How the Fall Summit Set the Stage for Building the AI-Native Enterprise Network Fabric in 2026

At the Fall 2025 AI Networking Summit in New York, one theme dominated every conversation: enterprises are experimenting with AI, but they’re not yet ready to operationalize it. Business units are running pilots, copilots, and proofs-of-concept, but IT and infrastructure teams are still figuring out how to scale, secure, and support them.

That disconnect — between AI enthusiasm and AI readiness — is now the industry’s biggest challenge. And solving it will define 2026.

Leaders from Fortune-class enterprises, cloud providers, and network innovators agreed: it’s time to move from token consumption to transformation. The question is no longer whether enterprises will build internal AI capacity, but how fast they can build the right foundation to make it real.

That foundation is what we’re calling the AI-Native Enterprise Network Fabric — the intelligent infrastructure layer that binds together compute, data, networking, security, and observability into a single, adaptive system. It’s the connective tissue that makes AI operational.

This fabric isn’t theoretical; it’s emerging today across the ONUG Collaborative community. It combines:

• Scalable networking for GPU clusters, edge, and hybrid environments
• Agentic AI overlays that automate orchestration and lifecycle management
• Zero-trust security built into every layer
• Observability and self-healing operations powered by AI itself

At the Fall Summit, enterprise business leaders made something else clear: they need IT to lead. Keynotes from industries like healthcare, logistics, and financial services showed how business units are driving AI transformation — but they can’t succeed without resilient, AI-ready infrastructure beneath them.

That insight shapes the entire 2026 AI Networking Summit series.

• Spring in Dallas (May 2026): Building the AI-Native Enterprise Network Fabric — a technical deep dive into SONiC, agentic automation, and edge intelligence. This is where practitioners, architects, and engineers come together to solve the hardest operational challenges inside the fabric.
• Fall in New York (October 2026): Scaling the Fabric — What’s Next? — focused on governance, economics, and executive alignment. This is where the boardroom meets the data center to decide how enterprises will scale AI responsibly and sustainably.

Together, these two Summits create a yearly cycle of action: build in spring, scale in fall.

For IT professionals, 2026 is your year to get in the game — to move from experimentation to leadership. Join a use case team, contribute to an ONUG Collaborative working group, and help define the next generation of enterprise infrastructure. You can join here.

For vendors and sponsors, this is your chance to align with the enterprises shaping the AI-Native future. Sponsor a use case, present your innovations, and engage with the community that’s building — not just talking about — the next wave of AI infrastructure.  Contact Paul and Erik at sponsors@onug.net for sponsorship opportunities.

The AI Networking Summit is where enterprise transformation happens.
Let’s build the fabric together.