The Trusted Telecom Association is a not-for-profit organization established to advance trusted communications in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

The telecommunications industry is approaching a pivotal moment similar to those that accompanied the introduction of enhanced services decades ago. The opportunity is clear, but the standards, architectures, and trust frameworks necessary to support widespread adoption have yet to be established.

In 1979, the communications industry faced a challenge. People needed a way to communicate when no one was available to answer the telephone. The industry came together to create the Voicemail Association, and a new global communications medium was born.

Today we face a different challenge.

For generations, when the telephone rang, people generally knew who was calling. That assumption no longer holds true. Consumers are now inundated with unwanted calls, spoofed identities, fraudulent communications, and increasingly sophisticated scams. Caller ID, analytics, and blocking technologies have helped, but they have not restored trust. Scammers simply change identities and continue calling.

Artificial Intelligence will dramatically accelerate this problem. AI is creating a world in which communications may be initiated by humans, enterprises, software agents, and autonomous AI systems. The volume, speed, and sophistication of communications will increase by orders of magnitude.

Before this new communications era can achieve its full potential, the world must establish a framework of trust.

The purpose of the Trusted Telecom Association is to bring together the organizations that will define that framework. Communications systems need reliable methods to identify, locate, authorize, authenticate, and trust the parties involved in every interaction.

The Association seeks to establish a global trust framework that enables secure and trusted communications across voice, email, text, messaging, video, and future AI-driven channels.

Its objective is to foster industry cooperation around the principle that communications should be authorized and authenticated before they occur, rather than analyzed after the fact. By establishing trusted communications at the point of initiation, the industry can restore confidence in digital interactions and create the foundation for safe AI-to-human and AI-to-AI communications.

The Association will provide a forum where service providers, enterprises, technology vendors, AI companies, standards organizations, and government agencies can work together to develop the policies, standards, and architectures required to restore trust to global communications.

The mission is simple:

Restore trust before communication begins!