News

29 posts

Google News Showcase is rolling out in Switzerland. Here’s how we are partnering with publishers.

Jörn Winterberg12/17/2024

Google News Showcase is rolling out in the Baltic nations. Here’s how we are partnering with publishers.

Marek Miller6/18/2024

Google News Showcase is rolling out in Cyprus. Here’s how we are partnering with publishers.

Riccardo Terzi5/30/2024

CJPA is unworkable and may result in changes to our services in California. As a result, we’re testing potential product implementations.

Jaffer Zaidi4/12/2024

Google News Showcase is rolling out in Finland. Here’s how we are partnering with publishers in Finland.

Jenny Feldhausen2/29/2024

We’re announcing new ways we’re bringing some of Google’s AI technology to journalists and news organizations.

Matt Cooke2/1/2024

Our customers broke records by reliably sending over 4 billion messages and over 64 billion emails during Cyber Week 2023! To put that into perspective, this means that our customers combined could have sent 8 messages or emails to every single person in the world over the past week. This volume is something we couldn’t have dreamed of when we started this communications journey over 15 years ago. Apart from the scale, one thing that continues to astonish us is how our customers have shaped and changed the way that businesses interact with consumers. Our customers continue to innovate across multiple channels for more meaningful engagement in order to reach consumers when and where they prefer. Even though we continue to see record numbers in volumes of communications sent, the goal should be less about how much you can send and more about how personalized you can be with your customer. In our 2023 Customer Engagement Report, 66% of consumers say they will quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. With a statistic like this, it may seem daunting to keep up with constant change in consumer preferences, so in this post we will walk through what we can learn from this past week, how we think about communications at scale for Cyber Week and beyond, and how trust and reliability can impact how consumers interact with your business or organization. What can we learn from Cyber Week? The best thing about Cyber Week is that businesses are able to engage with consumers at a tremendous scale. However, after more than 6 months of preparation and a grueling week of execution development, marketing, and operations teams are left exhausted. To help ease that exhaustion and give you a headstart into your post-Cyber Week retrospective, here are a few trends and learnings we saw this year. Cyber Week turns into Cyber Month – The term ‘Cyber Week’ now carries a different meaning than before, and in fact, is turning into ‘Cyber Month’ with sales starting as early as October and ending as late as January. By November 20th this year, our customers were already sending 7 billion emails daily. This means that businesses are reaching their customers earlier than ever before. Consumers are driving change – There are more options for how consumers can interact with businesses digitally. While texting and email will continue to be the cornerstone of Cyber Week, OTT (over-the-top) channels such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Chat, or Google Business Messaging are growing in popularity. Last year’s Cyber Week saw a 32% increase in messages sent over these OTT channels, and it continued to grow an additional 14% in 2023. It’s easy for businesses to be distracted with so many channels available, but it is more important than ever to optimize your messaging and channel usage for where consumers are at in their buying journey. Strategic investment in more targeted and bottom-of-funnel messaging will result in less messages being sent, but higher ROI. Building consumer trust leads to higher engagement – Only 1 in 3 consumers find it very or moderately easy to contact brands through their preferred messaging channels. Understanding what channels (email, voice, messaging) your customers want to be contacted on, when they want to hear from you, and what types of messages they want to receive will make or break your customer engagement. Twilio Trusted Communications played a role this year – If you sent a text message in the US this Cyber Week with Twilio you are aware that 2023 was the first Cyber Week in history where every at-scale sender in the US had to be registered. Just like building trust with your customers, building trust with the industry and carriers plays a large role in message deliverability, reliability, and engagement. This shift towards a fully trusted and verified communications ecosystem will continue to create a safe and trusted environment for businesses to engage with consumers. Similar to carriers for messaging, Gmail and Yahoo! lead the way to ensure the email channel is trusted and valued. The new Gmail and Yahoo! announcement requires customers to align their SPF and DKIM and create a DMARC policy reinforcement to ensure delivery. With senders now having to publish a DMARC record to comply with these new announcements, customers can create a more secure authenticated email environment for all senders and recipients. Data Drives Deliverability - The 3 Ds to remember. When it comes to communication deliverability, preparation is key. The fact is that no one is exempt from experiencing delivery failures. However, you can minimize the damage by carefully monitoring deliverability rates across your messaging and email solutions while paying careful attention to the key metrics that will alert you to any problems. Communications at scale is no longer just for Cyber Week While Cyber Week feels like the final exam at the end of the year to see how your communications solutions handle increased volume, it’s not the only week that your ability to grow and send reliable messages will be put to the test. Whether you’re scaling geographically, expanding and adding new communications channels, or growing the sheer volume of communications you send, you can run into common hurdles as a result of this scale. That is why our product, engineering, and operation teams have dedicated the last 2+ years developing and testing a messaging product suite that can handle the volume and scale that makes Cyber Week feel like just another week out of the year, the Traffic Optimization Engine. The Traffic Optimization Engine works across different networks, senders, geographies, and use cases to ensure that your most timely messages are delivered based on your highest priority needs and without overwhelming the carrier networks. This means that your messages will always be delivered in the time you and your customers expect – something other providers can’t always do. Reliability isn't something that just applies to texting and with 100% uptime across our Messaging and Email platforms during Cyber Week, we understand the power that reliable communication creates. However, we know first hand that emails that miss the inbox and experience delivery delays can prevent you from delivering the best experience to customers. To combat these hurdles, real-time data can be valuable to improve your email deliverability. The SendGrid Event Webhook provides real-time feedback on every email you send across nine event types, such as open and bounce rates. Customers can rely on our infrastructure to achieve optimal inbox placement and make the process of sending emails trustworthy and reliable. Building a communications solution that lasts At Twilio, we spend the full year preparing our platforms for the volume that comes with Cyber Week, but our ultimate goal is for you to experience this level of scale and engagement throughout the year. If you find yourselves getting nervous when thinking about Cyber Week or when expanding your communication platforms, we are always here to help you achieve the scale your business deserves. To learn more about how business can reach customers on the platforms they prefer using a cohesive omnichannel strategy, please watch our latest webinar Driving Meaningful Customer Engagement at Scale During Cyber Week

Shanelle Thadani11/30/2023

In today's highly interconnected global landscape, maintaining robust connections is vital for the success and growth of businesses and organizations. Twilio Interconnect stands at the forefront of this need, offering a dependable and secure conduit to the Twilio cloud through a global infrastructure. The demand for Twilio Interconnect has surged, and we are thrilled to introduce a new and enhanced user interface that enables customers to self-service provisioning, modifying, and removing Twilio Interconnect. Since the initial pilot launch, our self-service experience has remarkably improved the overall experience, streamlining processes with an impressive 40-75% increase in speed for handling requests. With the new self-service experience, you can swiftly modify account permissions and conveniently access your configuration information right from your Console. What is Twilio Interconnect? Twilio Interconnect represents a powerful, private link to the Twilio cloud, functioning like a dedicated express lane in the vast digital highway. This specialized connection ensures a smooth, uninterrupted flow of data and communications between your systems and Twilio's extensive range of services. This connection is established through physical infrastructure strategically located around the world, offering improved security and reduced latency. We offer three flavors of connectivity: Cross Connect - a physical connection via a fiber cable between your networking equipment and Twilio’s cloud in one of Twilio’s global data center locations. Third Party Exchange - a virtual connection that allows participants to exchange traffic without touching the public Internet. Virtual Private Network (VPN) - a virtual point-to-point connection to Twilio with IPSec tunnels that provide the functionality, security, and management policies of a private network. Interested in Twilio Interconnect? Jump over to the Console page to learn more! Lisha serves as the Principal Product Manager for Twilio Interconnect. She enjoys learning new things including ways to enhance the customer experience. Connect with Lisha at ltseng [at] twilio.com.

