Nokia has spent the past six weeks reshaping key parts of its leadership structure, from the board and management team to its largest business unit.

Between its April AGM and today’s appointment of Emma Falck as president of mobile infrastructure, the Finnish telecom company refreshed its board, expanded its leadership team, and named a new leader for its biggest business segment.

Individually, the changes look incremental. Together, they suggest Nokia is positioning itself for a more AI-driven phase of network infrastructure. 

Falck’s appointment is the clearest signal yet. She will take over mobile infrastructure on 1 September and join the group leadership team, moving from Siemens, where she most recently served as executive vice president, products, smart infrastructure buildings. The unit she inherits is not peripheral. Mobile Infrastructure remains Nokia’s largest business and the division most exposed to competitive pressure from Ericsson and Huawei.

The choice to recruit externally matters. Rather than selecting a longtime telecom executive, Nokia chose a leader whose background spans industrial automation, operational transformation, software, and large-scale systems businesses. That choice aligns with Nokia’s recent emphasis on operational execution and software-led infrastructure.

Why Nokia chose an outsider

Falck’s background combines technical depth, international operational experience, and transformation management. Before Siemens, she spent five years as a partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group. Earlier, she held senior roles at KONE, including responsibilities tied to the Greater China market. She also holds a PhD in engineering physics from Aalto University.

The emphasis from both Falck and Hotard was notably operational rather than visionary. “As AI moves toward physical AI, networks need to become AI-native by design for both 5G Advanced and 6G,” Hotard said in Nokia’s announcement.

Falck framed the challenge even more directly. “Customers need partners who can deliver with speed and predictability, and turn technology roadmaps into real-world performance.”

That framing reflects how Nokia has recently positioned its infrastructure business. Alongside network performance and scale, the company has increasingly emphasized software-led infrastructure, AI-native networks, automation, and operational execution in both its leadership messaging and recent product announcements.

Rather than presenting AI as a standalone product category, Nokia has increasingly framed it as part of how future networks will be designed, managed, and monetized. That ambition has become visible across several recent moves, including Nokia’s 12 May 2026 launch of agentic AI capabilities for home and broadband networks.

At Mobile World Congress in March, Nokia and Telia announced a collaboration around AI-RAN commercialization, targeting industrial and mission-critical use cases. Earlier the same month, Nokia expanded its long-running relationship with Virgin Media O2 through a multi-year 5G RAN agreement in the UK. The company has also continued investing in data center networking and software-led infrastructure.

Its new 55,000 square meter “Home of Radio” campus in Oulu, opened last year, is designed to centralize R&D and manufacturing around future network technologies. Meanwhile, the company’s Aurelis data center management platform reflects a broader push into software-defined infrastructure with lower power consumption and fewer hardware dependencies.