The capability was never the problem. Coordination is. Six years of working groups, roundtables, partnerships and research keep pointing at the same finding — and CASA26 in Amsterdam is built to test it.

I’ll be honest: I have the best job on the CASA26 team right now.

While the rest of the crew is buried in sponsor decks, budget spreadsheets, and speaker line-ups (huge respect — someone has to make the numbers work and get the class act talent on stage), I’ve been out on a bike, weaving through sunlit canals, on a mission of my own: finding the perfect spot for our social evening.

Because let’s be real — the sessions matter, the speakers matter, the sponsors matter. But everyone who’s been to a CASA event before knows where the real magic happens: the social evening. That’s where the hallway conversations turn into actual friendships. Where someone you just met over a cocktail becomes a collaborator, a mentor, or just a great story for next year.

So today’s “work” looked like this: cruising past centuries-old canal houses with their crooked gables and glinting reflections in the water, and checking out one of the city’s best hotspots for cocktails and food.

Good news on both fronts. I found our Monday social evening location — a club with exactly the right vibe: great drinks, great food, and just enough buzz to get people talking without drowning them out. And CASA26 itself? It’s landing at the Tobacco Theater — a stunning old building with a carved wooden door straight out of another century. One of those canal houses I passed along the way is still on the shortlist as a backup venue too.

And with that, the full social program is locked in: a canal boat tour with Sandbox and the startups on Sunday, followed by CAVE dinner for our key partners at Watergang, dinner and cocktails at TufTuf on Monday, drinks on Tuesday, and a special GSMA day on Wednesday. Every day has its own vibe, and I can’t wait for you all to experience it.

CASA26 is coming together beautifully, thanks to a team grinding through the unglamorous-but-essential stuff so the glamorous stuff (hi, that’s me) can shine. Genuinely — I love this job.

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.

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.

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.