Twilio’s customer-aware generative AI through new OpenAI integration

Through this integration, Twilio customers will be able to use OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to power new generative capabilities in Twilio Engage, its multichannel marketing solution built atop the Segment Customer Data Platform. The combination of Twilio Segment, ranked the #1 Customer Data Platform for market share by IDC for four consecutive years,* and OpenAI’s powerful Large Language Models, will create new opportunities for businesses to activate a unique understanding of their customers across every interaction.

“As AI drives down the cost of intelligence, it is increasingly possible for companies to deliver a deeply personalised experience for every customer,” said Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI. “We know how much people want this, and we’re happy to be working with Twilio to bring it to the world. Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform will enable todays and tomorrow’s large language models to unlock deep personalisation at scale for every business.”

This announcement is a part of Twilio CustomerAI, a technology layer that couples the power of predictive and generative AI with the wealth of customer data flowing through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform.

Most companies know that in order to understand their customers, they need to make use of their data – yet companies struggle to do so. Data pipelines break, data formats evolve rapidly, and data teams often don’t have the bandwidth to fully leverage the potential of the customer data they have.

Now, with AI rapidly unlocking new opportunities, the value of having organised, clean, and actionable data that is AI-ready has never been more important. Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform enables companies to unlock their data, building an understanding of their customers with Twilio Segment, and then activate that understanding across their contact centre with Twilio Flex, their marketing campaigns with Twilio Engage, and their products. Twilio CustomerAI infuses greater customer understanding and personalisation across every one of those customer touchpoints.

“It's clear that Large Language Models are the next wave of innovation in customer engagement,” said Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio. “Experiences like ChatGPT are coming to the enterprise to power groundbreaking experiences in sales, service, content, marketing, and more. Twilio CustomerAI enables companies to build customer-aware interactions – giving the language models context about the customer they're helping. Without customer-awareness, any ChatGPT-like experiences would be generic and unhelpful. But with CustomerAI, companies can transform LLMs into the most helpful, knowledgeable agent imaginable at scale.”

This integration with OpenAI will formalise the exciting opportunities that many in Twilio’s community of more than 10 million developers have already been experimenting with. For example, it’s possible to build a ChatGPT plugin for Twilio Flex, which gives users the ability to access Flex directly from ChatGPT's interface, creating a new channel for brands to serve their customers better.

Meanwhile, developers can create voice-activated chatbots, using Twilio's native speech recognition and Amazon Polly Neural text-to-speech capabilities with ChatGPT. Another example is the potential of ChatGPT when paired with Twilio Programmable Messaging, used to build a serverless SMS chatbot. These builds validate the enormous potential of OpenAI and Twilio’s ongoing and aligned efforts, and the value it can bring to customers looking to uplevel their customer engagement strategies.

Twilio and OpenAI are committed to building AI safely and responsibly. Twilio builds privacy and security by design into its product development lifecycle and will ensure companies have full transparency and control of the data that informs AI-powered interactions with their customers.

Twilio is partnering with a group of trusted, world-class partners that meet its privacy and data protection standards.

*Source: IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2019: Calm Before the Marketing Cloud Vendor Storm, Doc #US46130720, March 2020; IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2020 The Flight to First-Party Data Is On, and CDPs Win Big,Doc #US48052920, July 2021; IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Market Shares, 2021 Stellar CDP Growth Proves Value of Unified Data for CX, doc #US49493722 July 2022; *IDC Worldwide Customer Data Platform Applications Software Market Shares, 2022: Continued CDP Growth to $2.7 Billion Proves Value of Unified Data for CX and Digital Business, June 2023, IDC #US50861023.