At the final day of the Crexendo UGM, Thomas McCarthy-Howe, Chief Technology Officer at VCONIC, spoke with Technology Reseller News Publisher Doug Green about how VCONIC is redefining communications data with the introduction of the vCon — a new IETF-standard file format that turns conversations into actionable, privacy-protected digital assets.

“A vCon makes a conversation a first-class citizen,” McCarthy-Howe explained. “It contains everything that conversation means — who said it, who consented to it, and the context around it — so AI can learn from it responsibly.”

Unlike traditional recordings, a vCon combines audio, video, participants, consent, and metadata into a single secure container. This enables service providers, enterprises, and MSPs to use conversations for analytics, automation, and AI training while staying compliant with data privacy laws like GDPR and U.S. consumer-protection standards.

McCarthy-Howe emphasized that this new format also delivers a major business advantage: it transforms ordinary SIP trunks into “smart trunks.” Because each vCon is a unique, regulated record, it becomes a differentiating asset — one that’s difficult for competitors to replicate or for customers to migrate away from. “Once a service provider starts hosting conversations as vCons, they own a unique and irreplaceable data relationship with their customers,” he noted.

Adoption is growing quickly. At this year’s event, McCarthy-Howe said roughly one-fifth of attendees were already familiar with vCons and eager to learn how to integrate them. Use cases span UCaaS, contact centers, healthcare, finance, and even industrial settings — anywhere valuable insights are locked inside spoken interactions. “We’re helping the industry move from dumb pipes to smart trunks,” he said. “vCons let the good guys do the right thing — and prove it.”

VCONIC’s technology is already deployed in production environments, processing over 30 million calls per month and supporting hundreds of thousands of active conversations. The company is now scaling partnerships with service providers, helping them turn customer conversations into high-value, AI-ready data streams.

To learn more about the vCon standard and how VCONIC is enabling compliant AI-driven communications, visit vconic.com.