The vCon + SCITT Primer (For Those Not Yet Paying Attention)

Why Structured Memory and Verifiable Trust Matter in the Age of AI

For decades, I’ve watched how open standards quietly changed the world.

You may not think about protocols like SMTP, SIP, or HTTP on a daily basis—but they power nearly every email, voice call, and web session in your life. These weren’t corporate products. They weren’t locked behind walled gardens. They were public infrastructure, born at the IETF, designed to solve problems that mattered at scale.

Today, we’re building something just as foundational—but for the AI era.

We now have tools that allow AI to talk, listen, and with vCons, even remember.

But as I’ve said before: memory alone isn’t enough.

In an age of synthetic voice, LLMs, and AI-generated summaries, what we need next is verifiable trust.

That’s where SCITT comes in.

What is a vCon?

A vCon (Virtualized Conversation) is a structured, portable, and standardized digital record of a conversation.

Think of it like the vCard for conversations—but instead of sharing contact info, you’re preserving the key elements of a conversation in a format AI systems can use. vCons can be stored, shared, and referenced across tools and platforms.

They’re currently being standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—the same organization that helped shape the modern internet.

Unlike call transcripts or raw chat logs, vCons offer:

• Structured Memory – Machine-readable, time-stamped, contextual data.
• Portability – Use across systems and vendors.
• Privacy Controls – Selective redaction, expiration, and access.
• Interoperability – Built on open standards.

In a world where AI often forgets what happened five seconds ago, vCons provide contextual continuity—so machines can remember what we said, how we said it, and what came next.

And What Is SCITT?

SCITT stands for Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency, and Trust. It’s a protocol being developed at the IETF to ensure digital assets—like vCons—can be verified.

At its core, SCITT enables:

• Integrity – Can we prove the record hasn’t been tampered with?
• Transparency – Can we verify who created it and when?
• Trust – Can we rely on this data without blind faith in a third-party platform?

SCITT uses cryptographic signatures and distributed ledgers—not centralized platforms—to make every interaction traceable, verifiable, and trustworthy.

Why the IETF Matters in This Story

The vCon and SCITT protocols aren’t corporate inventions. They’re being developed at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—the same global standards body that gave us SMTP for email, SIP for VoIP, and HTTP for the web.

These aren’t just technical achievements—they are the foundation of digital communication as we know it.

By working through the IETF, the teams behind vCons and SCITT are doing what made the internet great in the first place: creating open, interoperable infrastructure that anyone can adopt, extend, and build on—without needing to license proprietary tech.

For executives, product strategists, and platform builders, this matters.

You're not betting on a startup's roadmap or a single vendor’s API. You’re aligning with internet-grade standards that are being shaped by a community of developers, policymakers, researchers, and technologists from around the world.

That’s what gives these ideas durability—and why the timing couldn’t be better.

A Clearer Case for Open Standards

The internet didn’t take off because we hoped it would work—it scaled because we agreed on how it should work.

It wasn’t about choosing one vendor’s platform over another—it was about creating open protocols that allowed everyone to connect, reliably and securely.

VoIP became viable because of SIP, not because any one company controlled voice innovation.

Email scaled globally because of SMTP, not because inboxes were built behind closed doors.

These weren’t the only ways to build communication systems—but they were the ways that enabled trust, scale, and interoperability.

And now, as AI becomes the new interface for communication and decision-making, we need that same kind of foundation.

That’s why vCons and SCITT matter.

vCons give AI memory that’s structured, portable, and interoperable—not locked into a single vendor’s silo.

SCITT adds verifiable trust—so conversations, decisions, and actions can be audited and proven, not just logged.

Together, they form an open, standards-based layer that enables AI-powered systems to communicate, remember, and verify—across tools, across companies, and across time.

This isn’t about wishful thinking. This is about building the future on infrastructure that lasts.

Real-World Stakes

Picture this:

You have a structured record of a sensitive business conversation—captured as a vCon. That record is then used:

• To train an internal AI assistant.
• To generate a summary for legal review.
• To drive follow-up actions in your CRM.

What if someone altered that conversation? What if metadata changed? What if a regulator asks whether that conversation happened—unchanged, from the right source, on the right date?

Without SCITT, the answer is murky. With SCITT, it’s bulletproof.

What’s Next?

We’re not just building smart machines. We’re building:

• Memory (vCons)
• Trust (SCITT)
• Accountability (via open infrastructure)

In April, at the Spring '25 vCon Conference in Hyannis, we’ll show what this looks like in practice:

• Live demos of how SCITT wraps vCons with provenance metadata.
• Real-world use cases and workflows.
• Discussions with leaders shaping this next phase of AI-powered communication.

If your AI tools are going to assist in decisions that matter, they need to remember and prove what they know.

That’s why memory needs structure. And structure needs trust.

That’s why we need vCons. That’s why we need SCITT.

And if you're just now paying attention? You're not too late. You're right on time.

If this helped you think differently, please share it. Someone in your network is looking for this—and may not know where to start.