AI Insights: Decoding Twilio's Latest CustomerAI Innovations

0:00The first thing that I want to say here is that Twilio, as I mentioned, is definitely kind of intensifying its focus on AI with a really big range of new capabilities under its customer AI banner banner. So announced at their kind of Twilio's annual signal conference, these AI advancements have been evolving through the whole year, and they're augmented by a significant partnership that they've done with OpenAI. So Twilio is pretty much adding to its product offering, including its customer data platform, its CDP, their contact center, and their marketing functionalities with next level AI solutions.

0:35So among these new capabilities is a feature known as voice intelligence, which employs large language models to glean actionable insights from voice conversations. Very, very interesting, right? So these insights are not just kind of surface level metrics. They dig into customer attributes or traits that can be integrated into Twilio's CDP, enhancing kind of the overall customer engagement experience. So Catherine Murthy, who is the SVP of product at Twilio said, customer AI is both predictive and generative. And so then she kind of elaborated that the AI tool offered kind of under the whole customer AI provides businesses with a quote flywheel of understanding, which essentially utilizes the collected data to better engage with their customers.

1:23Right. And Twilio is a really interesting automation software. It does a lot of great things, but even if you're not a developer, you can essentially set up essentially what happens with your customer journey. So if a customer is calling, you can have it automatically go. You can set out kind of like workflows where the call gets routed to a certain place or automatically sends a message to a certain person. And you can kind of build out these workflows. There's a ton of different products that they have, but essentially because they integrate with a lot of different like customer calling and messaging and those types of software, they have a lot of data around conversations that customers are having, you know, like that's customer service or sales or other areas.

1:59And they're leveraging that to essentially build these really impressive AI technology. So customer AI predictions is one of these predictive features that Twilio is rolling out. So the tool uses customer data and events to build models that can anticipate a variety of outcomes. So from a customer's lifetime value to their likelihood to make a purchase or even churn. And then these predictions are not just static data points. They power another new feature, which is generative journeys. So in essence, generative journeys allows marketers to kind of articulate their objectives in natural language.

2:34So, you know, you could say like, I would like to increase sales. I would like to decrease churn. Like you can talk to the system and give it your objectives and get the response. So it takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting using predictive data and customer traits to tailor the campaigns, which I think is a departure from the more manual journey builder approach, which traditionally is employed in marketing, right? I have a background in marketing And a lot of times when you're building out automations, you're like, okay, if a customer, you know, sends this message, then we're going to send up follow.

3:05We're going to respond with an automated email here. Um, then three days later, we have another automated email. If they, you know, text the number in that, then we're going to send them like the coupon here. You build these automated flows. What's really cool is now that's using AI to build out an automated flow that is the most likely to help your customer do your desired outcome. So you're like, build me a flow for my customer based on the fact that I would like to help decrease churn for customers that have issues or increase sales for customers that traditionally have really liked your product, right?

3:37You can give it all sorts of objectives. So I think moreover, Twilio is really kind of focused on this responsible AI use. It says it plans to implement what it calls AI nutrition fact labels, which essentially are designed to provide a really transparent control of how AI models are employed and how the data is processed. I think a lot of people really appreciate that transparency, especially when you're working with, you know, like a lot of customers data. Beyond everything it's doing in AI, Twilio is also launching a data focused feature called Linked Profiles, thanks to its partnership with Databricks.

4:15So essentially utilizing Databricks is kind of Delta Lake and also Delta sharing technologies. Linked profiles enables organizations to understand customer relationships at a household or even an account level. So for instance, this can aid in kind of comprehending various buying roles within complex B2B or B2C scenarios. So one of the key advantages of Twilio's partnership with Databricks is the ability to use a zero copy architecture. So this technology allows data to be shared across profiles without the need for redundant copies and really kind of is streamlining the data management process.

4:53So Murphy also hinted at the potential for further collaboration between Twilio and Databricks, particularly in the AI space, given that Databricks actually, they just recently acquired Mosaic ML. I covered this a while back, but they acquired Mosaic ML for$1.3 billion to essentially expand their AI capabilities. And so Murphy specifically said, quote, we're pretty excited about their Mosaic acquisition as that just adds another level. I think it's really, I do think this is a good piece of news for Databricks though, just on a side note, like when you have some of your customers or partners saying like, hey, we're super happy you guys just acquired this other company, you know, it was probably a good acquisition that adds a lot of value to what Databricks was actually doing.

5:38And of course, Mosaic ML, great company, they're doing some very interesting things. So I think it was a solid partnership. But you know, a lot of people kind of were like, Like, oh man, like, I don't know, they kind of raised their eyebrows at the$1.3 billion price tag. Of course, Mosaic ML was probably worth it. And if it's helping them to have more partnerships and customers and achieve more, it was definitely worth it. So I think the key takeaway here is kind of Twilio's substantial progress in integrating AI capabilities across this platform. It's really just kind of like offering business tools that are not just intelligent, but also very actionable.

6:11And, you know, they're focusing on what's ethically responsible. or really, I think, just being transparent with the data, which is what a lot of people want to see. So they're just responding to kind of their audience. I think with partnerships like those with OpenAI and also with Databricks, I think they're clearly kind of setting the stage for a future where AI doesn't just augment, but essentially transforms customer engagement. And this is definitely an area we'll be following closely in the future.