The Twilio SIGNAL 2025 customer and partner conference recently concluded in Sydney at the prestigious Doltone House, serving as a showcase for the future of digital engagement. This year’s event focused relentlessly on the transformative intersection of AI, contextual data, and communications, positioning Twilio as a strategic partner for businesses navigating the technological frontier.
SIGNAL 2025 unveiled Twilio’s strategy to equip every enterprise with a platform and intelligence required to transition from a traditional organisation into a sophisticated AI-first company. The key message was clear—the next era of customer experience will be defined by the ability to leverage data to power intelligent, personalised, and seamless interactions across every channel.
During the keynote sessions, Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler highlighted Twilio’s role in the new technology wave, by building a platform to allow businesses to integrate any LLM or AI agent while ensuring trusted customer communications across all channels. Twilio’s product strategy is designed to infuse AI into every layer of its platform, making every interaction and customer experience smarter, faster, and more personal.
“Our platform is the fully composable and extensible foundation for your modern communications. It powers every channel, providing the contextual data organisations need for deep customer understanding. Critically, we give you the freedom to integrate any LLM or agent of your choice—you build what you want, how you want. While we offer pre-built capabilities like AI-powered identity resolution, copilots, and intelligent workflow automation to speed up your journey, our core promise is infusing AI into every layer of the platform. This ensures maximum speed, value, and future-proofing for your business, regardless of where your technology journey takes you”.
For businesses to build and deploy personalised AI responsibly, they must ensure customer data is strictly used to enrich personalised experiences and improve proprietary business models. “AI is only truly useful when it can actually reference detailed information about unique customers, not just broad generalities,” Shipchandler stated, emphasising that AI is only as good as the data powering it. He stressed the importance of data governance, asserting, “Your data is your data,” ensuring customer data is used to enrich personalised experiences rather than being absorbed into training large language models (LLMs).
RCS, Voice AI, and Event-Triggered Journeys
Twilio’s event showcased several general availability and beta product launches, including:
- ConversationRelay: Twilio’s conversational AI capability is now generally available, simplifying the development of advanced, natural voice AI agents that handle low-latency transcription, interruption, and natural-sounding speech orchestration.
- RCS (Rich Communication Services) general availability: Developers can now seamlessly upgrade messaging workflows from SMS to RCS, integrating rich features like branded messaging, quick replies, and carousels, with a dynamic fallback mechanism for maximum reach. RCS is currently available for Android users on Telstra, but not for iPhones. Telstra was the first Australian mobile operator to launch its RCS service in February 2025. Wide adoption is expected in 2026.
- Content template builder: A new tool to easily create multichannel templates for SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, and email, improving message consistency and compliance.
- Event-triggered journeys (Public Beta): This feature allows businesses to capture detailed customer data from real-time actions—like cart abandonment—and instantaneously trigger personalised follow-up messages across the most effective channel.
Trust, fraud, and security
The battle against digital fraud is not just critical—it’s an increasingly costly challenge for Australian businesses. Robin Grochol, who leads Product Management for Twilio’s Data, Identity, and Security suite of products, notes, “The financial toll is severe: Australian organisations incur an average cost of $3.68 for every dollar lost to fraud. The key driver – vulnerabilities in account opening flows. Bad actors are consistently exploiting initial sign-up and onboarding processes to gain unauthorised access, create fraudulent accounts, and compromise valuable customer data”.
A major focus of the conference was the imperative to build tools that combat fraud and improve customer privacy as well as security. Grochol comments, “Customer engagement is impossible without trust. At Twilio, our ‘Trust Portfolio’ rests on four indispensable pillars we are heavily investing in: Scale and Reliability, Seamless User Verification, Branded Communications, and Data Trust. Our mission is to embed trust across an organisation’s entire tech stack, helping them earn and keep the right to engage.
“Our Verify and Lookup APIs combat billions of dollars in fraud loss… our customers have seen a 174% ROI with a payback period of just six months.Verify Fraud Guard and our SMS Pumping Suite have saved customers over $70 million USD by blocking more than 600 million artificially inflated traffic messages.”
Grochol highlights how Twilio is investing in Silent Network Authentication, she comments, “Silent Network Authentication (SNA) is seamless, phishing-resistant, and can dramatically reduce authentication time—a logistics customer saw verification time drop from 50 seconds to under five.”
Silent Network Authentication (SNA) is poised to replace SMS-based Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for mobile users because it offers a more secure and completely frictionless experience.
SNA doesn’t replace the concept of 2FA (which requires two different factors of authentication), but it replaces the method used for the second factor (the “possession” factor, typically the phone).
New study reveals digital patience is waning with Australians
In a release coinciding with the conference, a new Twilio study titled “Decoding Digital Patience” revealed that Australian consumers are rapidly losing patience with poor automated customer service. Key findings indicate that while 96% of Australians feel they should be patient, only 64% say they remain patient during online brand interactions.
Notably, 50% of consumers surveyed said that the use of AI in customer service is making them less patient, with frustrations including AI agents not understanding questions (52%) and having to repeat themselves (48%). The study underscores the critical need for AI to be backed by high-quality, contextual data and a seamless path to a human agent, as 84% of consumers value the ability to easily transfer from an AI to a person.
The conference detailed a platform strategy designed for the integration of AI across enterprise operations. Twilio has positioned its platform as the ‘composable and extensible’ foundation necessary for this evolution, emphasising the capacity for businesses to integrate any preferred LLM or AI agent. This approach aims to ensure technical autonomy, allowing organisations to “build what they want, how they want.”
