Last in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.

Every large operator has an innovation lab, an incubator, a venture arm, a digital unit — or all four. And yet, year after year, the breakthroughs that actually move the industry tend to arrive from somewhere else: a startup, a partnership, an outsider who saw the problem differently. At CASA25, one of the most uncomfortable and best-attended sessions asked the question out loud — why do telcos keep failing at innovation? The answer wasn’t a shortage of money, talent or technology. It was that the industry keeps treating innovation as something to own, when it is really something to orchestrate.

That is the subject of CASA26’s fourth and final pillar — innovation, ecosystems and real outcomes. And it’s the pillar the other three lead into. Intelligent engagement, sovereign AI, programmable networks: not one of them gets built by a single company acting alone.

Innovation is not a department

The recurring mistake is to treat innovation as an internal capability — a team, a budget, a building. But in a multi-stakeholder industry, the breakthrough almost never sits inside one organisation. It sits in the combination.

Look at what each party actually holds. Telcos have distribution, scale, regulatory standing and decades of customer trust — and they move slowly, with their attention turned inward. Startups have speed, focus and ideas — and they lack the distribution and trust to scale them. Capital can fund the gap — but only if it can see a credible path from idea to deployment. Each holds a piece. None holds the whole.

The asset a telco lacks is rarely an idea. It’s the speed to act on one. The asset a startup lacks is rarely an idea either — it’s the reach and the trust to take one to market. Put them in the same room, with capital at the table, and the arithmetic changes. That is the case for ecosystems over products, and it is the principle CASA is built on.

The problem isn’t invention. It’s execution.

If there was a single conclusion from CASA25, it was this: the technology is ready, the standards are maturing, the use cases are proven. The industry’s question has shifted from “can we?” to “how fast?” And “how fast” is not an engineering question. It’s an execution question — and in this industry, execution is a team sport that depends on partners aligning, not on one company’s roadmap.

This is where most innovation quietly dies. Not in the lab, but in the gap between a signed partnership and a live pilot. The industry is fluent in the theatre of innovation — the MOU, the demo, the press release — and far less practised at the unglamorous work of turning a promising collaboration into something deployed, paid for and scaled. CASA’s entire reason for existing is to close that gap.

What real outcomes actually look like

This is the pillar where CASA tries hardest to be different: anchored in proof, not panels. At CASA25, the Case Directory’s “show me the money” sessions made use cases defend themselves with real numbers rather than slideware. Vonage put quantified results on the table — named deployments, not hypotheticals. And the Showcase Challenge turned a pitch session into real companies, with Telnyx, Radisys, XConnect and winner Tresic among those it put in front of the room.

The model keeps producing. Shush, which has partnered with Twilio to take its Sherlock authentication platform to carriers and enterprises, is the pattern in miniature: a startup’s speed and focus paired with an incumbent’s reach. That is what “ecosystem” means in practice, away from the slide.

Capital is the missing third

Ideas and distribution still aren’t enough on their own. Durable innovation needs capital alongside them — early enough to matter, and patient enough to survive the distance between pilot and scale. It’s why CASA has deliberately brought investors into the room rather than keeping the conversation to vendors and operators, and why Sandbox Industries joined CASA26 as a strategic partner: to connect innovation with investment, and help turn promising collaborations into things that can actually be funded and built.

That partnership isn’t a logo on a website. Over recent months we’ve been on the road with Sandbox — sitting down with operators, cloud communications players and innovators across the ecosystem, connecting innovation with investment and testing where the real appetite for collaboration actually lies. The pattern in those conversations is consistent: the technology questions are largely settled, and the interest now is in who to build with, on what terms, and with whose capital behind it. That is the clearest signal yet that the ecosystem isn’t a conference theme. It’s already forming — and CASA26 is where it comes together in one room.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

The innovation track at CASA26 is designed to move past the panel and toward the pilot:

• What turns a partnership from an MOU into a deployment — and what kills it in between?
• How do an operator and a startup actually work together without the startup being crushed by procurement or the operator slowed to a halt?
• How does capital get into the ecosystem early enough to change outcomes rather than just reward them?
• And what does a real outcome look like — how do we measure it, and hold ourselves to it?

These are working sessions, not keynotes — curated discussions, showcase pilots and the kind of strategy input that partners like McKinsey bring, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who can actually move from idea to execution together. It’s the CASA method: identify the opportunity, shape it with the right partners, and develop it into something real — through CPaaSAA’s acceleration initiatives, long after Amsterdam.

The whole series points here

Intelligent engagement. Sovereign AI. Programmable networks. Each is a conversation the industry urgently needs to have. But a conversation is not an outcome. CASA26 exists to turn the four pillars into collaborations — which is why CASA is not really an event at all. It’s a working environment for the ecosystem, where the conversation continues long after the room empties. You don’t simply attend CASA. You become part of what follows.

All four pillars are open for partners to help shape and lead. If you want to be one of the organisations defining where this industry goes next — not just watching it happen — this is the room to be in.

The future of this industry will not be built by anyone alone. CASA26 is simply where the people who will build it are in the same place at the same time.

Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.

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That completes the four pillars of CASA26 — Intelligent Engagement; AI, Sovereign Infrastructure & Agentic Systems; Network APIs & Telecom Transformation; and Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes. We’ll be announcing partners, speakers and sessions across each of them over the coming months.

Third in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.

In March, the GSMA Open Gateway initiative marked its third birthday at MWC Barcelona. The interesting thing wasn’t the milestone. It was the agenda. The headline sessions weren’t about new APIs or new standards — they were about monetisation, business outcomes, and what the programme itself now calls “the demand side.” Aduna’s CEO took the keynote on turning APIs into real-world impact. The closing panels were about which verticals will actually pay.

Read between the lines and the industry is quietly admitting something it spent three years avoiding: the APIs were never the hard part.

That is the real subject of CASA26’s third pillar — Network APIs and telecom transformation. And it’s the pillar where I’ll be most direct, because this is the conversation the industry most needs and most avoids.

