Discussion of and the rapidly growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded this year, with diverse new applications sprouting up across a broad set of business use cases almost daily. One area that stands out as a big opportunity for the use of AI is customer engagement. How does AI influence and shape the future of customer interaction and brand loyalty? At the recent SIGNAL 2023 event, Twilio gave a glimpse into its view of the future of AI-powered customer engagement with the introduction of an assortment of new AI capabilities under the CustomerAI banner. The combination of the power of large language models (LLMs) with real-time customer data from Twilio’s customer data platform (CDP) Segment can offer companies a set of tools designed to improve and enhance customer interactions.

Twilio’s Use of AI for Customer Engagement

Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, summed up Twilio’s view of AI at the SIGNAL 2023 event, “The tectonic shift in technology that we’ve witnessed over the past year rivals the scale and magnitude of the invention of the Internet. AI has genuinely captured the hearts and minds of builders worldwide.”

The potential of pairing large language models (LLMs) with first-party customer data opens up many opportunities. Twilio announced a set of tools referred to as CustomerAI, that combines both predictive and generative AI applied to Twilio’s Segment's CDP. Announcements included:

• New AI capabilities in the CustomerAI solution to help businesses deliver personalized customer experiences. This includes predictive AI, voice intelligence, and generative AI tools.

  • New CustomerAI Predictions uses AI/ML models to anticipate customer behavior. This allows marketers to create targeted audiences and journeys without the need for scarce data science resources.

  • Voice Intelligence uses speech recognition and NLU to extract insights from customer service calls like feedback trends, competitive intel, and compliance risks.

  • CustomerAI Agent Assist, which provides real time recommendations for contact center agents and creates AI-generated summaries for efficient call wrap-ups. In collaboration with Google Cloud, Twilio added generative AI tools for Flex.

  • Generative AI capabilities in Twilio Engage and Segment to help marketers boost productivity. For example, marketers can turn text prompts into HTML emails in Engage.

• Segment Unify will make rich customer profile data available to agents in real-time to improve personalization.

• Segment CDP introduced Segment B2B Edition with Linked Profiles to link customer data with business data like accounts and subscriptions. This expands the customer data graph for more accurate and relevant personalization.

• Twilio Verify Fraud Guard uses machine learning (ML) to proactively protect brands from SMS pumping attacks.

• Traffic Optimization Engine features:

  • Real-time Routing optimizes traffic using algorithms.

  • Market Throughput to reduce global delivery overhead by setting per-country rate limits by sender type.

  • Multitenancy to manage traffic throughput across teams or ISV customers.

  • Traffic Shaping to dynamically manage capacity per message based on sender, destination country, tolerated latency, .etc

  • Insights provides real-time reporting on messaging deliverability, capacity allocation, and queueing.

• A new Zero Copy Architecture partnership with Databricks and Snowflake makes ingesting and accessing data for AI models faster without redundancy.

The future of customer engagement is personal and intuitively data-driven through the combination of real time data and AI. Integrating AI into customer engagement strategies should help businesses build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships.