Chewed Up by a Hundred Ants? The CASA26 Panel on Verticals, Value and Agents

Dave Michels’ CASA26 panel with 8×8, Sinch, Vonage and Dstny on verticals, value and the agent economy

Dave Michels ended the first day of CASA26 with a panel of people who sell to very different customers: Sam Wilson, CEO of 8×8; Jesper Larsson, who leads strategy and corporate development at Sinch; Kunal Shukla, who runs Vonage’s Network Powered Solutions; and Daan de Wever, Co-Founder and Group CEO of Dstny. Earlier that afternoon Dave had described an industry building empires on quicksand. Now he asked the people building them what they are doing about it.

Go vertical, or be eaten

Dave’s first challenge: outcome selling is hard when you do not know the customer, and this has always been a horizontal industry. Isn’t vertical selling a contradiction?

Sam’s answer was the image of the day. Silicon Valley keeps creating hundreds of startups, each attacking one vertical. If the larger players do not go deep into verticals, they will be chewed up by a hundred startup ants. You lose against a specialised player. Sam had seen contact centre providers at a healthcare show that nobody in the analyst rankings talks about, doing only healthcare for fifteen years, and doing fine. The way to compete is not mysterious: forward-deployed engineers, customer intimacy, channel partners, and the new AI tools to build faster. The market is big enough that you do not need many verticals to build a substantial business.

Jesper offered a different route. You do not have to do everything yourself. Sinch wants to be the trusted platform on which developers, enterprises and AI natives build their own vertical answers. Software may be cheap to write, he added, but everything you build you also have to maintain. Just because you can build it does not mean you should.

Kunal sided with focus through partners. Pick the areas where you add value, and let an ecosystem of partners sell vertically. Plenty of partners are strong in trust but lack network intelligence; enable them. And then he turned the question around: are we over-indexing on verticals and not talking about value? Account takeover looks the same in banking, social media and ride-hailing. Bring value, and the vertical matters less.

Daan added a European twist. Where the US has a handful of systems in a sector like healthcare, Europe has many per country. Expect micro-verticals, and a definition of vertical that depends on the market.

What customers push back on

On pricing, the panel agreed nobody knows the answer yet. Sam’s point was about rigidity. The industry asked customers to commit to thousands of seats for years, with seats you could add but never remove. Customers are saying no, and startups say yes to anything. He would happily take less revenue from a customer for more margin. And what customers ask for now is simple: a first use case with a defined return, the supplier’s skin in the game, no three-year contract, and value they can see quickly, because finance teams are tight.

Dave pushed for examples where the panel had to tell a customer they were wrong. Sam named two: customers who expect deployment and professional services for free, and customers who want guaranteed pricing for years while also choosing whichever new AI model they like. Kunal’s correction is one he makes constantly: if SMS and number verification come up in the same sentence, it is the wrong conversation. Number verification is not a cheaper one-time password; it is sold to the people who own authentication and fraud. And RCS is not SMS 2.0. Jesper sees the same shift from customer communication to customer conversation, which requires customers to upskill and suppliers to offer more than a price per message. Daan’s lesson was personal: a year ago he pitched an agent builder platform to operators, and the answer was, just tell me what I need to do. Now he comes with specific use cases and builds them together.

One agent, many rulebooks

On data sovereignty, Sam said it had moved from somewhere in his top ten to number two. The world is regionalising, and not only Europe: the UK, the EU, Latin America and Canada all differ. It is also an architecture problem. In the old world you built a contact centre per region. In the new one you build one AI agent that speaks a hundred languages, and then have to replicate it to meet every region’s regulatory requirements. Customers increasingly also want auditable proof that their data is not used to improve anything that helps a competitor. Jesper pointed out that Sinch also uses AI to design and meet compliance requirements. Daan sees sovereignty as an operating model, with plenty of open questions about what problem is really being solved.

The next billion numbers

This is the turn in the panel. Dave asked Sam about his claim that the next billion phone numbers will go to agents. Sam stood by it. When one person runs fifteen agents, those agents need to connect to the outside world, through a number, a messaging handle or something else, and connecting to the outside world is what this room does. 8×8 has spent five years becoming a direct number range holder in its main markets.

Daan took it further. Your next competitor may be a company with fifty people and hundreds of agents. The biggest challenge for established companies is not technology but organisational adaptability: the speed at which they learn and redesign. Will that mean fewer jobs? Sam does not think so, at least not inside his customers. The work changes: people will manage agents, keep them updated and compliant, and run quality management on them as contact centres have done for humans for decades. Daan compared it to electricity: first it extended the working day, then it created machine operators, and the definition of work changed. Be bold, he said, and redesign around where AI actually brings money to the bank.

The ants are real. The answer the panel kept coming back to is the one this room can give together: shared frameworks for trust, compliance, identity and interoperability that let established players build at a scale no single startup can. Our thanks to Dave, Sam, Jesper, Kunal and Daan, and to 8×8, Dstny and Vonage, CASA26 partners.

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