Twilio has announced a major platform update at its annual SIGNAL conference in San Francisco, centred on four new capabilities designed to deliver persistent, context-aware customer conversations across human and AI participants.
The four pillars – Conversation Memory, Conversation Orchestrator, Conversation Intelligence, and Agent Connect – are aimed at addressing a problem that has dogged customer engagement for years: interactions that begin without any knowledge of what came before.
“Most brands still treat every conversation with a customer like it’s the very first one,” said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio.
“Twilio is changing that at the infrastructure layer, so every business built on Twilio can remember, learn, and respond like they actually know their customers.”
The Business Problem
Most customer service workflows today lack continuity. A customer who raises an issue on chat and then calls in will typically need to re-explain their situation from scratch. Context doesn’t travel between channels, and it rarely survives the handoff between systems or agents.
It’s a challenge that has become more acute as AI agents enter the picture. Businesses are increasingly deploying AI alongside human agents, but without a shared memory layer or coherent orchestration, the result is often more fragmentation, not less.
Twilio’s new platform capabilities aim to fix that at the infrastructure level, with persistent memory, real-time context, and orchestration that spans every channel and participant.
The company’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler positioned the update as a response to a fundamental shift in how customer engagement works.
“The agentic era is here. Agents are joining conversations alongside the people they represent, and modern customer engagement requires an infrastructure that serves both equally,” he said.
The Four Core Capabilities
Conversation Memory maintains customer history, preferences, behaviour, and conversation state across channels, so agents – human or AI – always have the relevant context before engaging. The aim is that no customer ever has to repeat themselves, regardless of which channel they use or which agent picks up.
Conversation Orchestrator provides a unified layer for multi-channel, multi-agent engagement, covering routing, escalation, state management, and handoffs between humans and AI systems. Rather than managing separate workflows per channel, businesses get a single orchestration layer that maintains one continuous conversation thread regardless of how many systems are involved.
Conversation Intelligence uses generative AI language operators to turn live conversations into real-time intelligence. It is built into the new platform capabilities from the ground up, designed to surface actionable insights for human agents mid-conversation and trigger automated workflows across voice and messaging channels.
Agent Connect is an open source, self-hosted framework that connects AI agents directly to Twilio’s voice and messaging channels. It handles the technical complexity of real-time voice streaming, session and identity management, and agentic integrations. Critically, it is model-agnostic – meaning businesses can swap AI providers without changing their underlying Twilio integration or application wiring. As the AI vendor landscape continues to shift, that flexibility is likely to be a significant selling point for enterprise customers wary of lock-in.
Analyst Mila D’Antonio of Omdia noted the breadth of what Twilio is attempting. “At the center of the CPaaS, CCaaS, CDP, and AI convergence, Twilio is redefining what a Customer Engagement Platform looks like – one that remembers, adapts, and orchestrates across every touchpoint,” she said.
A Redesigned Developer Experience
Alongside the core platform announcements, Twilio has completely rebuilt its Console.
The new version introduces Workbench, a dedicated environment for developer productivity, alongside an integrated AI assistant for real-time support.
Product navigation, compliance management, and billing are consolidated in a single interface, with the ability to trial new Twilio products directly within the Console.
SIGNAL 2026 brought several further updates across Twilio’s product portfolio.
Twilio Email, built on SendGrid technology, is now generally available within the new Console.
It is aimed at development teams looking to add email to existing cross-channel workflows, rather than at high-volume senders.
The company was explicit that the product does not replace SendGrid, which remains the platform of choice for transactional and marketing email at scale.
Voice AI received a set of meaningful updates, including PCI-compliant Voice workflows, native integration of Deepgram’s real-time speech-to-text model, and Conversation Relay Insights – a new API providing programmatic access to latency and quality analytics.
On the channel expansion side, Twilio announced Data Residency for SMS in the EU, currently in public beta, offering enterprises the option to manage and store SMS-related personal data within the EU.
A private beta for Apple Messages for Business was also confirmed, which would see Twilio act as an official provider connecting consumers and businesses through Apple’s native Messages app.
Twilio also announced a partnership with Stripe as a launch partner for Stripe Projects, enabling developers to provision Twilio services directly within Stripe’s CLI workflow alongside centralised billing and credential management.