The plumbing finally works

It’s worth being fair first. The technical progress is real. Open Gateway is into its third year. CAMARA has standardised a credible set of service APIs. GSMA and TM Forum have a joint conformance certification programme, so an API certified once is trusted across the ecosystem. Aduna — backed by Ericsson and a roster of major operators — has stood up a genuine aggregation layer so a developer doesn’t have to integrate operator by operator. The hyperscalers — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — have put network APIs into their marketplaces. Vonage, now an Ericsson company, has gone further and built network APIs into the core of its platform rather than treating them as a side catalogue. XConnect has done the unglamorous work of making cross-operator reach actually function.

In other words, the excuse is gone. For years, “it’s still early, the standards aren’t ready” was a fair answer. It no longer is. The road has been built.

So here is the uncomfortable question, and it’s a commercial one, not a technical one: the network is now programmable — but is it profitable? Programmable is not the same as profitable. And the industry has been far better at the first than the second.

We counted the APIs. We forgot to ask what they’re worth.

The recurring failure of the Network API conversation is that it is conducted in the wrong units. We count APIs. We count operators onboarded. We count standards ratified and milestones hit. These are supply-side metrics, and the customer has never once asked how many APIs you have.

The questions that matter are the ones the industry is least comfortable with. What job does this get done, for whom? What does it replace, and is the replacement clearly better? What will someone actually pay, and on what commercial model — per call, per outcome, per seat, revenue share? Until those have answers, an API is a capability, not a business.

Some have already named the shift. Vonage’s Neelam Sandhu, newly into the CMO role, used her CASA25 keynote to reframe the company’s story from connectivity to outcomes — saying out loud the move this entire pillar is really about.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s the opposite. The good news is that the demand side is finally producing real answers — in one area especially.

Identity and fraud is the wedge

The clearest near-term business case for Network APIs is not a new experience. It’s the quiet replacement of a broken one. The one-time password sent by SMS is insecure, easily intercepted, and a genuinely poor experience — and it underpins authentication for half the digital economy. Network APIs like Silent Authentication, Number Verification and SIM Swap detection replace it with something the operator can verify at the network level, in milliseconds, without a code to type.

This is the killer app GSMA has been pointing at — the argument made memorably at CASA25 that digital identity, not connectivity, is the operator’s most valuable and most defensible asset. It now has a regulatory tailwind: age-verification laws tightening across the US, EU and Australia put operators in a position no pure software vendor can occupy, because the trust and the subscriber relationship already sit with them. Beyond identity, Quality-on-Demand — guaranteed network performance for drones, robotics, live broadcast and immersive applications — is the next vertical wave.

The opportunity isn’t only the operators’. It belongs equally to the players who turn raw network signals into something an enterprise can buy with confidence. Shush is a case in point — its Sherlock platform packages identity, trust and fraud capabilities into a product a security team can actually deploy, rather than a kit of APIs they’d have to assemble themselves. In partnership with Twilio, it has already put silent network authentication into production with carriers such as DITO — replacing the SMS one-time password with precisely the network-level verification described above. That packaging layer, where a network signal becomes a business outcome, is where a great deal of the value — and the margin — is going to settle.

Identity and fraud is where the abstract finally becomes commercial: a real pain, a clearly better fix, a buyer who is already regulated into needing it. That is what every other Network API use case has to learn from.

The disintermediation question nobody wants to ask

There is a strategic risk hiding inside all this progress. The aggregation layer that makes Network APIs usable — Aduna, the hyperscaler marketplaces, the channel partners — is also the layer that can stand between the operator and the customer. If operators become the wholesale supplier of capabilities that someone else packages, prices and owns the relationship for, they will have built the road and handed the tolls to someone else.

This is the real “telecom transformation” question, and it’s not technical. It’s about where in the value chain the operator chooses to compete. We heard the early version at CASA25, where the “telco of the future” panel — e&, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telin — circled exactly this tension between scale, partnership and control. The operators leaning hardest into Network APIs as a commercial discipline rather than a standards exercise — Orange and Vodafone among them, anchoring the Aduna model; BT building programmability into Global Fabric; the Asian operators like Telin treating it as a regional growth play — are the ones taking the question seriously. Whether they can move at the speed the opportunity demands is, as ever with telcos, the open question.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

The Network API track at CASA26 is built to skip the milestone update and go straight to the commercial core:

• Which use cases actually have a buyer and a price — and which are still capabilities in search of a business?
• What pricing and commercial models survive contact with a real enterprise: per-call, per-outcome, revenue share?
• How do operators avoid being disintermediated by the very aggregators and hyperscalers that make the APIs usable?
• Is identity the wedge that finally makes the rest of the catalogue sellable?

These are analyst-led sessions with the operators, aggregators and platform players living the question — GSMA on the standards and identity story, the aggregation and channel players on distribution, and the operators on whether they can convert structural advantage into revenue before the window narrows.

This is also one of the CASA26 tracks open for a partner to help shape and lead. If your business depends on Network APIs becoming a market rather than a milestone, this is the room where that case gets argued honestly.

The network is finally programmable. Whether the industry programs it into a business — or watches someone else do it — is the only question that now matters.

Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.

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Next in the series: Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes — why the breakthroughs will come from ecosystems, not incumbents acting alone, and how CASA turns conversations into collaborations.

Second in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.

A year ago, the story of AI in the Middle East was a story of pure ascent. The Gulf had decided it would not merely consume artificial intelligence; it would build the ground it runs on. Abu Dhabi broke ground on a gigawatt-scale compute cluster. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth stood up a national AI champion and raised its ambitions into the trillions. Washington cleared the export of tens of thousands of advanced GPUs that had been frozen for months. With more than three trillion dollars of sovereign capital behind them and regional data-centre capacity set to triple by the end of the decade, the Gulf states could build while everyone else waited for financing.

Then, in late February, the other face of the bet arrived. As the conflict with Iran escalated, drone and missile strikes hit data-centre infrastructure across the Gulf — and AWS confirmed its UAE region had been knocked offline, with recovery measured in months and customers told to move their workloads elsewhere. The region that had marketed itself as a safe harbour for the world’s data watched a flagship cloud region burn. In the space of twelve months, sovereignty went from a slide about data residency to a question with missiles attached: who physically controls the ground intelligence runs on — and what happens when that ground is contested?

That is the real subject of CASA26’s second pillar — AI, sovereign infrastructure and agentic systems. It’s also why e& enterprise’s Ahmed Omer is returning to CASA26 to talk through sovereignty from a Middle East vantage point that looks nothing like it did a year ago.

The hard part is no longer building the model

For most of the AI cycle, the centre of gravity sat in a handful of hyperscaler data centres where the largest models were trained. That era is closing. Models are commoditising — capable, open-weight, increasingly interchangeable. The defensible value is moving to a different question.

The hard part is no longer building the model. The hard part is deciding where it runs.

Training is a one-time, centralised act. Inference — the actual work of intelligence, performed millions of times a day — is not. It wants to be close to the data, close to the user, close to the decision. That pulls it out of the hyperscaler core and toward the edge: into networks, devices, enterprise premises and regional infrastructure. The economics point the same way. The binding constraint on AI is no longer chips alone; it is power, latency and the cost of moving data around. Inference at the edge is often cheaper, faster and easier to govern than inference shipped to a distant cloud and back.

This is the opening the telecom industry has been waiting for, whether or not it realises it.

Why this is the operators’ second chance

Hyperscalers own scale. What they cannot easily own is proximity, regulatory standing and trust — the three things that decide where regulated intelligence is allowed to run. Operators have all three almost by default: physical infrastructure close to the user, deep compliance relationships with national regulators, and decades of being trusted with sensitive data.

Sovereign AI is usually framed as a burden — GDPR, the EU AI Act, data-residency rules, the long list of reasons a regulated enterprise cannot simply pipe its data into a centralised model. Framed that way, it’s a cost. Framed correctly, it’s a market. The very rules that make centralised LLMs unusable for a bank, a hospital or a government create demand for intelligence that runs on controlled, in-country, compliant infrastructure. Someone has to host that. The operator with edge sites, a power footprint and a regulator’s trust is better placed to do it than almost anyone.

We saw the early shape of this at CASA25. Deutsche Telekom set out a blueprint for a sovereign CPaaS built on European terms. KPN made the case that reinvention is as much about AI culture and capability inside the operator as about the technology itself. Intel joined the uncomfortable conversation about why telcos keep failing at innovation — which is, at heart, this exact gap between holding the right assets and actually moving on them. And BT’s work on UC Edge points at the same instinct: push capability out to where the customer and the data already are.

The assets are real. The question CASA26 has to answer is whether the industry can convert them into a commercial position before the window closes.

Agents make the question urgent

There is a third force tightening all of this: agentic AI. Once intelligence is distributed across networks, devices and enterprises, the next step is agents that don’t just answer but act — booking, paying, negotiating, resolving, on a customer’s or a company’s behalf, with a degree of autonomy.

That changes the stakes of “where it runs” entirely. An agent acting autonomously inside a regulated business is not a chatbot; it’s an actor with access, authority and consequences. The control plane — the layer that governs which agents may operate, on what data, under whose rules, with what audit trail — becomes the most valuable real estate in the stack. It is, in effect, the new orchestration layer, and it sits naturally next to the infrastructure that hosts the inference.

CASA has to be honest here, because the industry often isn’t. Much of what is sold today as “agentic AI” is still a demo. At CASA25, the agentic sessions — including the “beyond the buzz” discussion Kyle Nel led, with Intel among those at the table — kept returning to the unglamorous questions: consent, identity, trust, governance, and whether any of it survives an enterprise procurement process. The capability is racing ahead. The governance, the economics and the trust model are not. That gap is the opportunity, not the disappointment.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

The AI and sovereignty track at CASA26 is built around the questions that decide who captures this — not the ones that demo well:

• Where will inference actually run in five years, and who pays for the power, the edge sites and the compliance?
• Is sovereign AI a genuine commercial line for operators and regional infrastructure players, or a slogan they’ll cede to the hyperscalers anyway?
• What does the control plane for agentic AI look like in practice, and who is positioned to own it?
• And from the Middle East to Europe, how does a region turn geopolitical exposure into a reason to keep intelligence on home soil?

These are analyst-led discussions, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who build, regulate, finance and deploy this infrastructure — operators, chipmakers, investors and the regional voices, including e& enterprise, who are living the sovereignty question in real time.

This is also one of the CASA26 tracks open for a partner to help shape and lead. If your company’s future depends on where intelligence runs — and on being seen as one of the organisations defining the answer — this is the conversation to be inside, while the track is still open.

The cloud was built for humans. The next infrastructure is being built for intelligence — and the question of whose soil it stands on is no longer academic.

Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.

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Next in the series: Network APIs & Telecom Transformation — from API counts to programmable networks, identity, and the business model operators keep missing.

First in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.

At CASA25, four analysts looked at the same market and disagreed about its size by more than a factor of ten. That wasn’t a rounding error. It was a fundamental disagreement about what business this industry is actually in.

That argument is the real subject of CASA26’s first pillar — Intelligent Engagement — and it’s where we’ll begin this four-part series on the questions the industry needs to resolve before September. It’s the pillar closest to CASA’s origins, and the one with the most money attached.

The messaging layer is no longer where the value lives

For most of the last decade, the CPaaS story was a story about reach. Get a message into any channel, anywhere, at scale. That was genuinely valuable, and it built an industry. But it is now largely commoditised. A2P SMS is a margin business under structural pressure. Channels proliferate, prices compress, and “we can reach your customer” is no longer a position — it’s table stakes.

The value has moved up the stack. It now sits in context, intelligence, and increasingly in autonomy: knowing who the customer is, what they’re trying to do, and being able to act on that in the moment. Intelligent Engagement is the name for what comes after “channels.” It’s the convergence of CPaaS, conversational platforms, AI, and customer data into something an enterprise no longer treats as a cost line, but as its primary, intelligence-bearing interface with its customers.