Lisha Tseng11/20/2023

Google News Showcase is rolling out in Greece. Here’s how we are partnering with Greek publishers.

Riccardo Terzi11/7/2023

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Twilio Content Template Builder, formerly known as the Content API and Content Editor. The Content Template Builder enables you to create and manage rich messaging templates and utilize them across all supported messaging channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, and Facebook Messenger. Send engaging rich messages to users no matter where you reach them with the Content Template Builder. What is the Content Template Builder? Twilio’s Content Template Builder enables you to create and manage rich messaging templates for omnichannel messaging, either through the Content API or an easy-to-use UI. With the Content Template Builder, you can: Reach users across messaging channels, meeting customer communication preferences. Incorporate rich messaging features, which are visual or interactive elements including Buttons and Lists, to make messages more visually engaging and encourage customers to interact by making it simple for them to take a specific action. Specify simple-text fallback options for rich messages, letting Twilio automatically deliver the richest content supported by the channel. Simplify the process of supporting new messaging channels by translating your existing message templates across channels. Save development teams time, as they can create a message template once and utilize it across channels, with the Content Template Builder normalizing for differences in rich messaging features between channels. Enable your non-technical teams to create message templates themselves with the Content Template Builder UI. Ensure compliance with WhatsApp template requirements and other channels’ specific policies. Businesses like paradox.ai are using the Content Template Builder to engage customers on the channel they prefer and manage their WhatsApp templates. With the Content Template Builder, paradox.ai has enabled their clients to reach consumers on their preferred channel, WhatsApp, and save clients time managing their WhatsApp templates. What’s New with the Content Template Builder As part of the general availability of the Content Template Builder, we’ve included additional features to expand its capabilities and make it easy to use alongside other Twilio solutions. Build with Twilio Studio The Content Template Builder now works with Twilio Studio. Use content templates as part of a Studio flow to reply with rich messages such as quick replies, calls to action, or lists. You can also now take in rich message metadata from an inbound message, such as a selection in a quick reply or List message, and use the user’s selection to determine the next step in the flow. Previously, this was only possible using a custom function or REST API widget to use content templates. Now, you can specify content template SIDs and variables natively within Studio to take advantage of Twilio's rich messaging features. Schedule Content Templates to be sent in the future With Message Scheduling, you can now schedule Content Template messages to be sent at a designated time. Schedule your SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages in advance to be delivered at the time you choose. If you create a rich message on WhatsApp, such as a media template with buttons, you can automatically specify a simple text fallback option that works on SMS. Integration with other Twilio solutions The Content Template Builder now works in partnership with several additional Twilio solutions. Use the Content Template Builder with Twilio Conversations to send rich content messages in two-way conversations, such as customer support or commerce conversations. It also now integrates with Twilio Engage so you can send rich content with WhatsApp in Engage. Support for new WhatsApp authentication templates WhatsApp has recently released new requirements for authentication message templates, where they must include one-tap autofill or copy code buttons as part of the message template. The Content Template Builder now supports these new authentication templates to help users create compliant message templates. Specify content fallback options to deliver across channels Content Template Builder lets you specify a content fallback option for channels that only support text and media, like SMS and MMS. This means you can create a template once and send it across channels with different rich content capabilities. The Content Template Builder will render the richest version of content created possible for the channel that the template is delivered on. For example, when sending a single content template, you can ensure users on WhatsApp get an authentication message with "copy code" functionality, while users on SMS receive a text-only version of the same message. Currently, Twilio only supports specifying content fallback options using the Content API. Coming Soon in 2023: All existing WhatsApp templates will be available in the Content Template Builder In the near future, all of your existing WhatsApp templates will be available in the Content Template Builder, enabling you to manage, edit, or delete these templates within the Template Builder. See and manage all of your WhatsApp templates in one place. SDK Support We will soon add SDK support for additional endpoints in the Content Template Builder, including the creation of new templates and the submission of templates for approval by WhatsApp to allow developers to build and submit their templates for approval in their preferred language. Get Started with the Twilio Content Template Builder Start building engaging rich message templates with the Content Template Builder today. Check out the Template Builder docs to learn more.

Becky Teper10/31/2023

Today, we’re announcing three new ways that you can get more context about the images and sources you’re finding online.

