“We used to care about the conversation only from the moment it started until it ended. Now we care about what happens after.”

That key quote from Jeff Pulver, telecom pioneer and the driving force behind the Pulver Order that helped make VoIP a legitimate telecom service, sums up a new era in enterprise communications. Speaking alongside leading industry analyst Jon Arnold, Pulver and Arnold joined Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, for a wide-ranging closing podcast at Enterprise Connect 2025.

Looking back over 25+ years of Enterprise Connect—from the PBX shows in Washington, D.C., to the Swan and Dolphin, and now the Gaylord and Las Vegas—the two industry veterans observed how much has changed. From Nortel to Microsoft, from hardware to the cloud, and now into the AI era, the show and the industry have constantly evolved.

Arnold noted the shift in enterprise communications from dedicated telecom departments to outsourced IT and cloud-first strategies. Pulver recalled the days when maintaining uptime on voice trading systems was a mission-critical function for financial firms. Today, the challenge is managing and extracting value from the metadata of conversations.

Pulver introduced listeners to the vCon, a new standard that captures the essence of a conversation—voice, text, and data—for post-call analytics, memory, and trust-building. “Living in a world where you can now leverage the metadata associated with the conversation and monetize that… that’s the future,” he said. Learn more about the Pulver Order and Jeff’s legacy in VoIP here: Celebrating 20 Years of Innovation.

AI, metadata, and automation were key themes. Arnold explained that while UCaaS providers have solved voice and video delivery, the next frontier is capturing insights from those communications to improve workflows and build knowledge across the organization. Pulver added that many chatbots today suffer from “amnesia” – they can’t remember previous interactions. The vCon standard aims to solve that, along with related standards like SKIT, which help verify the authenticity of data.

Trust and memory, said Pulver, are the building blocks of AI in communications. And while these technologies are just gaining traction, he predicted that by 2027-2030, they will redefine how businesses communicate, collaborate, and operate.

Pulver emphasized the importance of building opt-in consent and compliance into communications. Recording calls without proper consent, especially in California or the EU, could pose legal risks, and new protocols are being designed to address that.

Looking ahead, Arnold cautioned that companies that fail to invest in R&D during this critical AI transition risk falling behind. While current products are still maturing, the groundwork for the next generation of communications is being laid today.

Enterprise Connect 2025 may have wrapped, but the conversation is far from over. As Pulver put it, “This is where the future happens.”

Stay tuned for more updates from Enterprise Connect 2025 at Technology Reseller News.