That reframing sounds abstract until you attach a number to it.

The forecast gap is an identity gap

Come back to that order-of-magnitude disagreement, because it’s the most revealing thing CASA25 surfaced. It would be easy to read the spread as a measurement problem. It isn’t. It’s a disagreement about what business we think we’re in.

If you measure messages sent, you get one number, and it’s a shrinking one. If you measure engagement outcomes — intents resolved, journeys completed, fraud prevented, revenue influenced, churn avoided — you get a very different number, and it’s growing. The gap between the pessimistic and optimistic forecasts is, in effect, the gap between vendors who still sell volume and vendors who have learned to sell outcomes. The market isn’t waiting for permission to grow. It’s waiting for providers to reposition.

This is also where the industry has to be honest with itself. One of the sharpest moments at CASA25 was the “all bars, no bucks” challenge — the observation that we have built extraordinary capability and have not been disciplined about monetising it. The constraint on Intelligent Engagement is not the technology. The technology is ready. The constraint is the business model, and the willingness to charge for results rather than throughput.

Voice is the clearest proof that the category is real

If you want a live example of the shift, look at voice. For years it was the legacy channel everyone was quietly migrating away from. AI has reversed that almost overnight. Natural, programmable, low-latency voice has turned the oldest channel into one of the most interesting — not as a call, but as an interface for agents that can understand and act. Radisys made exactly this case at CASA25: voice is back, not because we missed it, but because it became intelligent. Telnyx showed the same shift from the developer side — the move from “ask your developer” to “ask your assistant,” with voice as a programmable, AI-native capability rather than a legacy line.

Agentic systems push the same logic further. The trajectory runs from broadcasting messages, to orchestrating journeys, to deploying agents that act on customer context with a degree of autonomy. Each step moves the provider closer to the outcome — and closer to the part of the value chain the enterprise actually pays a premium for.

The companies already winning here have made the same move in their own positioning. The leaders we heard from at CASA25 were not selling channels — they were selling business results, with the channel as an implementation detail. Sinch framed it as the shift from aggregation to orchestration. Infobip talked about scaling intelligent engagement. Vonage made the case for moving from connectivity to outcomes. Different language, same realisation: the value is in the result, not the route. That is the whole game.

And the market is starting to reward the move. Twilio — the company that effectively defined CPaaS — has just posted its fastest organic growth in years, and credits the acceleration squarely to voice and messaging reimagined around AI. The clearest sign yet that intelligent engagement isn’t a thesis about the future. It’s already in the numbers.

The same logic is now reshaping the players one layer up. In a recent CPaaSAA Talk, 8×8’s CEO Sam Wilson made the case for collapsing the old silos — UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS converging into a single engagement layer — on the simple grounds that customers don’t experience your org chart, they experience the outcome. That convergence is the structural story behind this pillar. The stack is consolidating around intelligence, and the providers who own the whole motion — context, channel and action — are the ones who get paid for the result rather than the traffic.

And this is no longer only a vendor story. Operators are climbing into the same layer. At CASA25, Deutsche Telekom set out a blueprint for a sovereign CPaaS, and KPN argued that trust itself is the product, not a feature bolted on. e& enterprise is further down that road than most — building an outcome-based play rather than a connectivity one — and Ahmed Omer returns to CASA26 to talk through what that looks like from the Middle East. Operators bring what the pure-play vendors structurally cannot: customer relationships, regulatory standing, and trust. Whether they move fast enough is the open question — but the ones who do will reshape this category, not just take part in it.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

It would be easy to spend a session admiring the framework. We’re not interested in that. At CASA26 the Intelligent Engagement track is built to move from concept to commercial reality, with the questions that actually decide who captures the upside:

• Where does the margin genuinely sit once the channel is commoditised — and what are enterprises demonstrably willing to pay for?
• What does “outcome-based” mean in an actual contract, and who is brave enough to sign one?
• How do you build customer context into engagement without colliding with trust, consent and data sovereignty — the subject of our other pillars, and not separable from this one?
• What separates an AI feature that demos well from an agent that survives contact with a real enterprise’s compliance, brand and economics?

These are analyst-led discussions anchored in real use cases, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who buy, build and finance this category. That is the point of CASA: not an audience, but a working group of the people who can actually move it forward.

Intelligent Engagement is also one of the tracks at CASA26 that a partner can help shape and lead. If your company’s future depends on this category being understood correctly — and on being seen as one of the people defining it — that’s a conversation worth having now, while the track is still open.

Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.

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Next in the series: AI, Sovereign Infrastructure & Agentic Systems — where the intelligence layer meets the question of who controls it.

After the momentum of CASA25, we’re excited to announce that CASA26 will return to Amsterdam in September 2026.

What started as a focused CPaaS industry gathering is evolving into something broader: a curated environment where telecom, CPaaS, AI, cloud, and ecosystem leaders come together to shape what comes next.

CASA25 proved there’s real appetite for deeper conversations — not just about APIs, platforms, or AI hype, but about actual business transformation, intelligent engagement, trust, sovereignty, and real-world outcomes. Across 27 sessions, industry leaders explored how communications, AI, and network capabilities are converging into a new ecosystem opportunity.  

Strategic Partners Already Engaged

This year, we’re particularly excited to already have strategic collaboration underway with GSMA and Sandbox Industries, helping strengthen both the telecom and innovation dimensions of the event.

These partnerships reflect where the industry is heading: closer collaboration between operators, cloud communications providers, AI innovators, enterprises, investors, and ecosystem builders.

CASA26 is not about building another conference. It’s about creating an environment where the right people can shape meaningful initiatives together.

The Four Pillars Of CASA26

CASA26 will be built around four major pillars:

Intelligent Engagement

How AI, CPaaS, conversational platforms, and customer context are reshaping engagement across industries.

Network APIs & Telecom Transformation

From APIs to programmable networks, sovereignty, identity, trust, and new monetization models.

AI, Sovereign Infrastructure & Agentic Systems

Exploring the intersection of AI, edge, infrastructure, data sovereignty, and enterprise control.

Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes

Moving beyond panels toward partnerships, pilots, venture collaboration, and execution.

A Curated Environment For Real Conversations

Like CASA25, CASA26 will remain intentionally curated.

Around 150 senior leaders. Analyst-led discussions. Real use cases. High-quality conversations. Less vendor fluff. More substance.  

CASA is not just an event. It’s becoming an ecosystem working environment where conversations continue long after Amsterdam.

Join The Conversation

Over the coming months, we’ll gradually announce strategic partners, speakers, themes, workshops, and ecosystem initiatives connected to CASA26.

If you’re interested in:
• sponsoring CASA26
• speaking or leading a session
• shaping one of the core pillars
• bringing customers or ecosystem partners
• running curated workshops or strategic discussions

we’d love to talk.

Amsterdam. September 2026.
The next chapter starts now.

At CASA25’s Showcase Challenge, not every demo was about AI agents or voice bots. XConnect’s Mark Harvey took a different route — literally.

Instead of asking what can AI do with networks?, Mark asked a simpler, and arguably harder, question:

What happens when network APIs actually work together — across borders, at scale, in the real world?

The answer came in the form of something unexpected: the world’s first truly global marathon.

It sounds like a gimmick. Until you realise what’s really being demonstrated.

The Problem with Most “Network API” Use Cases

Mark kicked off with a blunt observation. Most network API discussions today are local.

Single country. Single operator. Single use case.

Yet the real promise of telecom networks has always been global. Connectivity without borders. Services that work wherever people are — not just where an operator happens to operate.

So the XConnect team flipped the model.

What if you designed a use case that had to work across countries, networks, and operators from day one?

A Global Marathon, Powered by Telco APIs

The concept was deceptively simple.

Participants around the world run a marathon together — not in the same city, not even the same country, but connected digitally through a shared experience. Your marathon buddy might be in London while you’re running in Amsterdam. Different routes, same distance. Different conditions, shared challenge.

This wasn’t a mock-up. The app exists. It works. And under the hood, it’s powered entirely by telco APIs.

Not one or two — twelve GSMA Open Gateway APIs, layered together.

Why One API Is Never Enough

This was the real lesson of the demo.

• Number Verification enabled seamless login without passwords or OTP friction.
• Device Location ensured runners were where they said they were — no spoofing, no cheating.
• Geofencing dynamically adjusted routes in real time when runners hit roadblocks or restricted areas.
• Quality on Demand ensured the app kept working during high-density events with thousands of runners.
• KYC verified that users were who they claimed to be — using operator-grade data, not third-party guesswork.
• Roaming APIs confirmed cross-border authenticity without VPN tricks.
• OTP existed as a fallback, because resilience matters.
• Traffic Influence helped organisers manage crowds and alert authorities when needed.
• Carrier Billing opened the door to commerce, subscriptions, and operator revenue.
• SIM Swap and fraud-related APIs added another layer of trust and security.

Individually, these APIs are interesting.

Together, they create something meaningful.

That was the mic-drop moment.

From “Just a Demo” to a Commercial Question

Mark was refreshingly honest. This wasn’t built as a product. It started as “a bit of fun.”

But then something interesting happened.

A major sports brand asked a very real question: “Is this commercial?”

Suddenly, the conversation shifted.

If Strava can reach 150 million users and generate hundreds of millions in revenue, why couldn’t a telco-enabled platform — with built-in trust, identity, billing, and global reach — unlock similar value?

Subscription models. White-labelled platforms. Operator-led services. Brand partnerships. Commerce.

The business models are obvious once the capability exists.

Who Actually Wins?

That question came fast from the judges.

Mark’s answer was clear: operators should be the ultimate winners.

Not by selling one API at a time, but by enabling platforms that others want to build on. By making networks programmable in ways that developers, brands, and global communities can actually use.

The global marathon wasn’t about sport.

It was about showing that real value emerges when APIs are layered, orchestrated, and exposed as part of an ecosystem — not sold as isolated technical features.

Not a Sprint, a Marathon

There was a fitting metaphor in Mark’s closing exchange.

A global marathon isn’t about racing the same hill, the same street, or the same temperature. It’s about running the same distance together.

Much like network APIs.

This isn’t a sprint for quick wins. It’s a long-term play that rewards collaboration, scale, and persistence.

Or as Mark put it:

“Let’s run the world together.”

At CASA25, XConnect showed that when telco APIs stop living in slide decks — and start powering shared experiences — the opportunity becomes very real, very fast.

At CASA25, the Showcase Challenge wasn’t about polished slides or perfect demos. It was about ambition, direction, and showing where this industry is heading. Telnyx’s session delivered exactly that—even if the demo gods decided to test everyone’s patience along the way.

What looked like a simple appointment reminder call quickly revealed something far more interesting: a glimpse of how CPaaS is evolving from APIs and flow builders toward natural-language-driven platforms built for Voice AI at scale.

A Voice-First CPaaS, Built Before Voice AI Was Cool

Pete, leading the Telnyx showcase, has seen the CPaaS industry evolve from the inside. From witnessing Jeff Lawson demo early Twilio at an SF New Tech meetup, to becoming the first product manager for voice at MessageBird, to now helping build Telnyx’s European presence—he’s lived through multiple CPaaS eras.

That context matters, because Telnyx is not an SMS company adding voice as an afterthought. It started as a voice and number provider, building its own network over the past decade with a focus on high-definition audio, low latency, and global reliability.

That foundation turns out to be critical for Voice AI.

While many AI voice solutions stitch together third-party telephony, cloud AI, and infrastructure layers, Telnyx brings voice, messaging, numbers, storage, GPUs, and AI orchestration together in one platform. The result is not just convenience—it’s control over latency, quality, and reliability, which are non-negotiable for real-time conversational AI.

The Demo: When Voice AI Meets the Real World

The live demo aimed to show a simple but powerful use case: an automated voice assistant calling to confirm or reschedule a healthcare appointment.

The assistant did call.