Nidhi Hebbar10/25/2023

Builders around the world recently tuned in to watch our second annual Developer Keynote at Twilio’s 2023 SIGNAL customer and developer conference, a keynote tailored just for builders. Missed it? Don’t worry—in this post, we’ll recap everything Twilio’s CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson along with our Developer Evangelists (and robot companion, AILeen) discussed during the SIGNAL Developer Keynote. Plus, we’ll show you how Twilio is merging large language models (LLMs) with solid, compliant data to create even better customer experiences. At the end of the day, that all boils down to sending better communications. Alright, let’s talk about SIGNAL! The Developer Keynote set featuring Twilio’s CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson along with our Developer Evangelists. Provide more personalized engagement with CustomerAI + Segment Artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize the internet and also transform how we, as developers, build solutions and tools for customers. AI integrations will be table stakes across the web. For developers and companies to differentiate themselves from these soon-to-be standard experiences, they’ll need to ensure they are working with quality data. Typically, data is isolated in various systems such as a data warehouse, data lakehouse, or SaaS platform. If you can’t normalize, integrate, and access that data, creating novel experiences will be a challenge. This is where Twilio Segment’s customer data platform (CDP) comes in. As the #1 CDP in worldwide market share for the fourth year in a row according to IDC, Segment collects real-time data across channels into unified profiles leading to more personalized customer experiences. And since customer data is most often siloed across dozens of systems, Segment helps build a single view of the customer—without having to write all the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) operations—because understanding your customers is critical to a successful customer engagement strategy. With Segment, you can: Gather data from Sources such as websites or cloud applications Track a complete view of your customers across their journey and deliver personalized experiences using Unify Act on data and learn about your customers in real-time using Destinations When you gather this data about your customers in Segment, you have the opportunity to infuse it into every interaction your company has with its customers. That’s what we do with CustomerAI, a set of capabilities woven throughout all of our products that couples the power of LLMs with real-time customer data flowing through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. CustomerAI will help you to truly listen to your customers, interpret the signals they’re sending you across channels, and activate them through personalized experiences for every individual. Now you can inject some of AI’s reasoning ability to enhance your understanding of customers and create more personalized experiences. A more enjoyable customer experience To give you a better picture of what Segment and CustomerAI can do for you, our colleagues imagined a fictitious sneaker brand with a website which... sells sneakers. The website has an AI chatbot to help customers with questions or issues about their order. Using AI without relevant customer data, the chatbot returns an intelligible yet generic AI response. It lacks personalization, such as the customer’s name or order number, and requires the customer to answer follow-up questions to gather more information. But when the chatbot has access to Segment and CustomerAI, relevant data, traits, and events will be returned, which can then be passed to the LLM for a more personalized response. Because the customer’s data profile is already in Segment, the chatbot will automatically understand the customer’s name and order number and make a prediction about the customer’s intent, creating a truly personalized customer experience. Wouldn’t you much rather shop at a place with an experience like this? A demo website showcasing a personalized support conversation with a chatbot, using data from Segment and CustomerAI. Notice how the chatbot understands who the customer is, understands the issues they are facing, and can predict the customer's intent. The power of generative AI and predictive AI all in one instance Your applications and AI integrations are only as good as the data you’re feeding them. And investing in data quality will improve trust in your data, reduce time spent by your engineering teams navigating and validating data, and ultimately allow your business to grow faster. Time and time again, we see companies struggling with things like ensuring consistent event naming across properties, which can lead to confusion down the line. Using our fictitious sneaker brand, let’s assume two teams are working on the sneaker website. One team categorizes the SKUs as “sku” while the other uses a barcode. This inconsistency could lead to data conflicts for our AI to process. With Segment Protocols, you can define events and corresponding properties in a Tracking Plan, which becomes the central source of truth of your data. With Protocols, you’ll see a real-time flag whenever an event in the Tracking Plan has a violation, which can help you quickly find and resolve discrepancies. In this case, our Tracking Plan expects “sku” for the “product added” events, so you’ll notice a violation whenever that “sku” property is replaced with “barcode.” To help you quickly find and resolve discrepancies, real-time flagging occurs when an event in the Tracking Plan has a violation. Destinations are where you can send and store data, and Segment has over 450 pre-built Destinations already included. If you need to integrate with another Destination (or Source, for that matter) you can use Functions to build custom integrations. Segment Functions allows you to integrate custom Sources and Destinations with a webhook. After you configure your Sources and Destinations, you can use the data flowing through Segment to build a “golden” profile for each customer. And with Segment Unify, you can consolidate real-time customer data into these profiles across every platform to understand the customer journey and get a complete view of your customer. There’s also a new data graph feature called Linked Profiles that makes these profiles even more robust. Linked Profiles allow you to take contextual data from multiple sources and pair it with the customer profile. This pairing allows you to build a data graph of profiles and their related entities, which ultimately leads to better customer interactions. Linked Profiles allow you to take contextual data from multiple sources and pair it with the customer profile. If you want to understand the likelihood of a customer performing an event that’s tracked in Segment, you can use Predictive Traits. With Predictive Traits, we use Segment’s AI and machine learning to help you understand what your customers will do next. Predictive Traits come with out-of-the-box predictions, or you can create your own Custom Predictive Goals so that you can customize what matters most to you. AI and fraud detection With the rise in popularity of generative AI through models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, developers are harnessing the power of AI to help solve challenging problems. While generative AI focuses on making new content, predictive AI uses machine learning (ML) models to excel at decision making. And here at Twilio, we’re using predictive AI to proactively combat fraud. SMS Fraud results in billions of dollars of charges each year at the expense of individual companies. One known attack, called SMS Traffic Pumping (sometimes styled Artificially Inflated Traffic, or AIT), was projected to result in financial losses of $4.5 billion in 2021. SMS Traffic Pumping is when fraudsters use phone number input fields for one-time passcodes, app download links, or other messages sent via SMS without adequate controls to inflate traffic and exploit your app. Using bots, attackers send thousands of messages controlled by a specific mobile network operator (MNO) to exploit the input field. As a result, charges are incurred by the targeted business and the attacker receives a share of the generated revenue from the MNO. To combat fraud, such as SMS Traffic Pumping, and improve your SMS one-time passcodes (OTP) conversion, Twilio Verify launched Fraud Guard. Fraud Guard uses AI to proactively help detect SMS pumping fraud and prevent attacks. Twilio has data across hundreds of thousands of customers and billions of text messages, and our model can discern good actors from bad actors to proactively block fraudsters. Fraud Guard is already paying dividends for our customers – we estimate we saved customers over $30 million in fraudulent charges, blocking over 141 million fraudulent attacks through 7/14/23. Soon, we’ll launch Lookup SMS Pumping Risk as well. Currently in public beta, Lookup SMS Pumping Risk provides a risk score for phone numbers and allows you to act on the result – potentially saving you from dealing with SMS Pumping Fraud before it even begins. SMS Traffic Pumping is when fraudsters send multiple messages through an input field, then receive a share of the generated revenue. AI and data privacy With the amount of data that companies harvest, it’s no surprise when customers have concerns about data privacy. That’s why at SIGNAL, Twilio announced the adoption of a set of CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder framework to guide the responsible development, use, and deployment of predictive and generative AI across all of Twilio’s products and features. Twilio's CustomerAI Privacy Ladder The Segment Privacy Portal takes a proactive approach to privacy. It allows you to gain real-time visibility into what personal information you’re collecting, where you’re collecting it from, and where you’re sending it. Then, you can set up rules to automatically protect it. Privacy Portal gives developers the out-of-the-box ability to identify PII data, create their own identifiers, categorize them, and block incoming event PII data, right at the source. Segment encourages an architecture where you're thoughtful about getting data out, applying a layer of governance, layering privacy controls, and getting your data where it needs to go. What’s Next Learn how Twilio can help developers get the most out of AI, rewatch the Developer Keynote, and catch all of the breakout sessions we have around what’s possible to build with Twilio, now available on-demand for free on the SIGNAL platform. Anthony Dellavecchia is a Developer Evangelist who writes code on stage in front of a crowd. He is an experienced software developer who teaches thousands of people how to change the world with code. His goal is to help you build deep experiences and connections with technology so that they stick with you forever.

Anthony Dellavecchia8/24/2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, OpenAI has unlocked the potential of individuals, teams, start-ups, and billion-dollar companies. Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson recently had a chat with OpenAI’s Sam Altman at SIGNAL 2023, Twilio’s annual customer and developer conference, to share in their excitement and talk about the future of the space. Statista reported that the potential impact of AI in the United States could increase GDP by 21%. And, McKinsey revealed that the impact of generative AI on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy. “That’s why Twilio is partnering with Open AI,” says Lawson. “We’re introducing the AI personalization engine powered by Twilio Segment, which allows companies to take all the data they have about their customers and bring it into all the interactions they’re building on top of Open AI.” OpenAI and Twilio amplify the potential of customized support Customer service is not what it used to be, and support agents are catching on to the power of AI as a data-savvy co-pilot. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed a 14% increase in productivity among customer support agents who leveraged the help of chatbots. Traditional chatbots are evolving into intelligent, personalized assistants that can reshape how we engage with companies. AI-driven chatbots offer a level of assistance and problem-solving that was previously unimaginable. Whether addressing sales inquiries or troubleshooting service issues, they can quickly deliver accurate, efficient, and tailored responses. “We’ll be able to answer questions better than the last generation of chatbots ever could,” says Lawson. AI can not only help bridge the brand-consumer perception gap, but also propel the potential of chatbots to new heights. What’s even more appealing is that with AI, Twilio’s customers have the potential to drive down the cost of energy and intelligence. “We’re talking about orders of magnitude cheaper,” says Lawson, “Suddenly, you can unlock every customer.” What’s more, these bots will have to have an understanding of who they're talking to, which is more important than ever for brands. Although 46% of brands believe they’re doing an excellent job of providing personalization, just 15% of consumers agree, according to Twilio’s 2023 State of Customer Engagement Report. AI lowers the cost of intelligence while increasing personalization Even though the power of personalized experiences is clear, the cost of intelligence still proves a significant barrier. Crafting tailored interactions for every customer demands a level of resources that, until now, has been prohibitively expensive. “But with AI driving down the cost of intelligence, we can make that happen,” Altman says. And it couldn’t come at a better time: According to Twilio’s report, 66% of consumers say they will quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized. The notion of a “digital twin,” an AI-generated representation of a customer, presents an intriguing approach to the kind of personalization customers expect. Leveraging customer behavior data, companies can build accurate digital profiles, enabling them to test and fine-tune interactions to suit individual preferences. “We can use this digital twin to really understand the customer and make decisions on how best to serve them,” says Lawson. This fusion of AI and customer profiling allows businesses to anticipate needs, enhance decision-making, and deliver unparalleled value. Limitless opportunities for AI-powered personalization The potential value unlocked by AI-powered personalization is immense, promising sweeping benefits for both businesses and consumers. “When every company can deliver this deeply personalized experience, which would not be possible without AI, it’s going to be transformatively positive for how we interact with the world and what we expect from companies,” says Altman. As AI technology continues to advance, every customer can expect experiences that align with their unique needs. This heightened level of personalization not only drives immediate engagement but enhances customer retention: According to Twilio’s report, 86% of consumers acknowledge that personalized experiences increase their loyalty to specific brands. “It’ll empower companies to be better operators and more efficient at the same time, which is super exciting,” Lawson says. And, as AI-driven advancements pave the way to revolutionary changes, the possibilities are seemingly limitless for everything from education to healthcare. One compelling application is enhancing productivity—not only empowering developers to increase efficiencies, but enabling professionals in every field, department, and industry to maximize output. According to a Forbes Advisor survey, 64% of businesses believe that artificial intelligence will help increase their overall productivity. “OpenAI has ignited developer energy around what people can build,” says Lawson. Of course, Altman says, “It’s the developers that ignite the energy for us.” To learn more about implementing Twilio’s CustomerAI capabilities using quality real-time data, check out all of the exciting content we have around what’s possible with AI from SIGNAL, now available on-demand for free on the SIGNAL platform.

