Twilio Partners with Microsoft to Advance Conversational AI and Unveils New Customer Engagement Platform

Twilio Partners With Microsoft To Advance Conversational AI | AIM

Twilio, the leading customer engagement platform, announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft on Thursday to accelerate the adoption of conversational AI solutions across businesses worldwide. The collaboration, revealed at the Twilio SIGNAL conference, promises to empower more than 10 million Twilio developers alongside thousands of Microsoft-managed customers to build the future of AI-driven customer interactions. Conversational AI allows computers to understand and respond to human interactions naturally using advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, transforming how companies engage with customers. However, businesses have often faced hurdles, including limited accuracy due to incomplete data and challenges in scaling pilot projects because of legacy system constraints. The Twilio-Microsoft partnership leverages Twilio's expertise in communications and AI with Microsoft Azure AI's enterprise-grade, secure, and global infrastructure to address these challenges and drive wider conversational AI adoption across industries. "Every interaction between a business and its customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI," said Inbal Shani, chief product officer at Twilio. They plan to develop AI-powered multi-channel agents, tools to assist live customer service agents, and multi-modal solutions that seamlessly blend voice and text communications. These innovations, built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive engagement platform, aim to transform digital customer interactions. "Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI, including AI agents, across their organisation with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance," said Asha Sharma, corporate vice president of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. "Combined with Twilio's communications and data capabilities, this partnership creates a vital connection between businesses and their customers." Alongside the partnership announcement, Twilio revealed new conversational AI innovations, including ConversationRelay -- enabling developers to build natural voice AI agents with cutting-edge speech recognition and expressive voices -- and Conversational Intelligence, which converts calls and messages into actionable data to improve customer service.

Twilio doubles down on AI-powered customer engagement. Here's what's new

Twilio announced what's pitched as a next-generation Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) at its SIGNAL conference, including a series of updates aimed at re-shaping customer engagement through AI and real-time data. There are updates to the Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), lots of communication channel updates, new conversational AI tools, and intelligent compliance solutions in these announcements.Let's break things down. Khozema Shipchandler, Twilio's CEO, says that we are "facing the end of customer experience as we know it" and that it's time for a "new era for customer engagement." He's right. Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, is driving businesses to change the way they work and how they engage with customers. But at the same time, most still struggle with dis-connected systems and data silos, so all that AI they are trying to leverage isn't working the way they expect: To be successful, every business needs the right infrastructure: communications channels to connect with customers, contextual data to understand them, and the ability to accelerate it all with AI in a way that's powerful, flexible, and trustworthy. Twilio is building a platform that works across existing tech stacks and is an infrastructure layer for the entire customer journey. The goal is to seamlessly bring together all customer communication channels, contextual data, and intelligent automation with the intent of delivering more personalized, contextual customer experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Twilio is incorporating AI into its platform in three ways: With the Microsoft partnership, Twilio plans to build conversational AI solutions, including multi-channel agents that will automate and improve customer engagement, and AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center. Conversational AI is a large component of Twilio's AI approach. This is where machines engage in human conversations in a way that mimics a natural dialogue with the customer. It uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning (ML) to analyze, process, and understand human voice and text input and deliver the approach responses, again through AI voice and text. One new update in this area is ConversationRelay. This capability makes it easier for developers to create and deploy human-like voice agents, even supporting interruption handling, advanced speech recognition, and expressive voices. It also integrates with speech-to-text and text-to-speech partners, including ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Google, and Amazon. Brands can also bring their own LLMs to work with. Also new is Conversation Intelligence. Formerly called Voice Intelligence, brands can use it to analyze customer interactions across communication channels, including voice, SMS, MMS, Facebook Messenger, and website chat. Conversation Intelligence help identify sentiment, intent, and points of friction, which downstream systems can use to deliver better messaging and experiences. It also works with ConversationRelay to improve virtual agents continuously in real-time. A few examples Twilio provided that show the value of ConversationRelay and Conversation Intelligence together: However, Conversation Intelligence does even more because it analyzes conversations across communication channels. For example, it enables contact center agents to pick up a conversation, no matter where it is left off, with full context. It can also help Customer Experience teams to measure the effectiveness of their engagement strategies. There are a number of functions in the Conversation Intelligence application, including AI-powered transcriptions and language analysis. Now, there are also LLM-powered customer operators that allow you to define custom use cases through Natural Language prompting. You simply describe what you want to understand from customer interactions, and the AI will do the work. Take advantage of the information by programmatically sending the results to downstream applications. Twilio also open-sourced six AI language operators, including hallucination detection, virtual agent task completion, human escalation request, and customer emotion tagging, which you can use inside Conversation Intelligence to understand even more about customer interactions and deal with them appropriately. The Journeys architecture inside Twilio Engage has been completely re-designed, both on the front and backend. Some new capabilities are generally available, while others are out in public beta. First, there are Event Triggered Journeys, which fire when certain events occur. For example, abandoned shopping carts, forms, or onboarding flows. When these journeys happen, the Segment CDP will remember details about the event, such as items in the shopping cart or form data, and carry that information along the journey to drive better engagement. Another new feature is Rich Contextual Payloads, which combine triggered event information with warehouse data and the Segment CDP customer profile. This data is made available in a user-friendly interface and can be sent to messaging tools for activation. Finally, it's now easy to visualize what's happening in a journey, including a clear audit trail of the activity that happens. There were more updates to Twilio CEP than what I have covered here. Every update and new feature is aimed at aligning and improving all customer communications in a way that is AI-enabled, secure, and scalable. Everything announced falls in line with what Twilio's Chief Product Officer, Inbal Shani, talked about a few months ago, when she said: I think that's the biggest kind of difference in terms of perspective on AI; AI is a very useful tool. It's a very powerful tool. And you need to know how to use these tools to solve problems. But it's not a magic solution for everything, and it's not a magical solution that is going to solve everything. So, knowing how to use it in a smart way to really focus on the customer. If it's better user experience, if it's better productivity, if it's creating shorter time to value because of automation, then you have a successful AI strategy. It's easy for tech vendors to slap generative AI on top of their platforms and solutions. But there's no real benefit in that for the vendor or the customer. Fortunately, it's getting easier to integrate gen AI into tech platforms, making it a key component of a platform. What's important, though, is that they use it in service of the customer. When you step back and look at what Twilio is doing, you can see the end goal is to empower developers (which Twilio refers to as "builders") to do just that.

