The Scam Stops Here: How ICA Is Restoring Trust in Global Communications, Podcast

“This isn’t just tech—it’s protection for your mother, your daughter, your entire community. And no one else is doing it like this.” — Michael Gough, Intelligent Communication Assistant (ICA)

Imagine a world where every ring, ping, or notification is trusted—and no one wastes time dodging robocalls or deleting spam. That’s the world ICA (pronounced “Ikah”) is building. In a recent Technology Reseller News podcast, Michael Gough, Sales and Marketing Leader at ICA, previewed the company’s upcoming live demo at the Cloud Communications Alliance’s Cloud Connections Conference, taking place April 14–16 in St. Petersburg.

ICA will demonstrate what Gough calls the first true AI platform in telecommunications—a system designed to make digital deception impossible, without violating privacy laws, introducing new FCC rules, or requiring user intervention.

“ICA restores an era when users could communicate without interruption from unwanted calls, texts, emails, or videos,” said Gough.

At its core, ICA isn’t just another call filter or branded caller ID feature. It’s a patented behavioral AI engine that uses graph neural networks to assess communication attempts across voice, SMS, email, and social media. It then blocks, redirects, or engages the sender—sometimes with a convincing digital assistant that wastes scammer time and discourages future attempts.

In a live demo, Gough showed how ICA rerouted a scammer to an intelligent voice assistant that feigned interest, dragging the call out until it became financially unviable for the spammer to continue.

Another demo illustrated ICA’s intelligence in recognizing legitimate contacts—even scanning social graphs to validate the relationship between caller and recipient, proving its capability in real-time communication vetting.

The need is massive:

• 29% of U.S. cellular calls in Q4 2024 were spam. Over 4.7 million robocalls were placed in January 2025 alone.
• In February 2025, Americans received 19.2 billion spam texts.
• Every day, there are 3.4 billion phishing emails and 160 billion spam emails—46% of all email traffic.

While STIR/SHAKEN and branded calling offer some protection, they are limited. Branded calling works only on select mobile devices and is vulnerable to impersonation. STIR/SHAKEN doesn’t always function when calls cross from TDM to IP networks. And neither applies to email, SMS, or social media.

“Branded calling works on mobile, and STIR/SHAKEN only works part of the time. ICA enhances both—and works across all platforms,” explained Gough.

Unlike point solutions, ICA is designed to sit across communication ecosystems. It integrates with carrier and platform infrastructure through APIs, simplifying global deployments. Built on open standards from the Camara project and supported by the ADURA API aggregation framework, ICA offers a single integration point for global reach.

Whether deployed as a platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service, ICA provides a crawl-walk-run path that helps carriers begin protecting their networks immediately. For a limited number of partners participating at Cloud Connections, ICA is offering full implementation at no cost.

“We’re offering a handful of select platforms a chance to deploy ICA free of charge—and we’ll even help with implementation,” said Gough.

What sets ICA apart is not just detection, but disruption. By making scams financially pointless—tying up scammer resources and blocking unwanted traffic before it hits users—ICA dismantles the economic model that makes robocalling, smishing, and phishing profitable.

“With ICA, we’re not just enhancing telecom security,” said Gough. “We’re creating a future where communication is smarter, safer, and free from disruption.”

To see ICA in action, catch their live demo on April 15 at the Cloud Connections Conference in St. Petersburg. Visit myica.ai to learn more.

#AI #TelecomSecurity #RobocallPrevention #SpamBlocking #CommunicationTrust #CCA2025 #CloudConnections #BrandedCalling #STIRSHAKEN #DigitalAssistantAI #APIIntegration #TechForGood