The News: At Twilio’s SIGNAL 2023 Event, the company announced a series of CustomerAI capabilities centered on leveraging predictive and generative AI tools. Generative AI is poised to drive efficiencies, automation, and personalization in Twilio Engage, Flex, and Segment. More information on the CustomerAI announcements can be found on the Twilio website.
Twilio Reveals a Robust Lineup of CustomerAI-Powered Solutions
Analyst Take: CustomerAI-related announcements were rolling out fast and furious at Twilio’s SIGNAL 2023 event. The company is doubling down on its AI efforts, expanding capabilities across its product offerings. By layering in predictive and generative AI, Twilio’s offerings will help empower companies to move towards further automation and efficiencies, while providing a more enriched, relevant, and personal experience for customers.
CustomerAI was previewed in June, with many capabilities now generally available and others rolling out into early 2024. This layer of CustomerAI, based around the engagement flywheel that Twilio uses to demonstrate the interconnectedness and benefits of its solutions, helps to turn fragmented data into activation and more relevant, precise engagements with customers.
There were a lot of announcements at the event, and it merits digging into a few of the launches that are supporting a customer’s movement along the engagement flywheel.
CustomerAI Predictions
Twilio’s CustomerAI Predictions uses predictive AI to be proactive, rather than reactive and allows users to create targeted audiences out of the box, start customer journeys and personalize experiences across channels. Predictions can be made around a customer’s lifetime value, chance of purchase or churn, or likelihood to perform any other event. There is also the ability to show the quality of the prediction.
What is novel about this introduction is the ability to run them natively within a customer’s customer data platform (CDP). This feature is now generally available and can be accessed by Segment Unify and Twilio Engage customers.
Voice Intelligence
Voice Intelligence is now available in public beta and uses a transcription and language operator tool that leverages speech recognition to better understand conversations and tease out traits from conversations such as particular preferences. Insights can be created around items such as feedback, competition, and compliance risks. Voice Intelligence uses multiple large language models (LLMs) – some internally built and some from OpenAI. Another plus for Twilio Flex and Voice customers is a feature that can redact personal information automatically, helping with regulatory compliance.
General availability is planned for early 2024.
CustomerAI Generative Email and Journeys
Available within Twilio Engage, Generative Email allows users to pare down the manual tasks involved in creating HTML by simply entering text prompts.
Another interesting addition is CustomerAI Generative Journeys, which will similarly save time by allowing journeys to be created less manually. The creation of customer journeys is such an important task to creating friction-free customer experiences, but unfortunately it is one that is laborious. Using CustomerAI Generative Journeys, users can describe a particular type of campaign they want to do, define the audience and channels they want to use, and then Twilio Engage will then automatically build the journey using generative AI in seconds.
Both Generative Email and Generative Journeys are scheduled to be available in public beta in 2024.
Segment Enhancement for B2B and Zero Copy Architecture
Twilio announced a new Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles, which will help to solve a problem many encounter, which is tying together individual relationships to others, bringing together different data sets to create a more comprehensive picture. An expanded data graph can uncover the relationships across all customer data. This can include things like real-time customer profiles and other business data such as company accounts, prescriptions, products, households, etc. Linked Profiles helps to bring it all together, which will also allow for AI models to be trained to improve recommendations and activations. This solution is due to roll out globally, starting with the general availability of Event Enrichment, in the coming months.
Zero Copy Architecture has a pilot coming soon and leans into Twilio’s partnerships with Databricks and Snowflake to help ease the process of ensuring data infrastructure is ready for AI. The system allows customers to move data from their own data warehouse or make copies of the data. Users can query it directly with a click for use, which could be segmentation, audience building, or personalization.
CustomerAI Perception Engine
This was a bit of a sneak peak, as it is in pre-release, but it is a suite of CustomerAI tools that help to more deeply personalize customer interactions over voice and messaging. Customers can use natural language understanding (NLU) to analyze every customer interaction in unstructured data. This could include account information as well as consumer preferences from text messages and call transcripts. The analysis can then be used in the building of “Golden Profiles” for customers that are the power behind improved communications and conversations. These profiles can be fed into Twilio tools including Flex, Segment CDP, and Engage.
According to Twilio, LLMs, automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), speech-to-text transcriptions (STT), and language operators will power the tool. Twilio is starting with voice calls (in a public beta now) and will be adding messaging at the beginning of 2024.
Generative AI Capabilities for Twilio Flex and Flex Unify
CustomerAI Agent Assist will be able to support busy and often-overworked contact center agents by generating recommendations and next best actions. AI-powered post-call summarizations will also be able to take that mundane task out of an agent’s workload. This feature is expected to be available in private beta in the coming months.
Twilio also gave some information on Flex Unify, which is going to be in a public beta soon. At the keynote and analyst sessions, CEO, Jeff Lawson talked about how Twilio’s products help “put the real in real time.” Flex Unify will be a good illustration of this capability as it brings the data from Segment to agents in real time, lessening frustrations for agents while delivering a more personal and relevant interaction. Flex Unify will have CustomerAI integrated, supporting deep personalization as well as appropriate routing and recommendations.
Twilio also announced the general availability of Verify Fraud Guard, and Virtual Agent with Google Dialogflow CX, and introduced a Traffic Optimization Engine.
In an analyst session, Elena Donio, President, Twilio Data & Applications, summed it up well by saying, “A lot of data isn’t really being used to delight customers because companies are simply missing the signals. We are at a real moment with AI, with great acceleration and Twilio is set apart as we have the data, and it underpins everything Twilio does.”
The set of solutions that Twilio is rolling out will provide a lot of that fuel for acceleration, and promises benefit to both the companies using them and the customers they serve.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in technology research and marketing; prior to her current role, she was a Research Analyst at Omdia, authoring market and ecosystem reports on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and User Interface technologies. Sherril was previously Manager of Market Research at Intrado Life and Safety, providing competitive analysis and intelligence, business development support, and analyst relations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
