Businesses strive to raise the bar for customer experience (CX) as a way to boost customer loyalty and gain a strong competitive advantage. The emergence of generative AI and agentic AI is opening up new ways to enhance CX by enabling faster resolution and personalised experiences. Many vendors have introduced platforms to allow enterprises to adopt AI more rapidly through a simplified user interface. Twilio is one of the vendors that has moved in this direction. The company started as a provider of communications platform as a service (CPaaS) but it has moved beyond just communications applications programming interfaces (APIs). It is now a customer engagement platform provider offering communications APIs, contact centre (Twilio Flex), customer data management (Segment), and conversational AI. Twilio’s product development focuses on three key themes: Trusted, Simple, and Smart. The company has demonstrated these themes through product announcements and showcased at its SIGNAL events globally.
Firstly, trust is increasingly important due to the rising fraud impacting consumers. Twilio has introduced various capabilities, including Silent Network Authentication and FIDO-certified passkey as part of its Verify, a user verification product. The company is also promoting the use of branded communications, which has shown to achieve consumer trust and greater willingness to engage with brands. Twilio has introduced branded calling, RCS for branded messaging, Whatsapp Business Calling, and WebRTC for browser.
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The second theme is about simplifying developer experience. With its Segment (customer data platform) solution, Twilio enables businesses to leverage their data more effectively for gaining customer insights and taking actions. An example is the recent introduction of Event Triggered Journey, which allows the creation of automated marketing workflows to support personalised customer journeys. This can enable a responsive approach for real-time use cases, such as cart abandonment, onboarding flows, and trial-to-paid account journeys. By taking actions to promptly address issues a customer is facing can improve the chance of having a successful transaction, and a happy customer.
The third theme on ‘smart’ is about leveraging AI for enhancing customer engagement. Twilio announced two conversational AI updates in May 2025. The first is ‘Conversational Intelligence’, which analyses voice calls and text-based conversations and converting them into structured data and insights. This is useful for understanding sentiments, spotting compliance risks, and identifying churn risks. The other AI capability is ‘ConversationRelay’, which enables developers to create voice AI agents using their preferred LLM and integrate with customer data. Twilio is leveraging speech recognition technology and interrupt handling to enable human-like voice agents.
Today, many businesses use Twilio to enhance customer engagement. At the Twilio SIGNAL Sydney event, for example, Twilio customers spoke about their success with Twilio solutions. Crypto.com reduced onboarding times from hours to minutes, Lendi Group (a mortgage FinTech company) highlighted the use of AI agents to engage customers after hours, and Philippines Airlines was exploring Twilio Segment and Twilio Flex to enable personalised customer experiences.
The company is tackling another major challenge around AI security, through the recent acquisition of Stytch, an identity platform for AI agents. AI agent authentication becomes crucial as more agents are deployed and given access to data and systems. AI agents will also collaborate autonomously through protocols such as Model Context Protocol, which can create security risks without an effective identity framework.
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By GlobalDataIt has come a long way from legacy chatbots to GenAI-powered voice agents, and Twilio is not alone in pursuing AI-powered CX solutions. The market is a long way off from providing quantifiable feedback from customers. Technology vendors enabling customer engagement (for example: Genesys, Salesforce, and Zendesk) have developed AI capabilities including voice AI agents. The collective efforts and competition within the industry will help to drive awareness and adoption. But it is crucial to get the basics right around data management, security, and cost of deploying AI.
