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.

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.

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.

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

At CASA25, Nicolai Schaettgen (Match-Maker Ventures) hosted a candid fireside chat with Ramazan Soganci, Portfolio Lead CPaaS at KPN, diving into how the Dutch telco is reinventing itself through practical network API use cases. The star example? A collaboration with buy-now-pay-later giant Riverty — not built on technology for its own sake, but on something more fundamental: trust.

From Side Project to Strategic Priority

Two years ago, CPaaS at KPN was still treated like a side hustle. Like many telcos, KPN had spent a decade debating RCS and dabbling in APIs. But the rise of enterprise digital transformation—and the demand for flexible, secure, real-time communications—finally pushed the company to act.

That shift came with a new mindset: expose telco assets through APIs, go beyond messaging, and focus on value creation. Today, Ramazan leads this transformation. His team is scaling KPN’s CPaaS and network API business in partnership with aggregators and enterprises—proving the time for real deployment is now.

The Riverty Story: Trust Is the Real Currency

When financial services firm Riverty (formerly Arvato) approached KPN, it wasn’t to discuss APIs, pricing, or product specs. The conversation centered on trust—the most valuable asset in financial services.

With growing regulatory pressure across Europe, Riverty needed a robust age verification solution to protect consumers and satisfy regulators. Could telco data play a role in ensuring underage users weren’t accessing credit? Could the solution be seamless, scalable, and compliant?

KPN said yes—and delivered a simple yet powerful age verification API. The solution checks, in real time, whether a buyer is 18 or older, using KPN’s verified subscriber data. It’s frictionless, accurate, and—critically—trusted by both regulators and customers.

“We never discussed financial KPIs with Riverty,” Ramazan noted. “The entire conversation was about trust, compliance, and protecting customers.”

Beyond KPN’s Network: Scale Through Collaboration

One standout aspect of this use case: it doesn’t stop with KPN subscribers. Realizing that full market coverage is essential for enterprise buyers, KPN collaborated with other Dutch telcos and aggregators to make the solution available across networks.

This is not the telco playbook of old. It’s a new era of API-driven cooperation, where value comes from federation, not fragmentation.

“No customer accepts 40% coverage. To win, we need scale—and that means working together,” Ramazan said. “It’s not about ego anymore.”

A Strategic Framework: Communication + Network + Identity APIs

KPN’s offering spans far beyond a single use case. Ramazan described their CPaaS strategy as built around three pillars:

• Communication APIs – traditional messaging and voice (SMS, RCS, etc)
• Network APIs – exposing telco assets like quality on demand, SIM swap detection, and location
• Identity APIs – enabling age, identity, and silent authentication use cases

Each API is evaluated based on relevance to specific verticals, with financial services and e-commerce currently showing the most traction due to their fraud and compliance needs.

“We don’t believe in throwing dozens of APIs into the market and hoping for adoption,” Ramazan emphasized. “We start with real use cases, solve problems, and then scale.”

Hyperscalers, Developers, and the Go-to-Market Dilemma

One of the most honest parts of the discussion was around hyperscalers. Ramazan acknowledged that companies like Amazon and Google have a head start when it comes to developer relationships—but KPN isn’t trying to compete on the same terms.

Instead, they’re going deep in verticals, working directly with compliance officers, risk managers, and business owners, not just IT or procurement.

This account-based, consultative approach helped land the Riverty deal—and it’s the foundation for growth in other industries.

What’s Next: From Proof to Scale

KPN isn’t alone anymore. With GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative pushing global alignment, and more telcos investing in practical, privacy-compliant APIs, momentum is building. But challenges remain.

To truly scale:

Cross-operator collaboration must become the norm Success cases like Riverty must be productized and marketed The developer experience still needs simplification and abstraction Telcos must embrace new go-to-market roles, beyond network operations

Ramazan closed with a call to action:

“The industry needs more collaboration—not just among telcos, but with aggregators, platforms, and innovators in this room.”

Key Takeaways

• Trust is a strategic differentiator. Telcos can offer unique identity and verification tools that businesses—and regulators—will rely on.
• Start small, scale smart. Don’t launch dozens of APIs. Build reference use cases with high-value verticals, then replicate.
• Partnerships matter. Cross-operator collaboration and aggregator support are key to reaching enterprise-grade scale.
• Riverty is just the beginning. Financial services and e-commerce are ripe for more telco-powered identity and fraud solutions.

Final Word

At CASA25, the buzzword wasn’t APIs. It was impact. And KPN’s Riverty collaboration is a clear signal: telcos can move from slow-moving incumbents to trusted partners in the digital economy—when they build with purpose.

Let’s make it happen. Together.

At CASA25, Miruna Anastasoaie, a particle physicist turned telco transformation leader at KPN, delivered one of the most refreshing keynotes of the event—not because of dazzling AI demos or grand future visions, but because of her brutally honest, human, and deeply insightful take on what really matters when a telco wants to transform with AI: culture, mindset, and leadership.

If you thought transformation was about plugging in tools or writing slick AI strategies, think again.

From Physics to Telco: A Mindset That Matters

Miruna didn’t come to KPN to maintain the status quo. With a background in astrophysics and a career spanning academia, banking, and telco, she’s seen how hard it is to change large systems from the inside. But she also carries a scientist’s mindset: clear end goals, tolerance for the unknown, and a commitment to iteration.

“In physics, you might know your destination and your first step—but you must relearn at every step. That’s the mindset I brought to KPN.”

And she didn’t come because she thought telco was glamorous. Quite the opposite.

She assumed KPN was too old, too well established, with too much history, a company with deep heritage and complex legacy systems. But when a former colleague pitched her the transformation journey underway, she thought:

“If we can change an operator like KPN, we can do anything.”

