Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

At SIGNAL 2023, Twilio, the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, announced CustomerAI^[1] solutions that will unlock the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for hundreds of thousands of businesses. New predictive and generative AI tools, along with CDP innovations that underpin powerful AI use cases, are among the launches.

“The tectonic shift in technology that we’ve seen this past year rivals the scale and magnitude of the invention of the Internet. AI has truly captured the hearts and minds of builders across the globe,” said Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio. “I believe the real value unlock for AI will be pairing large language models with first party data sets – which is where Twilio is most differentiated. With CustomerAI, artificial intelligence becomes customer-aware, empowering businesses to drive data-driven personal interactions at every touchpoint.”

“Today we are announcing a slate of new CustomerAI capabilities that make AI more accessible, powering dynamic customer engagement that adapts to every individual customer. Getting smarter and more tailored all the time, every interaction creates new data and signals, and every new signal then cycles back around to inform the next AI-powered communication,” said Kathryn Murphy, SVP of Product at Twilio. “This flywheel creates precise 1:1 personalization that ensures each unique customer is taken care of, in turn accelerating competitive advantage and business results for brands by boosting customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.”

With CustomerAI, brands can expand their perception of customer data, activate it more extensively, and be better informed by a deeper understanding. SIGNAL 2023 announcements include:

Twilio Launches CustomerAI Predictions and Voice Intelligence to Drive Deeper Understanding of Customers with Predictive AI and Insights

In today’s competitive environment, marketers need new ways to attract, convert, and retain high-value customers. AI and machine learning (ML) models can help anticipate and act on future customer behavior, but effective, complex models require real-time data and data science expertise. With CustomerAI Predictions^[2], Twilio is putting the power of predictive AI at marketers’ fingertips. Without having to tap technical teams, marketers can now create hyper-targeted audiences out-of-the-box, trigger customer journeys, and personalize multichannel experiences based on a customer’s lifetime value (LTV), likelihood to purchase or churn, or any other event tracked in Segment. This is powered by unified, real-time data in Segment, critical to training high-quality AI models. Brands like Box are using Predictions to save time, optimize campaign performance, and unlock revenue opportunities.

Voice continues to be a critical customer service channel, with call volumes rising^[3]. Historically, companies have struggled to learn from call content because voice data is unstructured. Voice Intelligence^[4] changes this, using a transcription and language operator tool that deploys conversational speech recognition to intelligently extract insights. Using Natural Language Understanding (NLU), it reports on trends like common feedback, competitive insights, and compliance risks. Twilio Flex and Voice customers can also manage regulatory requirements with automated personal information (PII) redaction. One organization in the beta reported lead attribution management margins improved by 21% due to streamlined processes and human error reduction. Brands like Spoke Phone are already putting Voice Intelligence to work.

Twilio is also announcing the general availability of its CustomerAI Virtual Agent with Google Dialogflow CX native Voice integration.

Twilio Announces Generative AI Tools to Help Activate Customer Data and Adaptive Engagement in Twilio Engage, Flex, and Segment

Marketers today both want and need to spend their time strategizing for growth, but can be held back by manual tasks. With generative AI soon available^[5] inside Twilio Engage and Segment, they can save precious time, boost productivity, and optimize for stronger results. For example, with the new CustomerAI Generative Email design coming to Twilio Engage, marketers will be able to enter simple text prompts that turn ideas to HTML in seconds. This builds on the AI capabilities available in Twilio Engage today, such as Smart Headlines, the Smart Image Generator, and Smart Buttons that each suggest the most conversion-worthy content to include. Meanwhile, marketers will be able to skip the manual process of architecting customer Journeys thanks to new CustomerAI Generative Journeys. Soon, marketers will be able to describe campaign type (promotional, win-back, etc.), audience definition, and which channels they want to use, and Twilio Engage will then automatically build the journey using generative AI.

Generative AI capabilities are also launching for Twilio Flex, as recently announced with Google Cloud. For example, Flex customers will be able to deploy CustomerAI Agent Assist^[6] that will generate recommendations to contact center agents with tailored “next best actions” they should take when interacting with a specific customer as well as AI-generated rapid summarizations for efficient call wrap-up. Additionally, the forthcoming GA launch of Flex Unify will natively surface Segment’s rich customer profile data to agents in real-time. With agents empowered to interact in a more personalized way, contact centers can increase customer lifetime value and boost sales conversions.

Twilio Introduces Segment B2B Edition and Zero Copy Architecture to Offer a Composable, AI-Ready Customer Data Platform (CDP) that Enhances Businesses’ Perception of Customers

As AI continues to rise in prominence, marketing and product innovators are moving beyond generic personalization based on demographics or location. But to achieve excellent personalization, companies need a clean and consistent data foundation. Twilio’s new Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles^[7] will allow businesses to establish relationships across all their customer data in an expanded data graph. Segment has always brought data together in unified profiles, but, in addition to real-time consumer profiles, many organizations have business data sets (containing information like company accounts, subscriptions, products, households, and more) sitting in their data warehouse. Now, using Linked Profiles, companies can build a graph of relationships linking customer events, experiences, and profiles with these additional data sets. With a better line of sight across data, graphed to each customer, companies can train AI models, build advanced segmentation, and power state-of-the-art personalized recommendations and activations across channels.