Amanda Garcia8/24/2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is using vast amounts of data to transform how human beings and organizations engage with each other. It’s no surprise that 95% of orgs agree that demand for customer experience is driving rapid integration of touchpoints that unite real-time customer data with AI and analytics according to the 2023 NTT Customer Experience Report. The quality of data and your ability to activate relevant information about your customers is key to differentiating your business. First-party customer data that is orchestrated in real-time can provide AI with information to differentiate every virtual and human engagement. Imagine a virtual personal shopper that understands exactly what you’re looking for to simplify self-discovery and empower contact center agents to deliver hyper personalized experiences. Every time you interact, your experience is curated to your specific preferences. Knowing and treating your customer better than the competition should be your competitive advantage. That’s where Twilio can help. Twilio provides an industry leading communications and data platform that empowers your organization to personalize experiences, optimize AI, and create strong relationships with customers. Today, at SIGNAL 2023 we are giving a first look at Flex Unify,* which will provide contact centers with a golden customer profile that uses real-time data to deliver hyper-personalization across virtual interactions and agent conversations. Flex Unify and the golden customer profile Flex Unify will use real-time data collection and activation to unify multiple backend enterprise systems, providing a customer profile that can be updated on the fly. Going far beyond exposing static customer identifier fields like phone number and email addresses, Flex Unify will deliver relevant real-time data such as recent website click streams, ad impressions, plus recent purchases and returns. Automatically, this data is used to generate inferred traits such as churn risk and lifetime value. This in turn influences routing strategies and cross-sell/upsell guidance to agents, maximizing conversions and loyalty. This is the golden customer profile. Historically, agents needed to stitch information together by accessing multiple tabs in their desktop. Your contact center and sales solution should filter data and provide your customer-facing teams with information that is relevant to the specific interaction they’re having. Your AI should then collect data from every interaction to enrich your customer profile and inform how you re-engage moving forward. At Twilio, we like to call this the virtuous cycle of customer engagement. Every interaction deepens your understanding of the customer and how you engage moving forward. AI, powered by real-time data The data you provide your contact center’s AI workflows is what optimizes your customer and agent experience. That’s why Twilio announced CustomerAI in June of 2023, to provide an open and extensible technology layer that differentiates how AI impacts your customer engagement. CustomerAI will integrate with Flex Unify to deliver hyper-personalized experiences across virtual interactions and agent conversations. The golden profile provides inferred traits and predictive traits—data that is based on a customer’s previous activity with a business—that your AI needs to manage a personalized conversation, route to the appropriate agent, and provide recommended responses tailored to this specific customer. CustomerAI and Flex Unify will provide the data and automations to optimize every aspect of the customer journey, wherever the interaction takes place. You can connect customer-facing employees with the necessary channels, data, and AI to deliver personalized customer experiences. Blend in-store and online customer experiences Every conversation with a customer should be driven by the data collected from previous interactions. The inferred traits and predictive traits available can be used by in-store employees to better understand customers and personalize shopping experiences. This connects In-store and online interactions. Twilio Flex is excited to announce during our SIGNAL 2023 customer and developer conference Flex Mobile*, launching in beta later this year. Now, your employees have the power of Flex, in the palm of their hand. Connect your field sales, branch employees, and contact center agents with the power of 1:1 communications and an intuitive app experience to simplify communication with customers. Flex Mobile powers a wide range of use cases: Financial services. Integrate channels and mobile experience to empower branch and remote client-facing teammates to build strong relationships with local customers using compliant communications. Increase employee productivity while blending human and digital conversations to provide a differentiated experience. Retail. Provide every customer with a personalized experience that was previously reserved for luxury brands. Use customer preferences and previous purchases to connect in-store and online shopping experiences for every shopper. Logistics. Connect field sales and service teams with relevant customer information and preferences that can be used to personalize in-person interactions. Provide customers and agents with a true omnichannel experience Taking friction out of the engagement process by offering consistent, personalized experiences across all channels and locations is an important step towards building trust and loyalty across different generations and cultures. The experience you deploy needs to provide the channels your diverse customer base uses. That’s why we’re excited to announce two new native channels in Flex: Google Business Messages and Email powered by Twilio SendGrid. Google Business Messages provides your customers with an easy way to engage from Google search results. Email is great for sharing out longer form content, instructions, and providing necessary next steps to a customer. Twilio Flex provides true omnichannel experiences across every channel by providing the data and context needed to enable customers and agents to switch between channels freely. To learn more about implementing AI and omnichannel solutions into Twilio Flex using quality real-time data, talk to our experts. And, don’t miss all of the exciting keynotes and breakout sessions we have around what’s possible with Flex, now available on-demand for free on the SIGNAL platform. * - Flex feature is in Private beta.