The Real Challenge of AI Isn’t Tech—It’s Letting Go

KPN isn’t lacking in tech. It has one of the most complex IT landscapes Miruna has ever seen. But that complexity comes with history—and emotion.

Many of the systems in place have been serving the company for 20 or 30 years and were built by people who have grown with KPN during that time. Letting go of those “babies” isn’t just a technical task—it’s personal.

“That’s why, even as a tech nerd, I focus on the cultural side of transformation.”

Changing mindsets is harder than upgrading tools. Because tools can be bought. But to use them well, you need clarity of purpose, leadership courage, and the ability to unlearn.

The AI Illusion: It’s Not About Tools

Miruna challenged a popular misconception head-on:

“Is this really an AI problem? Or is it a mindset problem?”

She described meetings where everyone was focused on “getting the best LLM,” without understanding that an LLM without retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is just a parrot.

The obsession with new tools misses the point. No tool solves your core issues unless your foundations are solid:

• Clean data
• Clear processes
• Purpose-driven leadership

And perhaps most importantly:

“No supplier can solve our problems for us. Partnerships are important but you still own your problems. And ultimately you solve them from the inside.”

From Use Cases to Scale: Stop Planting Flowers

One of the biggest laughs—and biggest truths—came when Miruna spoke about the focus on use cases when she joined:

“It was like everyone was planting their own flower. But AI needs to work at scale, not in silos.”

Instead of spreading dozens of use cases across departments, she emphasized building shared journeys, connected processes, and interoperable AI systems that can grow with the business.

Use cases aren’t the goal—they’re just the first step. And they shouldn’t distract from the hard work of unification.

Don’t Freeze. Don’t Jump. Walk Forward With Purpose.

Many companies either freeze when faced with AI uncertainty—or jump headfirst into implementation with no structure.

Both are dangerous.

Some people thought they weren’t ready and wanted to cancel. She asked them, “What do we have?” When they listed it out, it was enough to move forward.

Miruna shared how her own team faced this when preparing for a board meeting:

“Delimit the known from the unknown. That’s what makes you strong.”

This mindset—that clarity trumps perfection—is what she calls the “physics of reinvention.” Take the first step. Reassess. Iterate.

Agentic AI Needs Orchestration—Not Chaos

When asked about agentic AI, she warned about another common trap: deploying too many agents too fast without guardrails.

“Ten agents solving a broken coffee machine may just argue with each other.”

Building agentic systems is like building teams—you need clear roles, coordination, and governance.

Throwing more energy at a system doesn’t help if the direction is off. In fact, it creates waste. Smart AI implementation is thoughtful, slow at first, and deeply structured.

Identity First. AI Second.

Perhaps the most powerful moment came near the end:

“Who are you, really? What’s your identity as a company? AI should help you—not define you.”

Too many AI projects start from the tech and forget the soul of the business. KPN, under Miruna’s leadership, is flipping that script.

She spends her time educating, challenging assumptions, and asking the tough cultural questions:

What is KPN’s purpose? What do we want to become? What are we willing to change—and what should remain?

Final Thought: The Hard Work Is Worth It

Transformation isn’t linear. It’s messy. It’s full of false starts and difficult conversations. But as Miruna reminded us:

“If you want impact, you have to do things differently. Not because you know better—but because you’re not afraid to fail and learn.”

And that’s what real AI transformation looks like.

Not plugging in a tool—but shifting a mindset.

Not buying intelligence—but building it—together.

The full program is now online at casa24.amsterdam/casa24-schedule – I encourage you to check it out and see all the incredible sessions we have lined up!

In this blog, I’ll be focusing on Day One, which is packed with transformative insights specifically for operators, telcos, and MNOs – plus everybody looking to do business with them.

Morning Session: Telco Transformation – The Big Picture

We kick off CASA24 on Monday morning with an in-depth look at how telcos are transforming. Industry leaders from McKinsey, Infobip, GSMA, Radisys, S&P Global, STL Partners and more, as well as top-tier operators like e& enterprise, BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, Telin and KPN will share insights on what’s driving this change and why programmable telecoms are essential to their future.

This morning track will cover not just broad trends but also specific strategies telcos are adopting to stay competitive in an ever-evolving market. From the latest in digital transformation to the impact of emerging technologies, this discussion will set the stage for the rest of the day.

Whether you’re an operator adapting to new market demands or a business looking to partner with telcos, this is where you need to be.

Afternoon Tracks: Network APIs and Security & Trust

After lunch, the day splits into two parallel tracks, each addressing critical aspects of the future of telco in more detail.

1. Network APIs: The New Frontier
   The possibilities within network APIs, as standardized in Project CAMARA and brought to marketing through GSMA’s Open Gateway Initiative (OGI) are endless, and this track dives deep into how operators are harnessing this technology. Expect to hear the latest Network API research results from S&P Global, and energetic panels about cutting-edge use cases where APIs are driving innovation in areas like CX and 5G. There will also be practical discussions on API integration and how this is becoming a new revenue stream for operators. Learn from the innovators who are pushing the boundaries and discover how you can leverage these APIs to create new opportunities.
2. Security & Trust: Building Resilient Networks
   In an era where cybersecurity is paramount, this track focuses on the strategies and technologies that ensure secure and trustworthy networks and communications. Topics will include vCon (virtualized conversations), data privacy, and how operators are working to build trust with consumers. Hear from experts who are tackling these challenges head-on, and understand how your business can benefit from their insights.

Why You Can’t Miss Day One at CASA24

If you’re a strategist or technical or business lead in the telco space—or looking to enter it as a technology provider—Day One at CASA24 is unmissable. This is your chance to engage directly with the minds shaping the future of the industry, from strategic thinkers to technical innovators. The networking opportunities alone could be the key to your next big partnership or business breakthrough.