It did understand intent.

And it also stumbled—mishearing a response and handling an edge case imperfectly.

That moment, instead of undermining the story, actually reinforced it.

Voice AI doesn’t fail because the idea is wrong. It fails when transcription, prompts, or latency aren’t yet tuned for messy, real-world human behavior: accents, hesitation, nerves, background noise. And as Pete openly explained, this wasn’t a network failure—it was a prompt depth and transcription issue. In other words: solvable problems.

The key takeaway wasn’t the hiccup. It was what was happening behind the scenes.

Voice AI Without Developers (Yes, Really)

One of the most compelling parts of the Telnyx story is who can now build voice applications.

The demo was created by a product marketing manager—not a developer—using tools like n8n and Supabase, connected to Telnyx’s Voice AI capabilities. No custom telephony code. No SIP gymnastics. No AI plumbing nightmares.

Instead, the logic is defined in natural language:

• What should the assistant do?
• What outcomes are allowed?
• How should edge cases be handled?

This marks a real shift in CPaaS evolution:

• First era: code-only APIs (powerful, but developer-exclusive)
• Second era: no-code / low-code flow builders
• Next era: natural language as the interface to CPaaS

Telnyx isn’t abandoning APIs or low-code tools. They’re adding a new layer on top—one where “speaking English to CPaaS” becomes a legitimate way to build.

Model Choice, Voice Choice, and Real Flexibility

Another important signal from the Telnyx platform: it doesn’t lock customers into a single AI stack.

Users can choose:

• LLMs (OpenAI, Google, Groq, others)
• Voice engines (Telnyx-native voices, Azure, AWS, ElevenLabs)
• Integration patterns (webhooks, Zapier, MCP servers)

That flexibility matters in a market where AI quality, cost, compliance, and sovereignty requirements vary widely by use case and region—especially in Europe.

Telnyx positions itself less as “the AI model provider” and more as the orchestration layer where Voice AI actually meets the network.

Why Voice AI Needs a Telco-Grade Backbone

One theme came up repeatedly during the Q&A: call quality.

Many customers experimenting with Voice AI start with tools like VAPI or standalone voice-generation platforms. Then reality hits—latency issues, dropped audio, unreliable call handling. That’s when they come looking for a provider that understands telephony deeply.

Voice AI only works when:

• Latency is consistently low
• Audio quality is predictable
• Fraud, abuse, and traffic anomalies are monitored in real time

Telnyx has been solving those problems for over a decade. Voice AI just raises the stakes.

From Enterprises to the Long Tail

So who is this for?

Not everyone at once.

Telnyx sees Voice AI adoption starting internally—tools for teams, operations, scheduling, data collection—and then moving outward to SMBs and mid-market platforms that want to embed voice intelligence directly into their products.

The real scaling lever isn’t selling to 50,000 restaurants one by one. It’s enabling platforms, MSPs, and SaaS providers to resell and embed Voice AI as a native capability. That’s why Telnyx is investing in channel partners—especially those already selling SIP trunks and looking for their next growth engine.

Guardrails Matter

Voice AI is powerful—and dangerous in the wrong hands.

Here again, Telnyx’s telco DNA shows. Fraud detection, traffic anomaly alerts, call-rate monitoring, and abuse prevention aren’t new features bolted on for AI—they’re already part of the platform.

That’s a meaningful differentiator as Voice AI moves from experiments to production.

The Bigger Shift: From Developers to Assistants

Pete closed with a line that stuck with many in the room:

We’re moving from “Ask your developer” to “Ask your assistant.”

That’s not just a tagline. It’s a reframing of who CPaaS is for, how products get built, and how value gets unlocked—especially in the long tail of businesses that never had access to this level of communication intelligence before.

The Telnyx demo may not have been perfect. But the direction was clear.

Voice is back.

Voice is intelligent.

And the platforms that truly understand voice—from the network up—are the ones best positioned to lead this next phase of CPaaS.

A phone call. That’s the point.

At first glance, what the audience saw during this CASA25 Showcase Challenge didn’t look very exciting. A phone. A dialer. A live call.

No app demo. No futuristic UI. No flashy slides.

But that was exactly the point.

What Adnan Saleem from Radisys showed was a real phone call—using the native dialer—backed by an agentic AI assistant that doesn’t live in an app at all. The AI lives inside the telco network itself. And once you realize that, everything about the demo changes.

This wasn’t voice calling plus AI. It was AI voice as a native network capability, available on any device, on any operator network, without downloads or friction.

For readers who want to go deeper into the architecture behind this approach, Adnan covered that earlier at CASA25 in his keynote: “Voice Is Back (and Smarter Than Ever): How Radisys Is Unlocking New AI Revenue Streams for Telcos.”

👉 https://casa26.amsterdam/2025/10/11/voice-is-back-and-smarter-than-ever-how-radisys-is-unlocking-new-ai-revenue-streams-for-telcos/

A personal AI assistant, reached through the dialer

Instead of opening with architecture diagrams, Adnan went straight into the experience. Using his native phone dialer, he called his personal virtual assistant.

The assistant already had access to private information Adnan had explicitly shared—documents, calendar entries, reminders—and could also draw on public data when needed. He asked about upcoming travel, reminders for purchases, and itinerary details, all through a simple voice interaction.

Turning a phone call into a shared AI experience

The pivotal moment came when Adnan asked the assistant to place an outbound call to his colleague Ralph.

The call connected like any normal voice call. No applications on either side. Once Ralph joined, Adnan invited the virtual assistant into the live call, turning it into a three-party conversation. The AI actively participated—suggesting restaurants near Amsterdam Central Station, answering follow-up questions, and staying fully aware of the context of the discussion.

Automatic summaries, actions, and memory

When the call ended, the system automatically generated a call summary, action items, and a full transcript. These were delivered instantly via SMS with a secure link.

Meetings were identified, dinner plans captured, and next steps outlined—without anyone taking notes or switching tools. Adnan then showed how the call transcript could be imported into the assistant’s private knowledge base.