Philip Borden8/23/2023

AI. Everyone is talking about it, and we’re all discovering new ways of using it every day. But how will AI shape the future of customer engagement? What should brands bear in mind when they use AI to deepen customer relationships? Meet Twilio’s CustomerAI technology At SIGNAL 2023, we showcased CustomerAI, a set of capabilities woven throughout all of our products that couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer data flowing through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. CustomerAI will help you to truly listen to your customers, interpret the signals they’re sending you across channels, and activate them through personalized experiences for every individual. It starts with enabling you to perceive your customers: to see them, hear them, and digest that information in a way that helps you determine what they want. Then, we help you leverage that perception to understand your customers. We provide tools that help you synthesize all that data, and find the insights that drive personalized customer engagement for each person. And then, we’ll help you activate those insights, engaging each customer at the right time, in the right place, and through the right channels. That’s the key to truly personalizing their experience based on everything they do. At SIGNAL, we explained how all of this works together to become a flywheel for customer engagement, while also announcing new features to help our customers make this virtuous cycle a reality. Let’s talk about what CustomerAI looks like in practice, across the stages of the flywheel, and how it can accelerate better engagement. CustomerAI helps you perceive customer behavior Your AI is only as good as your data, and that data can be messy. Without unifying it and making it intelligible across your organization, it’s not helpful. You need to be able to harness the right data in the right way in order to perceive and understand your customers’ behavior at any and every part of their journey. That’s the driving vision behind Twilio Segment’s composable customer data platform (CDP). It can help you with specific tasks, like adding events from your website, or support you in orchestrating an entire journey. You can choose where you start, whether that’s getting data from SaaS products into your data warehouse, or activating existing data with reverse ETL. That way, you can achieve your goal more quickly and efficiently. As the #1 CDP in worldwide market share for the fourth year in a row according to IDC, Segment helps brands reduce or eliminate the complexity of their data by unifying it all in one golden profile, making that data easily usable. And now with Twilio’s Zero Copy Architecture—pilot coming soon—you don’t even have to move the data from your data warehouse or make copies of it. Now you can just query it directly with a click for use, whether that’s for segmentation, audience building, personalization, and more. Segment is now expanding the golden profile with Segment’s B2B Edition with Linked Profiles, in private beta in Q4. It enables brands to understand each individual’s relationships to others. Users can link any customer information from any part of your business to a profile, enabling them to model beyond the individual to multi-user accounts, households, and more. That’s not the only data hurdle we’re tackling. Voice data has always been a challenge because it’s unstructured and hard to analyze. However, it remains a critical customer service channel, where every call holds vast amounts of data. Twilio’s Voice Intelligence—newly available in public beta—brings structure to voice data, using a transcription and language operator tool that deploys conversational speech recognition to intelligently extract insights. CustomerAI helps you understand your customers Comprehensive data requires a deeper understanding to activate well, and Twilio continues to invest in tools to help brands do just that. One huge investment we’ve made is in CustomerAI Predictions in Segment, now generally available. We know that predictive models aren’t exactly new, but the ability to run them natively in your CDP is. And that’s what Segment does: it makes engagement predictions easy. All you have to do is know what you want to predict—maybe it’s the date a customer will buy or possibly churn—and Segment will do the rest. You can use that data to plan when to send them an SMS text message with an offer to drive them into the store. You also want to show customers you understand them when they come to you with questions or concerns. That’s why we’re making the Twilio Flex contact center even more powerful with GenAI Agent Assist, in private beta in Q4. In partnership with Google Cloud, Flex customers can deploy GenAI Agent Assist to help them: Generate recommendations to agents Provide tailored “next best actions” they should take when interacting with a given customer Receive AI-generated rapid summaries at the end of calls Additionally, Flex Unify— coming soon in public beta—will natively surface Segment’s rich customer profile data to agents in real time. This will help them see all of the rich details about a customer, like real-time purchase and return data, and click-stream activity, so they can tailor their conversation accordingly, empowering contact centers to increase customer lifetime value and boost sales conversions. CustomerAI helps you activate your customers through personalization Being able to activate customers on the flywheel depends on three capabilities: deliverability, action, and insights. You can’t engage customers if they aren’t receiving or seeing your messages. That’s why we’re focusing on deliverability with our Traffic Optimization Engine features, including: Real-time Routing, now generally available, which optimizes traffic using our patented algorithms. Market Throughput, currently in public beta, which reduces global delivery overhead by setting per-country rate limits by sender type. Multitenancy, currently in private beta, which ensures a fair allocation of traffic throughput across teams or ISV customers. Traffic Shaping, currently in private beta, which dynamically manages capacity per message based on sender, destination country, tolerated latency, and more. Insights, currently in private beta, provides real-time, out-of-the-box reporting on messaging deliverability, capacity allocation, and queueing. Receiving a call, text, or email is only half the battle. Making each touchpoint relevant, and every journey cohesive, is key to driving action. We know that can be difficult and time-consuming, which is why we’ve invested in tools that simplify the process. CustomerAI Generative Journeys, in public beta in 2024, will power your customer journey builder with Twilio Engage. It will be easier for marketing teams to build smarter audiences, content, and campaigns. Just describe who you want to market to, and Engage will do the rest. CustomerAI Generative Email, in public beta in 2024, will even draft the perfect email based on your goals. All you have to do is enter simple text prompts that turn ideas into HTML in seconds. While reaching a customer is critical, building trust in every communication is essential to driving action. We’ve all gotten spam calls or unwanted texts from unknown senders. The odds of you engaging are low if you suspect it isn’t the brand you know and love. With Trusted Communications, brands can leverage capabilities like Branded Calling, now in private beta. Essentially, a call that would’ve been marked as spam or screened gets picked up, because the brand’s logo pops up and the end consumer knows it’s safe to engage. Trust goes both ways and no business wants to spend money on fraudulent accounts. Twilio Verify gives businesses a single API to make sure they know who they’re talking to; Twilio Verify Fraud Guard, now generally available, furthers that goal by using machine learning to proactively protect brands from SMS pumping attacks. That layer of protection now comes out-of-the-box for every new Verify customer and across every verification. Beyond deliverability and action, communications should bring in new data to help you continuously improve your customer’s experience. That’s where Perception Engine comes in, currently in pre-release. It enables you to add the most important details of a conversation across channels—like an address, preference, or request—to your customer’s golden profile, all without training a machine learning model. This enables you to develop more relevant, timely, and engaging communications that are more likely to be read and acted on by customers. We hope you are as excited as we are about these announcements unveiled at SIGNAL. Don’t miss all of the exciting keynotes and breakout sessions we have around what’s possible with Twilio and CustomerAI, now available on-demand for free on the SIGNAL platform. Interested in learning more? To dive deeper into each of these announcements and capabilities, take a look at detailed blog posts on: Twilio’s approach to trusted CustomerAI Twilio Flex, now powered by AI and real-time data Twilio Segment extends real-time CDP to unlock AI Joyce Kim is Twilio's Chief Marketing Officer and leads global marketing as Twilio executes its vision of becoming the leader in the emerging customer engagement category. Joyce brings over two decades of experience scaling commercial innovation and growth in the technology sector through large scale digital transformation and brand elevation strategies. Her expertise spans all facets of Go-To-Market including digital, brand, communications, channels and product strategy for global technology and SaaS companies.

