Four in five network API calls never cross a border

What a conversation with Proximus Global's network API lead reveals about who is actually buying, what they are actually buying, and why the agentic wave may not arrive on schedule.

Ask almost anyone in this industry to describe the network API opportunity and you will be shown a map of the world. Global coverage. One contract, one endpoint, hundreds of operators behind a single integration. It is the pitch every aggregation platform makes — ours included, in the sense that we have spent three years convening the people making it.

Then someone who runs one of those platforms tells you that roughly four out of five transactions never leave the country they started in.
That figure came from Ievgen Martsin, VP Network API and Programmable Voice & Messaging at Proximus Global, in a CPaaSAA Talk with Founding Partner Rob Kurver ahead of CASA26, where Proximus Global joins us as a Gold Sponsor. The conversation was meant to be an introduction to Konera, the network API platform Proximus Global launched last year. It became something more useful than that: a practitioner's account of where the money in this market actually sits.

One Call, Many Intelligences: What Alianza Crux Tells Us About Who Runs the Conversation

There is a law firm somewhere that wants its client calls to land in its case management system. The way it does this today is that the lawyer, before every call that matters, opens a web interface, types in a three-way calling number, dials it into the conversation, and hopes the recording makes it through.

That is the state of the art in 2026. Not in a legacy corner of the market — in the part of the industry that has just absorbed tens of billions of dollars of investment in conversational AI. The intelligence is extraordinary. Getting it attached to an actual phone call is still a manual workaround performed by a professional who bills by the hour.

Dag Peak, chief product and technology officer at Alianza, told that story in a CPaaSAA Talk we recorded this week. It is the most useful thing in the launch, because it locates the problem precisely. The barrier between conversational AI and the world’s conversations is not model quality, and it is not the network. It is provisioning, consent, and the fact that a phone call can only ever be forwarded to one place.

Who Runs the Conversation? Right Now, Nobody.

When we published AI Voice: Who Will Run the Conversation? earlier this year, the question in the title was meant as a strategic one — which layer ends up orchestrating the models, enforcing the policy, and holding the context when a conversation crosses channels.

In this CPaaSAA Talk, Jacques Klick of Sinch answered it in the present tense. Today, nobody does. Or, as he put it: whoever drew the short straw on the engineering team.

Network APIs Just Found Their Missing Channel. It Isn't Developers.

On this week's CPaaSAA Talk, Alex Barnett (VP Developer Ecosystem and Experience, Vonage) and Niv Raz (Senior Solution Architect, AWS) discussed the Vonage API Power for Kiro — the first CPaaS offered natively inside AWS's agentic IDE. On paper, a developer-tooling announcement. In substance, something bigger.

Alex put it plainly: for decades, the primary persona of every API business was the human developer. There is now a second, explicit persona — the agent — and Vonage is re-optimizing its entire surface area for it. MCP servers. Machine-readable documentation. Integration patterns taught directly to the AI.

That is not a tooling story. That is a distribution story. And it may be the mechanism that finally converts network APIs from industry ambition into industry usage.

The Call Is the New Platform

AI voice is moving into the core of the network. In the latest CPaaSAA Talk, Ralph Page of Radisys and CPaaSAA's Andrew Collinson set out what that changes — and why the real contest is over who runs the conversation.

Something shifted at MWC Barcelona this year. A handful of large operators — T-Mobile, Deutsche Telekom and Rakuten among them — stood up and announced that transcription, translation and live AI were now running inside the core of the network, on ordinary calls. Deutsche Telekom's Magenta AI Call Assistant put real-time translation and admin support into everyday phone calls, on any device, with nothing to install. Rakuten, with Nokia, took its cloud-native IMS voice core live in commercial operation — the kind of programmable foundation that makes putting AI inside a call possible in the first place. "We couldn't have done this three months ago," DT's Chief Product and Digital Officer Jon Abrahamson told us at the show.

Network APIs Need Customers, Not Just Standards

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, GMS and Shabodi announced a partnership focused on helping mobile operators expose and monetize network capabilities through APIs. On the surface, that may sound like another addition to the growing list of Network API announcements flooding the telecom industry.

But after speaking with David Vigar from GMS and Suresh Patel from Shabodi during a recent CPaaS Talk, it became clear that this conversation touched something much deeper — and much more important.