Every month, CPaaSAA members meet in the AI & Data Working Group — a member-only session where practitioners compare notes on what’s actually happening in AI, not what the press releases say. No vendors pitching from the outside, no recycled conference takes. Here’s a taste of the July session.
Who audits the agents? The session opened with the discovery that a popular AI coding CLI has been quietly uploading full repositories — commit histories and credential files included — while showing users only kilobytes of visible prompt traffic, even with privacy settings on. The uncomfortable takeaway: almost nobody is doing real due diligence on what these tools do in the background. The structural answer is forming at the IETF, where a proposed AUDIT working group stacks remote attestation, workload identity, vCon as the record of what agent and human actually did, and supply-chain transparency ledgers. Attestation is about to move from standards arcana to commercial infrastructure — and it lands squarely on the Trust agenda.
Export controls at AI speed Frontier model access is now openly geopolitical, and China is signaling reciprocal controls while shipping open models approaching frontier capability at a fraction of the cost and compute. The group’s sharpest observation: social media regulation arrived 15 years late; AI regulation arrived almost immediately. Practical response discussed in the room: test harness/model separation now to avoid lock-in.
Speech is moving to the edge Ahmed Taya from Speechmatics presented — and it was overdue. Speechmatics has been a CPaaSAA member for a while, they build genuinely impressive technology, and frankly they don’t make nearly enough noise about it. Case in point: their on-device model has been running inside Adobe Premiere for years under NDA, transcribing an hour of audio locally in under a minute.
His core argument: the cloud vs. on-prem debate shares a hidden assumption — GPU infrastructure exists somewhere in the chain. On-device speech removes that assumption entirely, delivering within 5% of cloud accuracy on laptops, Jetson boards, even a Raspberry Pi.
The commercial logic: AI voice calls cost 30–50 cents an hour today, nearly all of it inference. Edge speech is projected at $165B by 2035 — three times the conversational AI market. Use cases already live: medical scribes in hospitals with unreliable connectivity, broadcast captioning on a plug-in card, handheld translators, in-vehicle voice with health biomarkers. And in the Middle East, sovereign AI programs are pulling GPUs into the region while data-in-country stays non-negotiable — a market opening fast for anyone with the right deployment model.
The line that stuck: the technology has never been the problem — the problem is who deploys it at scale. Model providers need channel partners. That’s an Intelligent Engagement-shaped opportunity.
This is what membership looks like Working groups like this are where CPaaSAA members get ahead of the market — candid, practitioner-level, and months before it shows up in anyone’s keynote. If that’s a room you should be in: cpaasaa.com/membership-options.
My lifetime in IT and telecoms has been dedicated to innovation, building bridges and creating change. From the early days of cloud communications to working with operators on innovations and business development, and currently emphasizing APIs, CPaaS/CX and AI, my journey has been one of continuous evolution.
As founding partner at CPaaS Acceleration Alliance and The Next Cloud I'm privileged to help global telcos and techcos thrive in a fast changing world - through events, community building, strategy and global business development. I thrive on challenges and change, strategizing in cloud communications, and bringing people together for mutual success. Travel and continuous learning are my passions.
I believe the global communications industry is pivoting to prioritize customer experience and impactful solutions over mere technology and platforms, and we can tackle societal challenges by merging the strengths of corporates and innovators within new ecosystems.
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