Joyce Kim8/23/2023

Consumers don’t just want great experiences; they demand them. They now expect consistent, highly personalized cross-channel experiences, and when businesses fail to meet their expectations, they’re more motivated to seek out brands that get it right. What does a remarkable experience look like? The key to delivering an outstanding customer experience is listening to consumers’ preferences and anticipating their needs. Every communication with your customers generates carrier or network data (the types of things you can find in our Insights products), but that only tells a portion of the story. It doesn’t include the context of their call, the links they click in a message, or their response over text. Businesses have a huge opportunity to extract all that data and use it to inform and personalize all future conversations. That’s what takes a customer experience from ordinary to remarkable. But accessing that data is incredibly challenging. That’s because extracting and organizing customer data traditionally means relying on manual evaluation efforts and ad-hoc analysis. Manual analysis is inconsistent, expensive, and typically only targets 1-5% of customer interactions. As a result, it mostly focuses on tasks like regulatory compliance or profanity monitoring. But what if that analysis could provide deep insights into consumer behaviors – in a privacy-conscious way – to personalize every customer interaction over voice and messaging? Today, we’re thrilled to give you a first look at the Twilio CustomerAI Perception Engine, a new suite of CustomerAI tools that allows businesses to apply AI to communications data, and extract rich customer data across all of their communication channels at scale. Our goal has always been to help businesses build unforgettable customer experiences, and the CustomerAI Perception Engine will enhance Twilio’s existing products and features by allowing for even greater insights and personalization. Transform conversations into knowledge with natural language understanding AI is everywhere, and according to Forbes research, 64% of businesses that responded to their survey anticipate that AI will improve the customer experience. But, many companies need help to deploy this technology at scale. That’s because it’s hard to deploy new models into production, especially since AI models are hungry for data. The good news is that businesses already have the customer data they need to train their AI models. It lives within the conversations they have with customers every day in channels like voice, WhatsApp, and SMS. With the CustomerAI Perception Engine, Twilio customers can use natural language understanding to analyze every customer interaction. The CustomerAI Perception Engine includes natural language operators to extract unstructured customer data, such as account information or consumer preferences from text message conversations and call transcripts. It will then organize that previously inaccessible data, making it easier for companies to identify individual customer traits and wider customer trends in a more actionable way. The CustomerAI Perception Engine drives action with better communications But it’s not just about organizing that data. It’s about applying it to drive better communications, not necessarily more. The CustomerAI Perception Engine allows businesses to tap into the data that customers already share in calls and messages and use it to continuously expand and build comprehensive Golden Profiles for customers. Those Golden Profiles can then be used to contextualize conversations and to create highly targeted content and campaigns that improve marketing efficiency and, ultimately, customer lifetime value. Native application connectors will make it simple to feed golden profiles into other Twilio tools like Flex, Segment CDP, and Engage and improve customer interactions continuously. Great experiences increase the likelihood of future interactions, and every interaction generates more data that feeds the CustomerAI Perception Engine. Getting started with the CustomerAI Perception Engine The CustomerAI Perception Engine will start with voice calls through Twilio Voice Intelligence. If you’d like to learn more about how you can use CustomerAI to extract valuable data from your voice calls, take a tour of Voice Intelligence and join the public beta today. The CustomerAI Perception Engine for messaging channels is scheduled to be available beginning in 2024. With the CustomerAI Perception Engine, organizations will have the tools to extract previously inaccessible customer data and use it to build and continuously improve truly personalized customer experiences. Be sure to check out the SIGNAL keynote recap to catch up on all of the latest CustomerAI announcements.

Jason Spulak8/23/2023

At Twilio, we recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the way we work, live, and interact with the world around us. We believe its use will give us the ability to improve our products and services and create new opportunities for our customers. We also believe the true value of AI is unlocked when companies like yours are able to safely and compliantly harness all of the data across their business—including the signals from each interaction with every individual customer—and use this deep understanding at scale, consistently improving the next interaction that every customer has with your brand in real time. This data-driven flywheel—iteratively understanding and growing deeper relationships with customers—is precisely what Twilio makes possible. That’s why we’re incredibly excited about the value that Twilio’s CustomerAI technology will unlock for the brands and enterprises we serve. That said, we recognize that AI does not come without risk and are committed to helping our customers use AI in an ethical, legal, and responsible way. Our legacy of trust, squarely at the center On June 6, 2023 we announced CustomerAI, which couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with rich customer data that flows through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform. Ultimately, CustomerAI accelerates how companies unlock the potential of their customers across the entire customer journey, including marketing, sales and support, onboarding, authentication, and more—enabling companies to create a flywheel unlike anything they’ve had before. Twilio Segment enables companies to personalize interactions with golden profiles assembled from events and behaviors. But now with CustomerAI, we can better interpret communications—identifying traits and important details, and updating the customer profile. The flywheel effect means that our customers better understand every interaction, enriching the golden profile and, in turn, better personalizing every touchpoint. CustomerAI starts with its foundations in trust and the commitment that all of your data is yours. While privacy concerns have come to the forefront with AI, Twilio has always taken data privacy seriously. We maintain a commitment to building privacy and security by design into our product development lifecycle to support our customers’ compliant and responsible use of their data with our products and services. For example, we have created a Privacy Pattern for our Flex, Console, and SendGrid products that empowers developers to build privacy directly into their applications. We offer Segment Privacy Portal, a data inventory feature that allows customers to automatically identify and classify data (e.g. high, medium, low risk). You can set rules to manage risk exposure and proactively block data to comply with your company’s privacy policy. In addition, Twilio encrypts data both in transit and at rest utilizing industry standard encryption algorithms. It offers controls for customers to manage their customer data and to delete personal data relating to their users as needed. As we continue to deliver powerful AI solutions across the Twilio platform, we’re committed to the same level of rigor and trust, especially when it comes to protecting customer data privacy. Our commitment to privacy: CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder We view the use of AI and the protection of privacy as a shared responsibility between our customers and Twilio. To support this, we have adopted a set of CustomerAI trust principles to guide the responsible development, use, and deployment of predictive and generative AI across all of Twilio’s products and features. CustomerAI Trust Principles Transparent We provide transparency about our use of AI and give our customers the ability to control their data. We help our customers make informed choices about whether to use different types of AI models by being fully transparent about the AI vendors and type of models we are using, and how customer data is used by those models. One of the ways we provide transparency to customers is through our AI Nutrition Facts Labels (more on this below). These labels are assigned to each AI-driven product and feature that we launch, bringing all of the key details front and center in a simple and easily understandable format. Responsible We select responsible AI vendors and strive to use—and help our customers use—AI in a way that respects privacy, keeps data secure, and minimizes the risk of bias or other harms. Twilio performs a privacy and security assessment prior to working with any AI vendor to ensure they meet our privacy and security standards and requires specific contractual commitments. These include a specific commitment not to use customer data to train their models. Accountable We monitor the functioning of AI to address harms and fitness for purpose in partnership with our AI vendors and customers. Twilio exercises auditing, logging, and monitoring to ensure our AI is operating as intended. Additionally, we offer a number of guardrails to ensure fitness for purpose, ranging from human-in-the-loop to monitoring for toxicity and other harms. CustomerAI Privacy Ladder In addition to Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles, we have introduced our CustomerAI privacy ladder. For each AI-driven product or feature that you may opt to use, this ladder (and its levels) show the type of data used by the model, and whether the model is exclusively for your use or the use of multiple customers. While some customers may only prefer to use isolated models, we know that others may be open to sharing data and benefitting from models that use broader, more representative data sets. Level 1: Models with your data for your use, without PII Level 1 is the lowest privacy risk option and identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use without any personally identifiable information (PII)—that is, information that, when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual. Level 2: Models with your data for your use, with PII Level 2 offers more value and requires more caution than the first level as it identifies models that use your data for your exclusive use, including PII. Level 3: Models with your data for multi-customer use, without PII Level 3 offers the highest level of value and need for caution as it identifies models that use your data and other customers’ data for multiple customer use but does not include any PII. This may include PII data that has been anonymized prior to being used by the model. We view Twilio’s CustomerAI trust principles and the privacy ladder framework outlined above as critical to ensuring that, as a customer of Twilio, you’re equipped to make well-informed decisions about which CustomerAI products and features you and your organization are prepared to adopt. Introducing Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels Finally, in addition to Twilio’s overarching CustomerAI trust principles and privacy ladder framework, we’re excited to introduce Twilio’s AI Nutrition Facts Labels—a clear, consistent, and transparent way to understand exactly “what’s in the box” when assessing all of Twilio’s CustomerAI products and features across the platform. Our AI Nutrition Facts Labels provide key information about an AI model’s privacy level and design elements in an easily understandable format, mimicking the food nutrition labels you’re likely already familiar with today. Below, you’ll find an example of the AI Nutrition Facts Label for Twilio’s Generative Journeys and Generative Content (both in Engage) as well as Voice Intelligence—all of which were announced today at SIGNAL. You’ll see how each label highlights critical details like: Ladder level Model type Base models and owners A detailed breakdown for how data is used by each model Additional links to supporting, public-facing resources. All of the products and features that are powered by Twilio CustomerAI will feature this label within the product UI/UX, but we haven’t stopped there. We want you to have the ability to create and share AI Nutrition Facts Labels in ways that instill trust and a commitment to the privacy of your customers. To help make this possible, we’ve launched nutrition-facts.ai, a new AI Nutrition Facts Label generator, powered by Twilio, allowing our customers, partners, and the industry as a whole to easily and thoughtfully create their own AI Nutrition Facts Labels. Bringing trust and privacy to life through CustomerAI At Twilio, we’re incredibly excited about the value and efficiency AI will bring to our customers while, at the same time, remaining aware of the associated risks and complexity. As we continue to deliver on our mission of building the world’s most trusted customer engagement platform, we’re committed to being transparent, responsible, and accountable in how we use AI in our products and features. We’re also committed to adapting our AI efforts responsibly as best practices and regulation continue to evolve. Amy Holcroft is Twilio’s Chief Privacy Officer. She brings over 20 years of experience in privacy and manages Twilio’s international team of privacy lawyers, risk, and compliance professionals responsible for Twilio’s global privacy program. Kathryn Murphy is Twilio’s Senior Vice President of Product and Design at Twilio, focused on Segment, Engage, and CustomerAI. She brings over 20 years of experience in product management, design and engineering with deep domain expertise across retail, commerce, payments, customer data platforms, and multi-channel marketing.

