Building Empires on Quicksand: Dave Michels on the Big Blender

Dave Michels’ CASA26 talk on the collapse of the categories, and the opening it leaves

Dave Michels was at the first CASA, three years ago. It was a CPaaS event, he remembered, and everything was great. CASA26 was not a CPaaS event, and everything is not great. That, said the Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz, is the most telling measure of how much has changed.

A few years ago Dave started calling it the big blender: CPaaS, CCaaS, UCaaS and the rest overlapping more every year. He never liked the labels anyway. CCaaS is a deployment model of contact centre, UCaaS a deployment model of UC, and nobody has ever been sure what CPaaS is. Now even the analyst reports agree with him.

One circle where there used to be five

Dave reads the major analyst reports with a fine-tooth comb, and this year’s tell one story. The CPaaS report is about customer experience. The UCaaS report says the differentiators are contact centre and CPaaS capabilities. The contact centre report says the market is merging with CRM. So he redrew his Venn diagram. It now has one circle: agentic customer experience, built from capabilities that used to be called CPaaS, CCaaS, UCaaS, conversational AI and CRM.

CRM was the surprise. The CRM players have realised that selling seats in a user interface is no longer a great business, and are pivoting hard towards agents and their own contact centres.

Every piece is unstable

This is the turn in the talk. We are all trying to build empires, Dave said, and we are building them on quicksand. Every piece of the industry is moving at once.

• The bundle. Communications can come from your UCaaS, CCaaS or CPaaS provider, your CRM platform, your device maker, your productivity suite or your cloud. Pick a bundle, if you can work out which one you want.
• Sourcing and location. Data sovereignty used to mean where the data sits. Now it increasingly means who owns the provider, which has suddenly become a real advantage for European companies.
• Horizontal or vertical. Communications has always been horizontal. Dave watched companies exhibit at a big communications show and a healthcare show in the same week, and heard that the healthcare show was the busy one, because buyers there could see exactly what the tools would do for them.
• The billing model. Per seat made sense for a long time. Now it is per conversation, per outcome, per use. Usage-based pricing suits companies with CPaaS roots, because they already know how to do it. Most UCaaS companies do not.
• The value. Are we selling quality, insight, automation, compliance? Does the interface even matter any more?

Partners become competitors, and the analysts themselves are having an identity crisis, somewhere on a spectrum between research firms and influencers.

Voice is gold again, and the giants are looking elsewhere

Here is the contradiction. One of this year’s analyst reports concludes that telephony feature innovation has plateaued. Yet thanks to generative AI, voice is suddenly gold: for the first time, conversations can be captured and used in a meaningful way. That changes our relationship with voice, the way email changed when we learned that our employer could read it. Email took thirty years to get there; voice has had a hundred and fifty.

And the companies that used to have their eye on voice are distracted. The largest players in enterprise communications are pouring money and attention into building out AI and into protecting their software businesses. Few of them talk about voice quality or team chat any more. Meanwhile, the “good enough” argument that commoditised voice is turning back in favour of smaller, more specialised providers. And non-AI communications companies are cheap to buy, because nobody pays an AI premium for them.

Waves are hard to see from the inside

Dave closed with the internet. It came in waves: eyeballs, then revenue, then recurring revenue, then networks. Every wave is easy to see in hindsight and hard to see while you are in it. AI is the same, only bigger, and it is the first great wave in this industry that comes from outside it, hitting every sector and every country at once.

We will no longer sell minutes or lines. Nobody yet knows what replaces them. Trust is a strong candidate, because so many people do not trust AI. Speed is another, and speed favours the agile companies in this room over the distracted giants.

Quicksand is a terrible place to build an empire. It is a very good place to move fast. Our thanks to Dave for the opening that set up the afternoon.

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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.