Twilio has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to speed up the development and deployment of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration, revealed at the Twilio SIGNAL 2025 conference in San Francisco on 15 May, will combine Twilio’s customer engagement platform with Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry to support businesses in building advanced AI-driven customer experiences.
The partnership aims to benefit over 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft-managed clients by addressing major challenges in conversational AI deployment, such as incomplete data, scalability issues, and integration with legacy systems. The joint effort is expected to accelerate adoption across enterprises and help fulfil Twilio’s broader goal of delivering seamless and meaningful digital interactions between businesses and consumers.
Tackling barriers to conversational AI
Conversational AI uses natural language processing and machine learning to enable machines to interact with humans in a way that mimics natural dialogue. While the technology holds great promise, companies often face difficulties in building and scaling such solutions, particularly due to data limitations and legacy infrastructure.
Twilio’s strengths in communication, data and AI, paired with the secure and scalable infrastructure of Microsoft Azure AI, are expected to provide a powerful foundation for solving these issues. According to Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, “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. Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers.”
The partnership will focus on a range of innovations including multi-channel AI agents, AI support for live agents via Twilio’s Agent Copilot, and multi-modal solutions to improve the quality of digital interactions.
Expanding capabilities through joint innovation
As part of the partnership, Twilio and Microsoft will work together on conversational AI solutions that run on Azure AI Foundry and Twilio’s platform. Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President of Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, commented, “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.”
New solutions introduced by Twilio include ConversationRelay, which allows developers to build advanced voice AI agents using their preferred large language models (LLMs). This tool integrates real-time streaming, the latest in speech recognition, and expressive voice features to help developers build intelligent voice applications faster and with less complexity.
Another new feature, Conversational Intelligence, is now generally available for voice and in private beta for messaging. This technology analyses voice and text conversations, transforming them into structured insights to enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.
A spotlight on Twilio SIGNAL and Microsoft Build
Twilio SIGNAL 2025, held from 14 to 15 May in San Francisco, brought together developers, business leaders, and innovators from across industries. Keynote speakers included executives from Clear, Best Buy, Rocket, and Vineyard Vines. A pre-recorded fireside chat between Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella was also featured during the event. All keynote sessions will be made available on demand at signal.twilio.com.
In addition to the SIGNAL announcements, Twilio will showcase its Azure AI-powered conversational AI solutions at the Microsoft Build Conference in Seattle from 19 to 22 May.
