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The finalists for the 2026 NaaS Excellence Awards have been selected, recognizing organizations and solutions advancing Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) and AI-ready digital infrastructure. Taken together, their submissions tell a bigger story.
Across this year’s entries, we see automation becoming more autonomous, services spanning more providers and domains, and AI changing both the demands placed on digital infrastructure and how that infrastructure is operated. Four themes stand out among this year’s finalists.
Automation is moving toward autonomous operations
APIs and programmable infrastructure remain fundamental to NaaS, but many of this year’s finalists are pushing automation further. The submissions show growing use of AI-driven orchestration, intent-based operations, closed-loop automation, digital twins, and AI agents to manage complex service environments. Some are exploring how natural-language intent can be translated into service requirements and executed across network and IT domains. Others are applying AI agents to service ordering, inventory, assurance, performance management, and other operational functions.
The direction is clear: automation is moving beyond predefined processes toward systems that can interpret intent, make decisions, coordinate workflows, and adapt to changing conditions across distributed infrastructure and service environments.
NaaS is becoming an ecosystem proposition
Another strong theme is the importance of coordination across organizational boundaries. Many of the problems addressed by this year’s finalists extend beyond a single network. Services need to traverse service providers, clouds, data centers, internet exchanges, technology environments, and enterprise domains.
Interoperability, common APIs, standardized service models, orchestration, identity, trust, and governance become essential when no single organization controls the complete service delivery chain. The submissions show companies putting these capabilities to work to automate partner interactions, access distributed digital capabilities, and create more consistent service experiences. For NaaS, the ability to work effectively with partners is becoming as important as the capabilities of an individual network.
AI-ready infrastructure is about more than capacity
AI is also changing the infrastructure conversation. Supporting distributed AI workloads requires high-capacity connectivity, but the submissions demonstrate that capacity alone isn’t enough. AI infrastructure must connect GPUs, clouds, data centers, edge environments, data repositories, and enterprise locations while meeting demanding requirements for latency, resiliency, security, visibility, and service assurance. Those resources also need to be provisioned and managed dynamically as workloads and infrastructure requirements change.
Connectivity, automation, assurance, security, cloud integration, and multi-provider coordination all play a role in creating an infrastructure environment capable of supporting those demands. AI is playing a role on both sides of the equation: placing new demands on digital infrastructure while also helping operate it.
Standards are moving closer to execution
Running through these themes is another important development: standards are being applied directly within operational environments. Finalist submissions show standardized APIs, service models, and interoperability approaches being used to connect workflows, infrastructure, and partners. As services become more automated and distributed, the ability for independent organizations and technologies to work together consistently becomes more important.
For Mplify, this reinforces the importance of standards that enable automation and interoperability across organizations, technologies, and service environments.
Recognizing the organizations moving the industry forward
The 2026 NaaS Excellence Awards finalists span service providers, technology companies, digital infrastructure providers, and other organizations addressing some of the industry’s most important challenges.
Winners will be announced at the NaaS Excellence Awards Gala on September 23 during the Mplify Member Summit – Americas in Boston, and recognized for outstanding achievements across individual categories. But the collective work represented by this year’s finalists already provides an important signal: NaaS and AI-ready digital infrastructure are moving from innovation to execution, with automation, interoperability, and ecosystem coordination becoming central to how digital services are built and delivered.
Learn More
- View the complete list of 2026 NaaS Excellence Awards finalists
- Join industry leaders at the Mplify Member Summit – Americas in Boston, 22–24 September, to advance NaaS for the Agentic AI era and celebrate the 2026 NaaS Excellence Awards winners.