Amy Holcroft8/23/2023

This post first appeared on the Twilio Segment blog. Twilio introduces upcoming Segment B2B Edition and Zero Copy Architecture to offer a composable, AI-ready customer data platform (CDP) that enhances businesses’ understanding of customers New predictive and generative AI tools activate adaptive, 1:1 customer engagement in Twilio Engage and Segment CDP Take a minute to think about the best customer experience you’ve ever had. How did it make you feel? I doubt the first thing that came to mind was one of the many times you felt like just another faceless order number. Instead, you probably thought of a time when you felt seen and understood by a company, when they anticipated what you needed and offered it to you how and when you wanted it in a way that felt personal. These are the types of meaningful experiences that today’s consumers expect and companies strive to create, making well-intentioned promises to be “customer centric.” But for so long, the technology available wasn't capable of powering the scalable, real-time precision needed to deliver on that promise — resulting in generic experiences that left consumers frustrated. According to Twilio’s recent State of Customer Engagement Report, 91% of companies say they always or often personalize engagement with consumers. But, consumers don’t agree. Only 56% of consumers report that their interactions with brands are always or often personalized. Where is the disconnect? Instead of becoming “customer centric,” most companies have become “systems centric.” Exploding tech stacks and patchwork solutions lead to fragmented data, an incomplete view of the customer and, ultimately, disjointed experiences. The reality is that every consumer is a complex individual with unique wants and needs that change moment to moment. In order to truly put customers at the heart of your business, you need to be able to perceive who your customers are, understand how to best meet their needs and exceed their expectations, then activate those insights to engage them how, when, and where is most relevant and meaningful to them. These elements make up the engagement flywheel that is key to powering dynamic customer engagement that adapts to every individual customer at scale. At SIGNAL today, we announced Twilio CustomerAI to unlock the power of artificial intelligence (AI) for hundreds of thousands of businesses and supercharge the engagement flywheel. With CustomerAI, brands can expand their perception of customer data, activate it more extensively, and be better informed by a deeper understanding. But, it all starts with data. Customer data unlocks the promise of AI as a unique market advantage Your AI is only as good as the data you put into it. If your data is siloed, stale, inconsistent, and incomplete, your AI outputs will reflect that. At Twilio Segment, we have a long history of helping companies build trusted data infrastructures with unified, real-time, consistent, and consented data that is critical to your AI strategy. Our composable customer data platform (CDP) ensures your data is AI-ready, helping you collect, clean, and activate customer data with our open, API-first platform and 450+ pre-built connectors that enable you to start with data anywhere and activate it everywhere. With Segment, you choose where you start. Whether that’s getting data from SaaS products into your data warehouse, or activating existing data with reverse ETL, Segment gives you the flexibility and extensibility to move fast, scale with ease, and efficiently achieve your business goals as they evolve. Today, we’re giving warehouse-centric data teams even more control over their source data by introducing Zero Copy Architecture [1]. In partnership with Databricks and Snowflake, Segment will soon allow customers to query data warehouse or data lake datasets directly, eliminating the need for data copying and additional ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) jobs, avoiding redundancy, and resulting in more timely, secure, and accurate insights. Extend the customer profile to activate coordinated engagement across your entire business Bringing together all the best signals from your customers across every data source, Segment helps you build unified, identity-resolved customer profiles that give you a deeper understanding of each and every customer. But, in addition to real-time consumer profiles, many organizations have business datasets (containing information like company accounts, subscriptions, products, households, and more) sitting in their data warehouse. We are excited to announce our new Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles [2] that will allow businesses to establish relationships across all their customer data in an expanded data graph. Using Linked Profiles, companies can build a graph of relationships linking customer events, experiences, and profiles with these additional datasets. With a better line of sight across data, graphed to each customer, companies can train AI models, build advanced segmentation, and power state-of-the-art personalized recommendations and activations across channels. Put the power of predictive AI at marketers’ fingertips Today's marketers need to not only understand past customer behavior, but must be able to anticipate and act on customers’ future wants and needs. AI and machine learning (ML) models are incredibly effective at doing this but are complex to build and require data science expertise. With CustomerAI Predictions [3], now generally available, Segment is putting the power of predictive AI at marketers’ fingertips. Without having to tap technical teams, marketers can now create precisely targeted audiences out-of-the-box, trigger customer journeys, and personalize multichannel experiences based on a customer’s predicted lifetime value (LTV), likelihood to purchase or churn, or propensity to perform any other event tracked in Segment. Brands like Box are using Predictions to save time, optimize campaign performance, and discover revenue opportunities. “As marketers, the holy grail is to reach your customers and prospects in a way that is meaningful, relevant and additive to them. CustomerAI Predictions has equipped Box’s marketing team with the ability to forecast customer behavior to a degree that was simply unavailable to us before. We’ve been able to explore segmenting our audience based on predictive traits like who is most likely to join us at in-person events or who is more likely to purchase, and this allows us to meet those people where they are in their customer journey. Tools like Predictions put marketers at the center of this new era of AI which is transforming how companies engage and retain their customers.” – Chris Koehler, CMO at Box Create more relevant customer experiences in minutes with generative AI Marketers spend massive amounts of time writing, designing, and building campaigns and customer journeys. With generative AI soon available [4] inside Twilio Engage and Segment CDP, marketers can save precious time, boost productivity, and optimize for stronger results. Using the new CustomerAI Generative Email coming to Twilio Engage, marketers will be able to enter simple text prompts that turn ideas to HTML in minutes. This builds on the AI capabilities available in Twilio Engage today, such as our Smart Email Content Editor that suggests conversion-worthy email headlines, images, and calls-to-action to drive better engagement with the click of a button. Meanwhile, marketers will be able to skip the manual process of architecting customer Journeys thanks to CustomerAI Generative Journeys. Soon, they will be able to simply describe campaign type (promotional, win-back, etc.), audience definition, and which channels they want to use, then Twilio Engage will automatically build the journey using generative AI—saving marketers time while accelerating growth. By combining the deep understanding of your customer that Segment enables for businesses with the speed and scale of predictive AI and the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI, Twilio CustomerAI can help companies deliver dynamic customer engagement that adapts to every customer at scale. “The tectonic shift in technology that we’ve seen this past year rivals the scale and magnitude of the invention of the Internet. AI has truly captured the hearts and minds of builders across the globe. I believe the real value unlock for AI will be pairing large language models with first party data sets — which is where Twilio is most differentiated. With CustomerAI, artificial intelligence becomes customer-aware, empowering businesses to drive data-driven personal interactions at every touchpoint.” – Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio Committed to building AI safely and responsibly As Twilio develops and launches CustomerAI tools, we are leveraging our own proprietary technology as well as working with trusted industry leaders like AWS, Google, and OpenAI that meet its privacy and data protection standards. Twilio is committed to building CustomerAI safely and responsibly, and has today published its CustomerAI Trust Principles, along with information on the rollout and availability of its AI Nutrition Facts Labels. Learn more about our new CustomerAI capabilities launched at SIGNAL 2023. [1] The Zero Copy Architecture pilot is scheduled to be available globally in the coming months. [2] Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles is scheduled to roll out globally (starting with the GA of Event Enrichment) in the coming months. [3] CustomerAI Predictions is generally available (GA) and accessible to Segment Unify and Twilio Engage customers, globally, starting today. [4] CustomerAI Generative Email and CustomerAI Generative Journeys are scheduled to be available in public beta in 2024.

