Twilio has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers. Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyse and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text.
Businesses building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have run into a number of challenges — from lack of precision due to incomplete data, to difficulty scaling beyond successful pilot programs due to legacy systems integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio’s expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI’s safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure aims to help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise.
“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 two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio’s customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including:
- capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement;
- AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and
- multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers.
“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,” said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. “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.”