Twilio is also introducing Zero Copy Architecture^[8] to help businesses ensure their data infrastructure is AI-ready. In partnership with Databricks, the Data and AI company, and Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, the new capabilities will allow customers to push down query processing to the data warehouse or data platform directly, eliminating the need for data copying and additional ETL (“Extract-Transform-Load”) jobs, avoiding redundancy, and resulting in more timely, secure, and accurate insights. It also reduces the need to build and maintain data pipelines. Extending Twilio’s CDP, Zero Copy offers a new pathway for data ingestion and access. For AI models built in the data warehouse, Zero Copy “Data Sharing” technology will enable easier activation in downstream applications. Lastly, Twilio Engage and Twilio Flex customers will be able to onboard customer data into these applications more quickly and easily.

As Twilio develops and launches CustomerAI tools, it is leveraging its own proprietary technology as well as working with trusted industry leaders like AWS, Google, and OpenAI that meet its privacy and data protection standards. Twilio is committed to building CustomerAI safely and responsibly, and has today published its CustomerAI Trust Principles, along with information on the rollout and availability of its AI Nutrition Facts Labels. As a part of this commitment, Twilio builds privacy and security by design into its product development lifecycle and will ensure companies have full transparency and control of the data that informs AI-powered interactions with their customers.

At SIGNAL 2023, expect to hear how businesses like Cisco, JetBlue, and WB Games are building data-driven, personalized customer experiences at scale. Special guests this year include Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and AI researcher Dr. Anima Anandkumar. Join virtually and register for free here.

Quote Sheet (Analyst, Customer & Partner Commentary)

David Wallace, Research Director, Customer Data and Analytics at IDC:

“Twilio’s CustomerAI helps customers easily understand how and where they can leverage AI to drive better outcomes and business value across every interaction. These latest advancements across predictive and generative AI provide new ways for customers to deliver hyper-personalized touchpoints at scale. In addition, the new customer data platform capabilities and strategic partnerships will enable organizations to deliver improved customer experiences using the power of AI insights from unified customer data.”

Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer at Box:

“As marketers, the holy grail is to reach your customers and prospects in a way that is meaningful, relevant and additive to them. CustomerAI Predictions has equipped Box’s marketing team with the ability to forecast customer behavior to a degree that was simply unavailable to us before. We’ve been able to explore segmenting our audience based on predictive traits like who is most likely to join us at in-person events or who is more likely to purchase, and this allows us to meet those people where they are in their customer journey. Tools like Predictions put marketers at the center of this new era of AI which is transforming how companies engage and retain their customers.”

Chris Hecht, SVP Corp Development and Partnerships at Databricks:

“We’re thrilled about the strategic Delta Sharing partnership between Twilio and Databricks to enable businesses to derive actionable insights and deliver personalized experiences at scale with Zero Copy. As the delivery of personalization and next generation customer experiences continues to be a top priority for every enterprise, the combination of the Databricks Lakehouse architecture and Twilio Segment will be a game-changer for our joint customers looking to deliver the very best in real-time, one-to-one experiences, powered by AI. We’re looking forward to hearing more on this topic as our respective CEOs Ali Ghodsi and Jeff Lawson take the stage together at SIGNAL today.”

Craig Lisowski, Head of Data, Information Systems & Trust at Nextdoor:

“Nextdoor is excited to see the Databricks and Twilio Segment partnership. Together, they are paving the way for smarter insights and a deeper understanding of data. Real time data and historic data are key to helping Nextdoor create effective marketing programs for both neighbors and businesses with a high level of personalization.”

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements about the future availability of AI-related capabilities, functionality and features within Twilio products, including Flex, Segment, Unify, and Engage, and potential benefits to customers.

You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, the outcome of which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including those more fully described in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

^[1] Previewed in June, CustomerAI is a powerful technology layer that combines Twilio’s customer engagement platform data and large language models (LLMs) to create AI capabilities that unlock true customer relationships for brands.

^[2] Predictions is generally available (GA) and accessible to Segment Unify and Twilio Engage customers, globally, starting today.

^[3] 61% of surveyed customer care leaders report a growth in total calls. 58% of care leaders expect call volumes to increase even further over the next 18 months. (McKinsey’s 2022 State of Customer Care Survey).

^[4] Voice Intelligence is available globally in public beta (GA is scheduled for 2024).

^[5] Generative Email Design and Generative Journeys are scheduled to be available in public beta in 2024.

^[6] GenAI Agent Assist in Flex is scheduled to be available globally in private beta in the coming months.

^[7] Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles is scheduled to roll out globally (starting with the GA of Event Enrichment) in the coming months.

^[8] The Zero Copy Architecture pilot is scheduled to be available globally in the coming months.

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