Look Around the Room

We did that this weekend. What we saw is a room we haven’t found anywhere else.

Six in ten seats belong to people who own a network or build on one

More than 40 people in the room come from operators, from KPN, Vodafone, Orange and BT to Deutsche Telekom’s wholesale arm, Proximus Global and Telin in Indonesia. Close to 40 more come from 18 cloud communications platforms: 8×8, Sinch, Vonage, Alianza, Dstny, Crexendo, Gamma and others. Together they fill six of every ten seats, and they come from more than 20 countries.

That split matters more than the headcount. Most industry rooms have one side of the table but not the other, or one country but not the continent, or the networking but not the argument. Telco events talk about monetising the network, and the platforms that actually sell to enterprises are in the audience, if they’re there at all. Cloud comms events talk about customers and channels, and the operators who own the numbers, the identity signals and the regulatory trust are absent.

The conversation the industry needs — who delivers Intelligent Engagement to the enterprise, and how value flows between network and platform — only works with both sides at the same table. For two days, they are.

The operators in the room are the ones building what comes next

Look closer at the operator badges and a pattern jumps out. These aren’t procurement teams or network operations. They run Network APIs at Vodafone, product innovation at Telin, new services at Orange, voice and UC portfolios at KPN. They’re the people inside each operator whose job is to find the next revenue line — and who know they can’t build it alone.

That’s rarer than it sounds. Plenty of rooms have telco logos in them. Very few have the operator people who are actually looking for partners. They’re here to meet the platforms that can take their capabilities to enterprises, and the AI companies that can make those capabilities worth buying.

The badges say CEO, not engineer

One in four badges says founder or C-level. Most of the rest are the people who own a number: sales, go-to-market, strategy, product. A handful of pure engineering titles, and that’s by design.

This industry doesn’t lack technical capability. Network APIs work. Voice AI works. What it lacks is the commercial answer: what problem gets solved, for whom, at what price, through which partner. That answer won’t come from a room of architects. It comes from people who can say yes to a partnership on Tuesday and put it in a plan on Wednesday.

That’s the room we built. It’s why the programme runs on business models, pricing and trust, not specification sheets.

A third of the room is on stage

Almost a third of the people in the room have a session on the programme. That changes the nature of the event. The speakers aren’t a separate class flown in to perform; they’re peers, and they’ll be in the coffee queue after their session with the people who just heard them.

It’s also why the room votes on Monday and hears the result read back at the close on Tuesday. When the audience and the stage are the same people, the most interesting data point is what the room believes, not what the keynote says.

The bridge between AI and comms is being built here

Here’s what you won’t find at most communications events: AI companies. We’ve written more than once this year about the disconnect between the two worlds — AI and comms chasing the same enterprise customers, at different conferences, rarely in the same room.

At CASA26 they share the stage — from AI-first companies like ElevenLabs to founders building AI into the heart of communications, like LastBot, Meetric, Telkoa and Core Cognitics. They sit in the programme next to operators and platforms, not in a separate AI track, but in the same sessions and the same argument. And the line between an AI company and a comms company is blurring fast: almost every platform in this room is rebuilding its product around AI. Bridging that gap is what CPaaSAA is for, and the bridge gets wider every edition: more AI startups next year, and more of the established AI players after that.

For AI companies the logic is simple. Most go to AI conferences, where they meet other AI companies. What they need is distribution, regulatory trust and access to enterprise customers who can’t send their data to just any model — exactly what the operators and platforms in this room hold. The most valuable seat for an AI company this year isn’t at an AI event. It’s in a room full of the people who own the channel.

The same logic runs the other way. For any partner that wants to reach operators, there’s no shorter path than a room where more than 40 of them are sitting down together for two days.

What happens next

Sunday, the ecosystem gathers on the canals. Monday and Tuesday, the Tobacco Theater. Wednesday, our partners at GSMA host operators for their Telco Roundtable.

The programme is strong. We’re proud of it. But look around the room on Monday morning — that’s where CASA26 actually happens.

CASA26 runs 20–23 September at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam. The full programme is at casa26.amsterdam/casa26-schedule.