Twilio SIGNAL 2025: Building customer experiences in the age of AI

Twilio SIGNAL 2025: Building customer experiences in the age of AI

At Twilio, we envision a world in which every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing. And with AI disrupting nearly every aspect of customer experience, we believe there is an opportunity to reimagine and accelerate our path to this vision. Therefore, today, at our SIGNAL conference in San Francisco, we revealed the next wave of innovation on our builder-centric, AI-first platform for customer experience. We are proud to have been joined on stage by partners and customers like Microsoft, CLEAR, Best Buy, Rocket, Vineyard Vines, and UNOS.

Today’s customers expect every interaction with a brand to feel like a meaningful conversation—one that’s thoughtful, connected, and moves the relationship forward. While brands understand the value of this, they struggle with siloed data, and incompatible tools that make true engagement difficult. Twilio’s strength in CPaaS and CDP gives us the unique foundation to bring together communications, contextual data, and AI into a single platform that powers the entire customer journey. Purpose-built for an AI-powered future, Twilio’s trusted, simple and smart platform is designed to equip every builder and brand with the tools to create deeply personalized experiences and turn every interaction into lasting business value.

Here is a look at our announcements from today.

Center of the AI Ecosystem

For businesses navigating the evolving landscape of AI, Twilio is committed to making AI trustworthy and accessible. Our approach is three-fold. First, we collaborate with top AI pioneers to natively provide AI integrations that you can pick from. Next, we infuse AI into our products to intuitively enhance workflows. Finally, we give our customers the flexibility to use best-in-class AI tools and even bring their internal LLMs, to meet their specific needs. At Twilio, we do not believe in a "walled garden" approach, we want to be the infrastructure layer enabling enterprises, startups and ISVs, to leverage their existing tech stack and get the best ROI. 

Today we are excited to announce amazing progress on many of these fronts;

Twilio’s Conversational AI brings together the power of human conversation and AI intelligence—connecting channels like Voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and web chat to create a unified customer experience. It eliminates the traditional challenges of scaling voice channels, such as complex LLM integration, speech recognition, media orchestration, and limited data insights. And with real-time data, open APIs, and capabilities designed to support compliance, Conversational AI empowers teams to move fast, stay in control, and make every conversation count. This strategy comes to life with two key offerings: ConversationRelay and Conversational Intelligence—now generally available.

1. ConversationRelay: Makes it radically simple to deploy human-like AI voice agents with features like interruption handling, advanced speech recognition, and expressive voices. ConversationRelay supports integrations with top text-to-speech and speech-to-text partners like ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Google, and Amazon, and lets you bring your own LLM. HIPAA-eligible¹ for secure voice automation in regulated industries, and now tightly integrated with Conversational Intelligence, so every interaction isn’t just understood—it’s measured and optimized. Twilio customer, Cedar, already uses ConversationRelay’s AI voice agents to handle patient billing calls securely and efficiently, leveraging advanced speech recognition and real-time analytics.
2. Conversational Intelligence: Now Generally Available for Twilio Voice and in Private Beta for Twilio Messaging channels, Conversational Intelligence lets you analyze interactions across your customer channels, quickly identifying sentiment, intent, and points of friction for each customer. These insights empower you to improve customer service, optimize sales, and enhance personalization—maximizing ROI from every interaction.      

In addition to new product announcements, we continue to collaborate with top AI pioneers to give our customers the flexibility to use best-in-class AI tools for building personalized, impactful customer experiences. Today, we announced a new multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to help make conversational AI experiences feel natural. We can’t wait to see how this partnership helps accelerate AI-powered solutions for our customers.

Beyond the partnerships with established AI pioneers, we want to continue celebrating industry-defining achievements from the startup ecosystem. Today, we’re also launching Twilio's AI Startup Searchlight Awards Program 2025, spotlighting startups using Twilio, communications, data, and AI to solve real-world challenges. We’re excited to see how these startups creatively leverage Twilio’s platform to create the next wave of meaningful customer engagement.

Powering the future of global communications 

Our communications reach is staggering: facilitating over 193 billion messages, 22 billion calls, and 2.2 trillion emails annually. This global scale forms the basis of our promise: connecting the world’s brands to customers, reliably and securely, across 180+ countries. As channels multiply and digital noise grows, Twilio has relentlessly innovated for 16 years to solve the ultimate challenge; building scalable trust at every digital touchpoint.

Today Twilio highlighted a new wave of features that facilitate trusted, simple, and smart communications globally. 

1. Branded communications build trust. From WhatsApp and voice to email and RCS, trusted branding from businesses increases engagement. The Consumer Preferences Report also shows that 75% of consumers trust messages more when branded.

   RCS Business Messaging (Rich Communication Services) is moving to general availability on Twilio Messaging later this year, Twilio eases your use of this emerging channel with automatic upgrade and failover to ensure you’re not required to integrate and orchestrate across new APIs. Now live in 19 countries, RCS offers richer, branded customer experiences—including cards, quick replies, and verified trust markers right in consumers native messaging app. 

