Twilio has announced a strategic, multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate enterprise adoption of conversational AI by bringing together Twilio’s trusted engagement platform with Microsoft’s powerful Azure AI infrastructure.
“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.”
This alliance opens the door for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft-managed enterprise customers to create smarter, more seamless AI-powered customer interactions. Together, the companies will work to overcome the common obstacles businesses face when building conversational AI solutions, such as fragmented data, limited scalability, and legacy system roadblocks.
The companies plan to co-develop a range of AI-driven customer engagement tools. These include intelligent, multi-channel AI agents that automate interactions across touchpoints, enhanced capabilities for Twilio’s Agent Copilot to assist live support agents in real time, and multi-modal solutions to enhance digital conversations through voice, text, and other formats.
Twilio unveils innovations in conversational AI
In addition to the partnership, Twilio also introduced several key enhancements to its conversational AI offerings at SIGNAL. These innovations help businesses adopt and scale conversational AI more effectively, improving customer care and sales processes.
For instance, ConversationRelay enables developers to quickly build powerful natural voice AI agents using the language model of their choice. It supports real-time audio streaming, advanced speech recognition, dynamic interruption handling, and lifelike voice synthesis, allowing more human-like and efficient conversations with less development overhead.
“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.”
Another major release is Conversational Intelligence, which expands on Twilio’s existing Voice Intelligence product. Now generally available for voice and in private beta for messaging, this tool transforms spoken and written customer conversations into actionable insights. Businesses can use this structured data to refine customer journeys, optimise operations, and deliver better outcomes at scale.
Twilio’s conversational AI strategy emphasises flexibility, letting organisations tailor their adoption journey at their own pace. Thanks to native integration with Twilio’s CPaaS and Customer Data Platform (CDP), these solutions are ready to deliver more personalised, effective engagement, right out of the box.