At the Fall ’25 vCon Conference in Washington, D.C., Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, met with Mike Onslow, CTO of Clarity Voice, to discuss the company’s hands-on work with vCons, the rise of AI-driven communications, and the transformative potential of standardizing conversational data across platforms.

Onslow began by outlining Clarity Voice’s 20-year journey as a communications provider serving small and very small businesses with voice, video, messaging, and increasingly, AI-powered tools. “When the customer wins, we win,” he notes, highlighting a culture centered on customer success across specialized business verticals.

A major focus of the discussion was vCon, the emerging standard for representing conversations—described by Onslow as “a PDF for your conversations.” By standardizing call, message, and AI-generated analysis into a single interoperable format, vCons allow organizations to search, index, process, and share conversational data across platforms without reinventing the wheel. “Thomas calls vCons robot food,” Onslow says, noting that large AI models already understand the vCon structure because the specification predates ChatGPT.

Onslow shared lessons from Clarity Voice’s year-long practical deployment of vCons, including the need for strong data engineering and the importance of keeping raw recordings and raw vCons for future reprocessing as AI models evolve. He also emphasized the value of partnering with experts such as vConic and co-creator Thomas Howe to accelerate implementation, rather than tackling the open-source standard alone.

One of Onslow’s standout contributions at the event was his talk on using vCons for code review analysis. By transforming developer conversations inside pull requests into vCons, Clarity Voice built tools to detect burnout signals, identify subject-matter experts, and surface hidden collaboration patterns. The approach highlights the broader potential of vCons well beyond traditional UCaaS ecosystems—spanning healthcare, marketing, customer support, and any environment where interactions can be enriched with contextual data.

Reflecting on the week’s sessions, Onslow emphasized the value of the community emerging around vCon. “This community is the huge value,” he says. “We’re figuring out what doesn’t work and what does work—together.” He encourages newcomers to engage with the vCon Foundation to gain a smoother on-ramp into the technology and its ecosystem.

To learn more about Clarity Voice and its work with AI-powered communications and vCons, visit https://clarityvoice.com/.