   WhatsApp Business Calling is set for General Availability on Twilio Voice this summer. It puts your brand front-and-center on the world’s most popular messaging app and facilitates seamless transitions between messaging and voice channels.

    

2. We continue to expand global compliance capabilities, empowering businesses to seamlessly meet regulatory requirements and protect personal data.

   Data Residency in the EU (European Union): Data Residency in the EU enables businesses to meet common privacy and compliance requirements related to the handling of personal data in the EU. Data Residency for SendGrid Email will be Generally Available in July, and with early adoption of EU IP addresses, businesses have increased their EU-based email by over 400%. Data Residency in the EU for SMS will be in Private Beta by the end of the year.

   Compliance Toolkit enables businesses to comply with certain regulatory requirements in the US without complex manual processes or any code changes. Currently in beta for Twilio Messaging, this intuitive solution uses Artificial Intelligence to proactively detect potential violations and prevent transmission to help ensure every communication meets the latest requirements, reducing operational overhead and risk.

    

3. Twilio is also strengthening reliability to improve message deliverability, protect against fraud, and enhance user authentication for businesses.

   Customer Deliverability Engine provides real-time, actionable insights directly in the Twilio Console, and AI Assistant helps businesses identify and resolve Messaging issues before they impact campaigns. Early users have seen an 80% decrease in message failures, enabling more reliable and effective customer communications.

   Fraud Guard, Twilio’s SMS Traffic Pumping Protection suite across Twilio Verify, Twilio Messaging, and Twilio Lookup offers guaranteed protection against Artificially Inflated Traffic (AIT) and has already saved customers over $82 million dollars².

   Enhanced User Authentication: Businesses need to continuously verify consumer identities to ensure engagement with real users, not fraudsters—limiting unnecessary marketing spend on unauthorized users, safeguarding account access, and meeting regulatory requirements. Twilio Verify and Twilio Lookup enable businesses to do this today, with advancements in Passkeys, Lookup Line Type Intelligence and identity fraud prevention coming soon. 

Customer data at your fingertips with Segment

Amazing customer experiences rely on contextual data, and in an AI-powered world, whoever knows the customer best wins. That's why our Customer Data Platform, Twilio Segment, is built around the customer, and not tied to any one part of your existing tech stack like the CRM. This enables us to  empower every team from Marketing and Sales, to Customer Success and Support, with a centralized, real-time view of each customer across the entire journey, while integrating data from across a number of systems and data repositories seamlessly. 

Segment connects all customer data—identity, context, behavior—no matter where it lives, creating a unified profile with best-in-class identity resolution and data governance. Whether it’s loyalty status from a warehouse, verified profiles for security, or communications data from emails and SMS messages, Segment brings it all together so that context is front and center, ensuring every engagement is relevant, timely, and smart.

Add in generative and predictive AI capabilities and personalization moves from theory to results. But, the real leap? Understanding and acting on every critical customer intent signal. Here’s how Segment’s latest features make it easy:

1. Event-Triggered Journeys (Public Beta): Don’t just detect when a customer takes a key action, like abandoning an online cart, form application, or onboarding workflow—instantaneously know the details (product, price, size, stage of journey), as well as important context about the user from your data warehouse (loyalty status, buying group, account balance) and trigger a perfectly-timed and personalized message via the right channel or downstream tool (email, SMS, or even WhatsApp). Dynamic and simultaneous cart management captures intent across devices in real time and a scale. (GA this summer)

2. Native SMS & Email Integrations: Segment is adding native support for Twilio SendGrid (GA) and Twilio Messaging (Public Beta this quarter) to our catalog of over 700 extensible integrations —making it easier than ever to send better emails and real-time SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp updates with customer data from Segment.

3. Enhanced Observability & Alerting: Track the performance and integrity of all your journeys, audiences, and data pipelines at a glance (GA), and set up alerts for when things go awry (Public Beta).

Segment is inherently extensible and as part of these updates, we are also giving developers programmatic access and control across destinations, audiences, and profiles. Additionally, Segment’s extensibility also means you can now analyze more, personalize faster, and optimize for ROI with two new premier partners: Amplitude (for digital analytics) and Attribution App (for cross-channel marketing attribution).

Trusted, simple, smart platform of the future

Twilio’s message is clear: everything you need—data, communication channels and AI —are woven into our trusted, simple and smart platform, so whether you are an enterprise, a startup OR an ISV, you can stop worrying about infrastructure and start focusing on building incredible customer experiences. And while we just shared our Day 1 keynote session, there’s more. Stay tuned for more highlights from our over 50 breakout sessions and Day 2 at Twilio’s SIGNAL conference.

1. For more information regarding Twilio's HIPAA Eligible Services please refer to https://www.twilio.com/en-us/hipaa.
2. Twilio Verify Fraud Guard totaled $82M in explicit savings June '22 to 01 May ‘25.