Twilio unveils AI-powered engagement platform and partners with Microsoft at SIGNAL 2025 - SiliconANGLE

Twilio unveils AI-powered engagement platform and partners with Microsoft at SIGNAL 2025 Communication tool provider Twilio Inc. today announced updates at its annual SIGNAL 2025 conference, including a next-generation customer engagement platform built for an artificial intelligence and data-driven future, along with a new strategic partnership with Microsoft Corp. to advance conversational AI. Leading the list of announcements was a next-generation platform designed to unify communications, data and AI into a single, flexible infrastructure for customer engagement. The platform integrates omnichannel communication tools, including voice, SMS, email, video and over-the top, with contextual data from Twilio's Segment Customer Data Platform and a growing portfolio of native AI capabilities. The enhancements unveiled by Twilio span three core areas -- conversational AI, compliance and personalization. The updates are designed to help businesses deliver more intelligent, compliant and tailored customer engagement at scale. In conversational AI, Twilio today launched ConversationRelay, a tool that allows developers to build voice agents using their choice of large language models. The service includes features such as real-time streaming, advanced speech recognition, interruption handling and human-like voice rendering. Conversational Intelligence is now generally available for voice and entered private beta for messaging, allowing companies to turn conversations into structured insights. On the compliance front, Twilio introduced a new Compliance Toolkit, now in public beta, to help businesses manage requirements such as the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act more easily. The company also announced plans to make RCS messaging and WhatsApp Business Calling generally available later this year. For personalization and insights, Twilio updated its Segment Customer Data Platform with a redesigned Journeys architecture that now supports event-triggered workflows and richer contextual payloads. The improvements are complemented with new integrations for SMS and SendGrid, as well as new partnerships with Amplitude Inc. and Attribution App. Twilio is also expanding data residency options in the EU for email and SMS, further strengthening its global compliance capabilities. Along with product updates, Twilio announced a new strategic partnership with Microsoft to jointly develop and deploy conversational AI experiences at scale. Under the partnership, Twilio will integrate its engagement platform with Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry to power AI-driven communications, including multi-channel AI agents, advanced contact center assistants via Twilio Agent Copilot and multi-modal customer interaction tools. The collaboration brings together Twilio's strengths in communications and customer data with Microsoft's enterprise-grade AI infrastructure with an aim to help businesses overcome legacy integration challenges and accelerate the adoption of intelligent, scalable customer engagement solutions. "Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI, including AI agents, across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency and simplify compliance," said Asha Sharma, corporate vice president of the Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. "Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities - the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers."

Twilio Announces Multi-Year Strategic Partnership with Microsoft to Accelerate Conversational AI Initiatives

Twilio to develop conversational AI solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's customer engagement platform Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives realtime, personalized experiences for today's leading brands, today announced at Twilio SIGNAL a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers to build the future of conversational AI and helps deliver on Twilio's vision: ensuring that every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing. Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text. Businesses building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have run into a number of challenges -- from lack of precision due to incomplete data, to difficulty scaling beyond successful pilot programs due to legacy systems integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio's expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI's safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure uniquely help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise. "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," said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. "Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers." The two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including: Capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement; AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and Multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers. "Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance," said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. "Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities - the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers." Conversational AI at Twilio Twilio's Conversational AI solutions provide model flexibility, streamlined options for businesses to augment capabilities at their own speed, and native integrations to the leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions. In addition to the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announced numerous conversational AI enhancements and innovations today at Twilio SIGNAL for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer care and sales. Notable innovations include: ConversationRelay (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and with less overhead. Conversational Intelligence (General Availability for Voice and Private Beta for Messaging): An expansion of Twilio's Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights that improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, at scale. About Twilio Today's leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), visit: www.twilio.com.