To close the loop, he called the assistant again and asked about his upcoming meetings and dinner plans. The AI responded instantly and accurately, using the context from the call that had just taken place.

Why “native” matters

What made this demo stand out was not just the AI, but where it lived.

This wasn’t an app layered on top of voice. It was native to the network itself. There was nothing to install, no interoperability issues, and no reliance on high-end smartphones. The service worked on any device, on any operator network, wherever voice works.

That makes it always available—and inherently inclusive.

The operator opportunity

During the Q&A, the conversation naturally shifted to monetization. From an operator perspective, how does this turn into real revenue?

Adnan outlined two clear paths. At the consumer level, this becomes a value-added service—an incremental monthly charge for a powerful personal productivity assistant. At the SMB and enterprise level, the value increases significantly: automatic call summaries, embedded business intelligence, action tracking, and AI-assisted workflows tied directly to everyday voice conversations.

Questions around AI accuracy, data privacy, and enterprise readiness were addressed directly. These are real concerns, but also expected steps on the path to large-scale commercial deployment—not fundamental blockers.

The bigger takeaway

The broader takeaway from this CASA25 Showcase Challenge was simple but important.

Voice doesn’t need to be reinvented. It needs to be elevated.

When AI voice is built directly into the operator network, the network itself becomes the platform—unlocking a new class of services that are personal, contextual, and ready to scale.

During the CASA25 Showcase Challenge, four strong contenders took the stage to demonstrate how they are shaping the future of communications. The final demo of the session, delivered by Robert Galop of Creo Solutions, didn’t just close the challenge — it reframed how many in the room think about conversations, data, and value creation.

By the end of the session, it was clear why Creo Solutions was later announced as the overall winner. Their demo didn’t focus on a single feature or narrow use case. Instead, it presented a bold but practical vision: conversations themselves are becoming a foundational data layer for enterprises, and the industry needs the infrastructure to manage, govern, and monetize them at scale.

VCONs as a New Industry Catalyst

Robert started by anchoring his story in context. The communications industry has seen a few defining inflection points over the past decades — HTML in the early 90s, SIP in the late 90s, and large language models in the early 2020s. Each of these moments unlocked entirely new business models and ecosystems.

His claim was simple but powerful: 2025 will be remembered as the year VCONs, combined with AI, kicked off the conversation intelligence era.

What makes VCONs different is their scope. Rather than treating conversations as transient events or isolated transcripts, VCONs capture structured, contextual information across the entire customer journey — from voice calls and contact center interactions to meetings, emails, social media reviews, and even legacy channels like fax. In Robert’s view, today’s conversation intelligence tools only scratch the surface of what’s possible when conversations become a shared, interoperable asset.

The Coming Explosion of Conversation Data

Looking ahead to 2026, Robert painted a picture of scale. As telco networks, UCaaS, CCaaS, and enterprise applications increasingly generate VCONs by default, the industry will soon be dealing with billions of conversations created every single day.

That volume raises an obvious question: where do all those VCONs live, and how do they become useful rather than overwhelming?

This is where Creo Solutions’ core proposition comes in.

Introducing the Conversation Intelligence Cloud

Creo Solutions is building what Robert described as a conversation intelligence cloud — a platform designed to ingest VCONs from across the ecosystem and turn them into something operational.

The platform is built to serve multiple constituencies at once:

• Telcos that already carry the conversations across their networks
• Application vendors generating VCONs through UCaaS, CCaaS, and collaboration tools
• Enterprises that want actionable insight, not raw data

At its core, the cloud combines intelligence, media connectivity, and security. But just as importantly, it includes a set of ready-made applications that help customers get started quickly. These apps are not positioned as the end state, but as an on-ramp — something tangible that can be sold, deployed, and understood today, while enabling much richer innovation over time.

Consent, Compliance, and Trust by Design

One of the most compelling parts of the demo was the emphasis on compliance and consent.

Robert shared a real-world example from early deployments where a CSP began sending customer data into the platform — only for Creo Solutions to discover that no proper consent had ever been gathered, and that highly sensitive personal conversations were being processed without visibility or control. The result was a full data purge and a rethink of how consent must be enforced at the conversation level.

From that experience emerged a robust consent control layer. The platform checks whether consent exists, whether callers were notified, and whether consent was withdrawn. It also performs redaction and anonymization where needed, ensuring that conversation intelligence can scale without eroding trust or regulatory compliance.

From Raw Conversations to Usable Experiences

Rather than flooding users with dashboards or transcripts, Creo Solutions focuses on surfacing what actually matters.

Robert demonstrated several “copilots” designed for real-world users — especially SMBs and SMEs who are not living inside enterprise analytics tools:

• First Alert Copilot, which flags high-risk or high-priority conversations, such as customers threatening to churn
• Call Summary Copilot, which extracts key actions and commitments from calls
• Daily recaps delivered via email, so business owners on the road still stay informed

In the live demo, a billing dispute call — scripted using ChatGPT — flowed through the platform. The system automatically detected customer frustration, escalated an alert to the business owner, generated a task list, and summarized the interaction without requiring anyone to manually review the call.

The result is a lightweight but powerful alternative to traditional CRMs: every conversation, every commitment, and every issue captured and tracked — with easy integration into tools like HubSpot or Zendesk when needed.

Querying the Business Through Conversations

Beyond alerts and summaries, Robert hinted at what comes next.

All conversations are stored, vectorized, and made available to large language models. That means enterprises can begin querying their entire conversation history — not just for reporting, but for deeper reasoning, pattern detection, and even business planning.

When combined with concepts like MCP servers and deep reasoning, the idea of running complex analysis across every customer interaction becomes not just feasible, but practical.

A Clear Monetization Story for Providers

The final piece of the demo — and one that clearly resonated with the judges — was the business model.

Creo Solutions makes it easy for providers to integrate through multiple connectivity options. Once connected, telcos and service providers can:

• Upsell copilots alongside UCaaS and CCaaS seats
• Add insight-driven services on top of basic connectivity
• Dramatically increase ARPU without changing core infrastructure

Robert summed it up succinctly: this is a path to more than doubling revenue per customer by adding intelligence to calls that today generate zero value beyond basic connectivity.

