Twilio teams with Microsoft to drive enterprise conversational AI

Twilio has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft aimed at accelerating the adoption of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for customer engagement.

The collaboration will leverage Twilio's customer engagement platform in conjunction with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, providing enhanced enterprise-grade infrastructure for conversational AI deployment. This partnership is intended to benefit Twilio's developer community, numbering over 10 million, alongside thousands of Microsoft's managed customers seeking to adopt advanced conversational interfaces.

Conversational AI, powered by natural language processing and machine learning, enables machines to interpret and respond to human conversations with increasing sophistication. The technology addresses common business challenges such as limited data precision and integration barriers caused by outdated legacy systems.

Twilio's expertise in communications, data, and AI will be paired with Azure's secure and scalable platform to assist enterprises in integrating conversational AI across various business functions. Specific areas of product development will include multi-channel AI agents for customer service automation, AI tools to assist live agents in contact centres, and solutions that enhance digital engagement between businesses and their clients.

"Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI," said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. "Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers."

The partnership will focus on building solutions using both Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's engagement platform, which merges communications, contextual data, and AI. These solutions aim to enhance how enterprises automate customer interactions and drive more personalised engagement at scale.

Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, commented: "Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organisation with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance. Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities – the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers."

Twilio is also introducing new conversational AI features, including ConversationRelay, which is now generally available. This tool allows developers to build sophisticated voice AI agents, integrating the latest in speech recognition, real-time streaming, and human-like responses. Additional updates include Conversational Intelligence, offering insights drawn from voice calls and message transcripts, which are available for voice communications and in private beta for messaging.

Khozema Shipchandler, Chief Executive Officer at Twilio, spoke on the future of customer engagement: "We are facing the end of customer experience as we know it, and Twilio's heritage in CPaaS, CDP, and AI-powered capabilities has positioned us well for a new era of customer engagement. To be successful, every business needs the right infrastructure: communications channels to connect with customers, contextual data to understand them, and the ability to accelerate it all with AI in a way that's powerful, flexible, and trustworthy."

Twilio has also previewed the next generation of its Customer Engagement Platform, designed to serve as the infrastructure underpinning all customer interactions. The platform will offer modular, interoperable systems that integrate with a range of AI ecosystems and support native large language model (LLM) integrations for greater efficiency.

Additional product enhancements announced include the expansion of communications channels, with upcoming general availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) and WhatsApp Business Calling, as well as the introduction of a Compliance Toolkit to help businesses adhere to global regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

Data residency enhancements were shared, with general availability of EU-based email data storage scheduled for July and SMS data residency in private beta later in 2025. Twilio's Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) will receive a rearchitected journeys system for real-time, personalised customer engagement, alongside features such as event-triggered journeys, contextual payloads, strengthened observability, and native integrations with Twilio's messaging solutions.

Segment announced two new preferred partnerships with Amplitude and Attribution App, expanding the analytics and marketing attribution options available to users of its CDP.

Customer feedback was also highlighted. Dugan Winkie, Vice President and Head of Commercial Strategy at Cedar, stated: "ConversationRelay has been instrumental in helping us bring Kora, our AI voice assistant, to life. Twilio's real-time voice infrastructure, combined with our own data and AI, allows us to simplify the financial experience and meet patients with the same level of care, personalisation, and empathy they'd expect from a live agent—at scale."

Bob Summers, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Goodcall AI, said: "Being named a Twilio AI Startup Searchlight honoree has super-charged Goodcall's credibility, turning recognition into real revenue growth and an even faster innovation cadence. Twilio's feature-rich, rock-solid platform is the backbone that lets our Voice AI delight customers at scale while we push the boundaries of what conversational automation can do. I'm excited to join the SIGNAL stage to share our journey and inspire developers to build the next wave of voice-first experiences."

Twilio's recent developments reflect ongoing efforts to provide flexible, secure, and intelligent tools to support evolving business needs in customer engagement, personalisation, and compliance.