Twilio and Microsoft have entered into a multi-year partnership to accelerate the use of conversational AI in enterprise customer communication. Announced at Twilio’s SIGNAL conference, the tie-up will let developers build AI-powered tools and applications on top of Twilio’s newly refreshed customer engagement platform and Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry.
In addition, Twilio introduced a range of new tools—some designed to support conversational AI, others focused on improved compliance and trust, and a collection aimed at improving personalization.
Helping Companies With AI’s ‘Last Mile’
What do they mean when they talk about conversational AI? They’re referring to technologies like chatbots and virtual agents that use natural language processing and machine learning to chat with users in a human-like way. They can analyze, interpret, and respond through voice and text. This integration allows organizations to build better AI solutions across multiple communication channels.
“Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI,” Inbal Shani, Twilio’s chief product officer, remarked in a statement. “Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers.”
This partnership gives Twilio greater visibility among Microsoft’s enterprise customers, exposing its developer tools to large firms looking to build extensible custom communication solutions. “The way I like to phrase it is that Twilio helps customers deliver that last mile,” Zachary Hanif, the company’s head of AI, machine learning, and data, tells me. “They might be using a lot of the conversational intelligence capabilities of Microsoft, but we help them deliver the last mile, so that way they can actually do that final stage reach out, the coordination, whatever it is they might happen to need.”
While there are platforms offering a low-/no-code way of building AI solutions, Twilio’s value proposition is to provide developers with the flexibility to make it their way without feeling constrained by a third-party platform. “Our customers have ecosystems already. They have data stores that they depend on. They have mechanisms that they use. They have preferred providers. They have an already running business, and they’re coming to Twilio to make that business better and not to mandate, ‘hey, if you want to use us, you have to completely rebuild everything that you’ve got,’” Hanif explains.
Meanwhile, Twilio’s community of over 10 million developers will gain access to Microsoft’s infrastructure and tools via its Azure AI Foundry, a platform powering enterprise AI operations, model builders, and app development. This should help them scale their AI applications and strengthen security.
“Microsoft operates at the very highest levels of scale—they have for an extended period of time. They are incredibly focused on the well-meaning continuing operation of their services, and the services of the organizations who work with and are building capabilities on top of them,” Hanif states. “Integrating with something like that is just an absolute thing that I think is both exciting and transformative for us and our capabilities.”
This isn’t Twilio’s first partnership to expand its customer engagement platform’s reach. Hanif shares that the company has done “a number of things to integrate in and work very closely with other major providers inside the AI space.”
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A Reimagined Customer Engagement Platform
Beyond the Microsoft partnership, Twilio is revealing its rebuilt customer engagement platform. It claims that all its products are now tightly integrated with each other, and developers will now have a “seamless experience.” There isn’t a new product, app, or technology being released, just an updated platform that blends its core cloud communication offerings with its customer data platform (CDP) and AI.
“By unifying communications, data, and intelligence in a single, scalable ecosystem, Twilio is delivering on the promise of personalized, trusted, and outcome-driven customer experiences,” Omdia Principal Analyst, Mila D’Antonio, says in a statement. “An experience platform designed from the ground up for an agentic world not only reinforces Twilio’s leadership; it also reflects its commitment to solving real customer challenges with innovation that’s both practical and visionary.”
While customers can still purchase Twilio’s products individually, the company now offers what Hanif describes as a “single pane of glass” experience, in that customers “can manage any of the digital communications they’re looking to manage across all of Twilio products and channels at the same time as they interact with the tool natively.”
He later states that the company has eliminated “the individual points of friction that exist between the seams” of Twilio’s products. Although he concedes that this may seem minor to the general public, it is frequently noticeable to developers. Twilio apparently has taken great pains to ensure a cohesive experience across its product suite so users can focus on understanding how everything is going rather than app jumping.
In short, Hanif declares that “we’re massively improving the integrations between [Twilio’s individual products] and creating these seamless experiences for individual developers.” And this means that tools have become easier to use, natively integrated into existing and future workflows, and are more efficient to work with.
This unified customer engagement platform is in preview right now.
Other SIGNAL Announcements
Lastly, Twilio is showing off new developer tools and updates focused on conversational AI, compliance, and personalization within its Segment offering. Here’s everything that’s being announced:
ConversationRelay
This capability is now generally available. With it, developers can build powerful natural voice AI agents using any large language model. Introduced in 2024, this service should offer everything needed to bring voice to any bot, including speech recognition, natural human-sounding text-to-speech tech, and human-like conversational pacing, orchestration, and interruption handling.
Conversational Intelligence
This is an expansion of Twilio’s Voice Intelligence, bringing voice call and text-based conversation analysis to AI agents, turning the chats into structured data and generating insights companies can use to bolster their customer service. The voice feature is generally available, while messaging is in private beta.
Access to More Communication Channels
Twilio says Rich Communication Services (RCS) and WhatsApp Business Calling will be generally available in the coming months.
Better Compliance
The company plans to release a new feature called Compliance Toolkit. When made available in a public beta in “the coming weeks,” this service allows businesses to ensure that their messaging and voice communications comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This federal law regulates the use of telephone equipment for advertising and solicitation purposes, restricting unsolicited calls, faxes, and text messages. Consumers are allowed to sue for damages or seek an injunction.
Twilio is also shoring up consumer data protection in the European Union by launching its Regional Email with Data Residency (generally available later this quarter) and Regional Messaging with Data Storage (in private beta in the second half of this year).
Segment Updates
The final reveals from SIGNAL center on the company’s Segment product. The first is that there are two new preferred partners: Amplittude and Attribution App. Below are the rest, now in public beta:
- Event-Triggered Journeys: manage the state of a customer’s cart without wasting engineering resources
- Rich Contextual Payloads: Use triggered events and warehouse data to offer better personalized experiences
- Strengthened observability and scalability: Customers are able to better visualize what’s going on in their “journey”
- Improved extensibility with native Twilio SendGrid and Twilio SMS integrations
“Today’s leading companies trust Twilio’s capabilities to drive and manage their customer engagement. The platform that we have built helps direct personalized relationships between our customers and their end users,” Hanif declares. “We’ve been enabling companies to use their communications and their data to add intelligence and security to every step of that journey, from sales and marketing growth, customer service—there’s no shortage of these use cases—we have given our customers the ability to address in flexible and programmatic ways. And that story is just continuing to get better with our increased focus on AI, on data, and enabling our customers to interact in the increasingly focused world that we find ourselves in.”
Featured Image: AI-generated image of a programmer working on a computer in a loft home at night. Overlaid is a Twilio logo. Image credit: Adobe Firefly/Twilio
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