Twilio and Google Cloud Expand Partnership to Improve Customer Experience with AI

Intelligent Contact Center Momentum Sets the Stage for Joint Generative AI Innovation

Twilio Inc. (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, and Google Cloud today announced an expansion of their long-standing partnership to bring Google Cloud generative artificial intelligence (AI) to Twilio’s customer engagement products to improve experiences for millions of end users.

For more than a decade, Google Cloud and Twilio have been working together to innovate in the customer engagement space. Today, the companies are exploring new ways to infuse generative AI into Twilio Flex (the cloud-based digital engagement solution for personalized interactions across contact centers, sales, and in-app concierge) and across the Twilio Customer Engagement Platform, with the shared goal of transforming how brands personalize their customer interactions.

“Generative AI is transformative and we’ve only scratched the surface of seeing how it can reshape customer experiences across the board,” said Meir Amiel, SVP of Product and Engineering for Data & Applications at Twilio. “With Google on board as a trusted partner, the confluence of Twilio's customer engagement platform data and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI models aims to put generative AI capabilities in the hands of hundreds of thousands of businesses, enhancing contact center experiences, marketing automation, and more. We look forward to forging ahead with further innovation in the years to come.”

“We’re excited to build on our shared momentum with Twilio by uncovering areas where we can apply Google Cloud’s AI and jointly shape next generation intelligence-driven customer engagement tools,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate VP, Global Partner Ecosystem & Channels at Google Cloud. “So much opportunity exists to combine the strengths of the Twilio platform and Google Cloud’s generative AI, and empower businesses everywhere to better understand and provide deeper value to their customers.”

“The potential of generative AI is astounding. We’re proud to be on the forefront of cutting edge customer engagement alongside powerhouses like Google and Twilio, and look forward to leveraging Twilio’s CustomerAI going forward,” said Steve Basra, CEO and president of Toyota Connected North America, “Destination Assist, built on Twilio Flex using Google Cloud AI, is only the beginning of how we’ll be able to use intelligence-powered tools to improve the driving experience.”

As part of the expanded partnership, Google Cloud and Twilio are announcing a new native integration¹ between Google Cloud Contact Center AI and Twilio Flex. The integration makes it easy to deploy sophisticated AI-powered virtual agents that can offer conversational self-service interactions, which can be deployed in a single click. Utilizing conversational AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to act as the first line of customer support, these virtual agents can be configured to positively handle support requests with little to no human agent intervention. This means that customers can receive 24/7 assistance and have their needs addressed quickly, with 30+ languages and variants supported. It also enables contact center representatives to spend their time efficiently, by having the virtual agents accurately route priority callers with more complex service needs to the proper agent while providing context from the initial interaction.

As an example of the impact that AI can have in the real-world, Twilio’s voice integration with Toyota Connected is now live for millions of Toyota and Lexus drivers in North America and powers Toyota Connected’s Destination Assist navigation feature.

Next, Google Cloud and Twilio are exploring the powerful potential of bringing generative AI into Flex to transform customer experience for everyday users to enable:

• Personalized Service: Generative AI can provide recommendations to contact center agents with the tailored “best next action” they should take when interacting with a specific customer. This is based on relevant historical context and data sourced from the Segment customer profile, which provides a single unified view of the customer within Twilio Segment's customer data platform.
• Efficiency and Analysis: Generative AI can proactively complete time-consuming tasks like after call summaries that include intent and sentiment analysis. This enables agents to serve customers more effectively and increases operational efficiency. It is also an investment in the quality of future customer interactions and satisfaction because customer profiles are enriched by the insights produced.
• Deeper Understanding: Generative AI can automatically capture key first-party data and traits from calls with customers, which also helps build rich and robust customer profiles that can later be used to assist and delight end users.

Google Cloud’s generative AI can create a ripple effect of personalization by sending the insights it collects and synthesizes into Segment customer profiles for future use. The enriched profiles enable businesses to have more personalized, informed interactions and touchpoints that customers highly value – both in Flex and across other Twilio marketing and CX applications.

“AI truly holds the promise to completely change the face of customer service forever,” states a recent report authored by Max Ball, Forrester Principal Analyst². “Better self-service, smart agent assistance, improved agent feedback, and a new level of business insights that will raise the value of the contact center to the rest of the organization are all possible with AI.”

Twilio and Google Cloud 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.

Google Cloud and Twilio are also working together on events for the developer community, like the recent AI + Data Hackathon. Participants used mock data from the Twilio Segment CDP and the Google PaLM API to create innovative applications for the contest.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud accelerates every organization's ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google's cutting-edge technology — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

About Twilio

Today's leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), visit: www.twilio.com.

About Toyota Connected

Based in Plano, Texas, Toyota Connected North America (TCNA) was established in 2016 to contribute toward realizing Toyota’s global vision for an intelligent mobile society. As an independent Toyota company, TCNA serves as a software and innovation hub that leverages big data from vehicles to humanize the driving experience, providing customers secure, seamless and contextual services. Comprised primarily of software engineers and data scientists, TCNA is a center of excellence for connected services that elevate the customer experience as well as benefiting dealers, distributors and partners. At the heart of TCNA is Toyota’s belief in human-centered mobility and a fundamental commitment to personal privacy. Learn more at toyotaconnected.com.

^[1] Now live for voice in public beta and coming soon to all digital channels

^[2] Forrester, The Contact Center As A Service Landscape, Q4 2022, December 29th, 2022

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