When challenged with an elevator pitch to a telco CEO, his answer was equally direct: every call that crosses your network is currently discarded from a value perspective — this platform turns every one of those calls into a monetizable asset.

Why Creo Solutions Took the Win

The Showcase Challenge judges weren’t just looking for interesting technology. They were looking for something that could scale globally, align with telco realities, and solve real enterprise problems.

Creo Solutions checked all three boxes.

By positioning VCONs as a shared foundation, embedding consent and trust by design, and delivering practical applications with a clear revenue story, the team demonstrated not just a product — but a platform with ecosystem-level implications.

It’s no surprise, then, that Creo Solutions was ultimately announced as the winner of the CASA25 Showcase Challenge. Their demo captured both the urgency and the opportunity facing the communications industry as conversations themselves become the next great data frontier.

If this is what the conversation intelligence era looks like at kickoff, the next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.

It’s 10 a.m. in Amsterdam, and the Tobacco Theater is buzzing. The lights dim, the cameras roll, and CPaaS Acceleration Alliance founder Rob Kurver steps onto the stage. “Wow. Good morning, everybody,” he begins. “Welcome to Amsterdam. It’s so amazing that after a couple of years of building this alliance, we have this group here together — telcos, CPaaS players, analysts, technologists, investors… and then some.”

The room, a mix of deep industry veterans and new innovators, breaks into smiles. This is CASA25 — the third edition of an event that’s fast become the gathering place for those shaping the future of communications.

From Swamp to Innovation

Rob kicks things off with a bit of history about the venue. The Nes, the old Amsterdam street where the theater sits, was once a swamp, reclaimed in 1342. Over centuries it evolved — first home to churches, then to traders, and later to a tobacco auction house. “You can turn anything into a hype cycle,” he jokes. “We went from the swamp — the innovation trigger — to the peak of expectation with the churches, to the trough of disillusionment with tobacco, and now the plateau of productivity.”

Then comes the punchline: “If you think about it, instead of five churches, we now have five big LLM guys — Mark, Sam, and the others. The role of the church centuries ago has been replaced by the role of Big Tech today.”

Three Years, Three Days, Three Big Moves

There’s a running theme in Rob’s welcome: the power of three.

• Year 1: Connect — bringing telcos and CPaaS together.
• Year 2: Grow — exploring real use cases.
• Year 3: Accelerate — creating impact.

“Kevin and I started this thing three years ago,” Rob recalls. “The idea was to bridge the gap between telcos and CPaaS. Those early conversations were… interesting. ‘You’ll be our first member!’ doesn’t always sell.”

Today, with 120+ active members and partners representing roughly half a trillion dollars in market cap, the Alliance is no longer an experiment — it’s an ecosystem.

And CASA25 marks a milestone with three announcements:

• The State of CPaaS 2025 Report, written by Andrew Collinson, examining how the industry moves from $30B toward $100B — not in theory, but in practice.
• A new investment partnership — “putting our money where our mouth is” to accelerate growth across the ecosystem.
• The Case Directory, expanding last year’s Playbook into a living repository of use cases and business outcomes.

“We Want to Make a Difference”

This, Rob emphasizes, isn’t about yet another conference. “We don’t just want to have an event and some dinners. We really want to make an impact. This alliance was built to change something — to move the industry forward together.”

Kevin Joins the Stage: “The Moment We’ve Been Building Toward”

Enter Kevin Nethercott, co-founder and master evangelist. He laughs as he takes the stage — “I might be the oldest guy in the room now, but I’ve never been more excited.”

Kevin draws a parallel to the early days of VoIP: “When we moved from TDM to IP, the world changed. SIP alone enabled nearly a trillion dollars of new business. What’s coming next — AI, vCons, and agentic automation — is that level of transformation all over again.”

He teases what’s ahead: the launch of a new working group focused on vCons, and an afternoon exploring AI’s disruption of the communications stack. “When I first saw Netscape, I knew the world would never be the same. That’s where we are now with AI.”

The Road Ahead: Two Days of Doing, Not Talking

The rest of Day 1 dives into Intelligent Engagement — starting with Vonage’s Neelam Sandhu, followed by the unveiling of the State of CPaaS report and a debate among analysts about the market’s future.

The afternoon shifts gears to AI disruption and vCons, followed by a preview of the new investment partnership. “And then,” Rob smiles, “there’s only one thing to do — get drunk.” Attendees laugh as he announces the evening party at the Chin Chin Club — a speakeasy-style celebration complete with Amsterdam’s famous bitterballen.

Day 2: The Fight Club Rule

Kevin sets the tone for the next morning. “We start at 10 a.m. with Fight Club. And the first rule of Fight Club? You can’t say CPaaS.” The audience chuckles. “Tomorrow is all about customers, use cases, and monetization. We’ve talked enough tech. Let’s focus on what drives value.”

The day features a keynote from Gamma, a showcase of real-world enterprise use cases, and sessions on Network APIs and Open Telcos. It ends with the CPaaS Showcase Challenge — “where American Idol meets CPaaS,” as Kevin puts it — before everyone gathers again for drinks.

Workshops and Day 3: Rolling Up Sleeves

New this year are hands-on workshops, hosted by sponsors like Radisys, Crexendo/NetSapiens, GSMA and the vCon Foundation. With limited seats (“and the right to strike competitors from the list,” Rob jokes), these small sessions dive deeper into the how.

Day 3 caps off the week with the GSMA Open Gateway Analyst Summit, a focused, invite-only deep dive into the future of network APIs — and the next step in bridging telecom and innovation.

From Connection to Impact

As Rob wraps up, he gestures to the crowd. “Three years ago, we set out to connect telcos and CPaaS. Now we’re ready to create impact. Let’s make these three days count.”

The lights fade, applause fills the theater, and CASA25 officially begins — not as another conference, but as a movement built on collaboration, curiosity, and a shared determination to shape what comes next.