Twilio Unveils Next-Generation Customer Engagement Platform at SIGNAL 2025 

Twilio, a customer engagement platform provider, today at its SIGNAL event in San Francisco introduced its next-generation platform, enhanced customer data platform (CDP) capabilities, and significant communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) updates, including new conversational AI tools, trusted communications channels, and intelligent compliance solutions, and a partnership with Microsoft to accelerate conversational AI initiatives  built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's customer engagement platform.

"We are facing the end of customer experience as we know it, and Twilio's heritage in CPaaS, CDP, and AI-powered capabilities has positioned us well for a new era of customer engagement," said Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, in a statement. "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."

As part of the announcements, Twilio’s interoperable and interconnected platform is being optimized for communications that lead to customer engagement and action by seamlessly incorporating omnichannel communications (voice, SMS, RCS, email, OTT, and video), authentication and identity, intelligent automation, predictive insights, and a unified profile API that incorporates contextual Segment CDP data.

Twilio's conversational AI updates include the following:

• ConversationRelay, which enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of large language models. 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.
• Conversational Intelligence (An expansion of Twilio';s Voice Intelligence that analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights.

Other upgrades in Twilio's CPaaS portfolio include the following:

• Rich Communication Services (RCS).
• WhatsApp Business Calling.
• Compliance Toolkit for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act across messaging and voice communications.

Meanwhile, the major updates to Twilio's Segment CDP include a fully redesigned Journeys architecture inside of Twilio Engage with a number of new features that unlock highly personalized, real-time transactional customer journeys for businesses. New features include the following:

• Event-Triggered Journeys to dynamically manage customers' carts
• Rich contextual payloads that combine information from triggered events and warehouse data;
• Strengthened observability and scalability for customers to visualize exactly what is going on in a journey;
• Improved extensibility with native Twilio SendGrid and Twilio SMS integrations.

Segment also announced two new preferred partners: Amplitude, a leading digital analytics platform, and Attribution App, the multi-touch marketing attribution solution. As preferred Segment partners, Amplitude and Attribution App will be recommended offerings in their respective software categories and will actively co-sell with Twilio Segment's sales teams.

A bigger partnership announcement, though, involved Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. Twilio's communications, data, and AI will be combined with Microsoft Azure AI's safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure.

The two companies will collaborate on 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 the following:

• Capabilities for building multichannel 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
• Multimodal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers.

"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 of Twilio, in a statement. "Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers."

"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 Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, in a statement. "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."