Twilio revamps, updates customer engagement platform

Two years after a brutal activist investor battle that brought about change at the top, this week, Twilio made its case to line-of-business leaders as a more fully formed customer experience cloud.

Twilio, of course, also needs to retain its loyal developer customer base. It hopes to pull all that off with the release of the Next Generation Platform, which includes several features, among them Conversation Memory, which aggregates customer data across channels such as email, phone, chat and text; Conversation Orchestrator, which combines that data into a continuous conversation narrative; and Agent Connect, which plugs AI into voice and messaging channels.

Twilio has long been a developer-friendly platform, with popular tech building blocks around its Flex contact center as a service, SendGrid email tools and Segment marketing-oriented customer data platform. Co-founder and former CEO Jeff Lawson coded apps live from the keynote stage at the company's annual Signal user conference. But he was pushed out in 2024 after two activist shareholders won their quest for changes at the company.

The new regime, led by new CEO Khozema Shipchandler, rewrote the company's strategy to focus on infrastructure to support a conversation layer connecting data warehouses and CX tools, and to simplify the deployment of Twilio's technologies, said Inbal Shani, Twilio's chief product officer and head of R&D.

At the time, Twilio's new leadership immediately had to solve another puzzle, like everyone else in Silicon Valley: how to incorporate the rapidly emerging generative and agentic AI into the platform.

"We started looking into the new way[s] of customer engagement," Shani said. "What is truly a conversation that is happening now between humans? Humans and AI? And, in the future, AI-to-AI conversation? That's where we invested a lot in building this foundational layer."

With foundational CX pieces in place, such as messaging and voice, as well as customer data and contact center, the stage was set for Twilio to layer AI across everything to connect communications, data and automation, said Paul Nashawaty, analyst at TheCube Research.

He said the Next Generation Platform will make Twilio more competitive with the likes of Salesforce and Genesys. For joint customers, though, Twilio also strives to make CX operations systems work together more efficiently as a composable infrastructure layer, Shani said.

With that approach, the company has begun appealing to customers outside its developer orbit.

"Twilio's moving from a developer-first API company into a more complete, AI-powered customer engagement platform," Nashawaty said. "What's changing is who's buying. While developers are still key, AI is attracting more business and CX leaders because its use cases tie directly to revenue and customer experience."

That said, Twilio still focused heavily on developers at Signal 2026 this week, with flashing graphics and myriad messages around the "build" theme, such as "Build moments that people never forget."

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience, specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.