentially edge, data centres.
- NaaS operators are more advanced than the wider telco market in reckoning with how agentic AI will change their businesses. Many have already exposed customer support and sales agents on their platforms, have thought about how to expose lifecycle service orchestration (LSO) APIs via model context protocol (MCP) or agents, and how to secure agentic identities and exchanges.
- Security and ecosystem coordination are the biggest challenges. There was regular commentary throughout the Summit on the integration of quantum capabilities to ensure security, addressing customer sovereignty questions and how the industry could collaborate to expose NaaS capabilities to customers in a more coordinated fashion.
In the full research we explore each of these three themes and include snapshots from Vodafone, Console Connect and Sparkle’s latest innovations in NaaS.
