Jeff Pulver: vCon Moves from Conversation Capture to a Trust Layer for the AI Era, Podcast

“We’re living in the agentic age of voice.” In this Technology Reseller News podcast, Jeff Pulver of the vCon Foundation discusses the upcoming fall VON+ events in Atlanta and why he believes voice is entering a new renaissance driven by AI, identity and trusted conversations. The three-day program begins October 13 with two parallel events: the 2026 vCon Summit and Voice AI Live. The vCon Summit will focus on virtualized conversations, implementations and emerging standards, while Voice AI Live will feature demonstrations from voice AI platforms. The following two days will bring together communications veterans, AI startups, network operators and other industry leaders for VON+, focused on the future of voice and conversations. Pulver argues that the industry must move beyond least-cost routing toward what he calls “purple routing”—prioritizing low latency, high-quality audio, security, identity and trusted paths rather than simply choosing the cheapest route. “In the age of AI, what matters is the lowest-latency signal, the most secure known route, high-quality voice and identity,” Pulver says. vCon as the conversation record Pulver also sees vCon becoming a foundational component of AI-era communications. A vCon can capture not only a voice call but also the broader conversation across channels—text, messaging, transcripts, documents and other interactions—and preserve the associated metadata and context. “vCons can turn conversations into an asset,” Pulver says. That capability can support compliance, portability and AI memory while helping organizations avoid locking conversation history into individual communications platforms. Pulver also points to future use cases involving agent-to-agent communications and capturing the reasoning and actions of agentic AI systems. The larger opportunity, he says, is for communications companies to rethink what voice becomes when AI is built into the experience rather than simply layered onto legacy telecom. “We need to be thinking for the future today,” Pulver says. “If we don’t, somebody new is going to come in and take the revenue.” The VON+ fall events take place October 13–15 in Sandy Springs, Atlanta. Visit Pulver.com, VONevolution.com or TheVConFoundation.com to learn more.