Katrina Wong8/23/2023

You count on Twilio to get your messages delivered on time, every time. As more and more business interactions move to messaging, there’s pressure on the finite resources of networks. Sending messages to consumers is no longer just about reaching their phone screen, but sending timely, thoughtful, and impactful messages to drive meaningful engagement globally. As messaging volumes sent through Twilio have soared, we’ve doubled down on our investment in messaging quality for all of our customers. That includes our Traffic Optimization Engine, a new suite of products to help you achieve global messaging deliverability and prioritization at scale. Whether you’re scaling geographically, expanding use cases, adding new sender types, or growing the sheer volume of messages you send, you may begin to run into deliverability and messaging throughput issues caused by the strain on the carriers’ networks and how your messages are prioritized and delivered. A prime example of this is the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2022, nearly 4 billion messages were sent to consumers via Twilio in that week alone. Building a messaging platform for global scale and reliability Some of our largest and fastest-growing customers have more intensive needs when it comes to scaling their messaging, and sometimes require a more hands-on approach from our product and engineering teams. To ensure deliverability at scale during big sending opportunities like Cyber Week, we spend months partnering with our customers to architect their messaging solutions. But we asked ourselves: what if that same level of planning and scale could happen automatically and throughout the year? The Traffic Optimization Engine now enables you to do just that. This suite of products works across different networks, senders, geographies, and use cases to ensure that your most timely messages are delivered based on your highest priority needs and without overwhelming the carrier networks. This means that your messages will always be delivered in the time you and your customers expect – something other providers can’t always do. Our system of traffic shaping and priority queueing is based on the capabilities of each carrier, each sender, and each message type, which allows us to ensure that one-time passwords, for example, get through quickly while marketing messages send within a reasonable timeframe and are cost effective. What’s inside the Traffic Optimization Engine? The Traffic Optimization Engine consists of a range of features and products that work together, or individually, to give you granular control over your messaging deliverability, throughput allocation, and prioritization of their messaging solution at scale. Each of these products works seamlessly with our Programmable Messaging API and is implemented in partnership with our Product and Engineering teams, ensuring that you’ll have personalized support in achieving deliverability at scale. The features included are: Real-time Routing - Generally available Patented algorithms optimize your messaging traffic for maximum deliverability across 4,800+ carrier connections every 75 seconds, ensuring deliverability even when you’re sending high-volume messaging traffic. Multitenancy - Private beta This tool dynamically assigns equal messaging throughput across all teams or customers of an independent software vendor (ISV) to ensure fair distribution of throughput across messages. This allows you to balance your traffic for optimum sending across all use cases, internal teams, or customers using your platform. Market Throughput - Public beta A throughput architecture structure places per-country rate limits for each sender type instead of at the individual sender level to reduce overhead for global delivery. Market Throughput enables you to have more control over which use cases and sender types are prioritized by country. For example, architecting your messaging solution so that your timely verification messages over short codes in the U.S. have prioritized deliverability over your promotional messages sent from your toll-free numbers to ensure the high-priority verifications are delivered first. Traffic Shaping - Private beta Traffic Shaping creates dynamic traffic lanes in order to protect your messaging, and allows you to prioritize and categorize your messages by country and sender type to enable more seamless deliverability for your high-priority messages. Insights - Generally available Insights gives you real-time, out-of-the-box analytics and reporting on messaging deliverability, capacity allocation, and queuing so you have more granular insights into the performance of your global messaging traffic. The Traffic Optimization Engine is built for all Twilio customers, and if you’re growing your messaging solution globally, have encountered messaging delays, long queue lengths for high-priority messages, or want to gain more control of how your messages achieve optimum delivery, you may be eligible for our products currently in beta. Reach out today or talk with your Twilio account team to see how you can begin architecting your messaging solutions for global scale.

Will McKenzie8/23/2023

Today, we’re excited to announce that Twilio Generic Pay Connector is now Generally Available. The Generic Pay Connector enables you to capture payments from your customers using Twilio <Pay> and Pay Agent Assist and process them with your payment processor of choice. With Twilio Generic Pay Connector, you can accept payments from your consumers over a phone call in a PCI-compliant manner, reducing your PCI-compliance scope and simplifying PCI compliance data. When your payment processor of choice is not included in Twilio's list of branded Pay Connectors, Twilio Generic Pay Connector is there for you. Your payment processor is responsible for processing the actual transaction and reporting the result back to Twilio. Twilio relays the result (success/error) of the transaction received from the payment processor back to your application. With this, you can design your payment IVR solution. We built Generic Pay Connector to serve these segments: Merchants There are merchants who are PCI-compliant, however, they do not have an infrastructure to capture and collect payments from consumers over a voice-call. Furthermore, they may not want to invest in building integrations with their payment processors. There are merchants who are limited to no PCI-scope and want to outsource PCI-compliance items because any PCI-scope increase involves work (which can be a massive undertaking for small or medium sized enterprises). Furthermore, they may not want to invest in building integrations with their payment processors. Payment Processors The majority of Payment Processors do not offer a PCI-compliant way of collecting payments over the phone and need offerings like Twilio <Pay>. This also opens up a new marketing channel for acquiring new customers for payment processors. As part of an IVR payment process, the two most widely performed transactions are - Tokenize and Charge. Each payment processor may have slight variations on how they define these transaction types. In this respect, we provide payment processors the flexibility to define the setup and type of transaction. What do you need to know about Generic Pay Connector? Twilio Generic Pay Connector accepts two payment methods: credit cards and ACH-debit. It performs two transaction types: charge and tokenization. A charge transaction means you want to immediately capture funds from the customer's supplied payment method (i.e., credit cards or ACH-debit) in return for the goods or services you offer. A tokenize transaction means you want to obtain a token based on the user's supplied payment information (i.e., credit card or ACH-debit information) from the payment processor instead of posting any charge. Tokens are typically stored so that you can charge the user in the future without having to ask for the payment information again. Note that tokens are provided by your payment gateway or processor. We have also introduced Test and Live modes for Generic Pay Connector. In the Test mode, you can install and configure your connector, plug in your payment gateway URL and test it using test credit card and bank account numbers. When you're ready to go live, raise a support ticket and submit a valid PCI Attestation of Compliance (AoC) document for your payment gateway and a member of our team will review and approve your connector in Live mode to start processing transactions. For more details, check out our docs. Learn more about the Generic Pay Connector in the docs. We can’t wait to see what you build!

Nikita Chheda8/17/2023