Marking Our Own Homework: Four Futures for Intelligent Engagement

Andrew Collinson’s CASA26 scorecard on a year of intelligent engagement, and the four ways it could play out

A year ago, in our State of CPaaS 2025 report, we told this industry to drive the intelligent engagement narrative, and named six opportunities to get there. At CASA26, Andrew Collinson, founder of Connective Insight and the analyst behind that report, did something analysts rarely do on stage. He marked his own homework.

He started with a definition, and it is worth repeating because it is a customer’s definition rather than a supplier’s. Intelligent engagement is the ambition to interact with your customers at scale and at speed. Whatever label the supplier puts on it, that is what every enterprise case study he looked at was chasing.

The scorecard: tries hard, not straight A’s

Andrew went through last year’s opportunities one by one.

• Intelligent engagement itself: partial. The industry has bought the idea, but it has not explained it. “We still talk about CPaaS and UCaaS and CCaaS.”
• vCon and the conversation record: on track. The conversation record is the key, and the standards are still to play for.
• RCS: behind. Improving, and doing useful things, but the industry should be doing a better job with it.
• Network APIs: on track. “A lot of good things going on in this space, but nobody’s talking about it.”
• AI voice: beyond anything expected. The market moved faster than anyone could write about it.
• Trust and fraud: mixed. Going well where intelligence is concerned, behind in messaging.

His overall verdict: you are doing all right, and some things are going better than others. Fair, and not comfortable. An industry that gets partial credit on its own central idea has a communication problem at the very least.

The real test is whether the position lasts

The scorecard was the warm-up. The harder question is whether there is a sustainable position in intelligent engagement for the communications industry at all. Plenty of players from outside are moving around and into this space. Partial credit means little if what the industry holds today will not carry it through the next three, five or ten years.

So rather than forecast one outcome, Andrew set out two axes and the four futures they create.

Two axes, four futures

The first axis is the network: how much the telco end of the industry still matters in the way enterprises engage their customers. The second is intelligence: whether it stays inside this industry, or moves somewhere else.

• Full intelligent engagement. The network matters and the intelligence stays in the industry. Good for telcos and good for engagement platforms.
• Platform-led intelligent engagement. The platforms win, the telco end fades. RCS and network APIs underdeliver, SMS declines, WhatsApp and email keep growing.
• Wholesale signals. The network does fine, but the engagement platforms are absorbed into other things.
• Absorbed engagement. Neither does well. As Andrew put it, the one he imagined nobody in the room was happy about.

The value of the framework is not the prediction. It is that it makes the conditions visible. Which of the four this industry ends up in depends on choices being made now: whether RCS gets the push it needs, whether network APIs find a story buyers understand, and who owns the conversation record and the intelligence built on top of it.

Not one analyst’s view

Andrew was clear that this was not a framework he had made up on his own. In the full session, Nick Lane of Mobilesquared and Raúl Castañón of 451 Research each take one of the axes and test it from their own corner of the market, and Amy Cameron of STL Partners joins them.

The four futures run as a thread through this series. On Tuesdays we look at Intelligence: who captures the value of the conversation. On Thursdays we look at Trust: what the network can prove that nobody else can. Next Monday, we look back at what the room believed after two days of arguing about it.

Partial credit is still credit. It is not yet a position. Our thanks to Andrew, and to Nick, Raúl and Amy, for putting the question to the room so plainly.

More from CASA26

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CASA26 ran 21–23 September 2026 at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam, hosted by CPaaSAA. This is part of our Monday series on Transformation.