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Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Mar 4, 2025

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

All right, welcome everybody. I'm going to say the Morgan Stanley disclosures for Morgan Stanley Research Disclosures. Please see morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. I'm Meta Marshall. I cover communication software here at Morgan Stanley. We're delighted to have Twilio here, delighted to have Khozema Shipchandler here, who is CEO. You've had all the roles within Twilio, but your current one is CEO.

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Nice to have you.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. Maybe to start with, Twilio has changed pretty meaningfully since you took over as CEO and since you've kind of come to the company in general. You've done some headcount reductions, business reorganizations, changed the go-to-market motions, most of which you covered at your latest analyst day. Can you just outline what investors should take away from the Analyst Day and how the Twilio vision has changed alongside of that, if at all?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah, I think, first of all, what I would say is that we were just talking as we were coming on stage that last year, at the same time during the conference, we talked a lot about the financial discipline with which we wanted to run the company, the operating rigor, and the innovation focus. I think in the year that's transpired, you've seen a number of proof points that sort of validate that. a s you look at our Investor Day, I mean, the past is kind of the past, but in that period of time, we took a company basically that was fundamentally losing money, that was using cash, whose growth had stalled. E very one of those metrics, on a kind of different trajectory, but every one of those metrics is starting to turn around.

I think the evidence of that is starting to show up. T hen from our standpoint, we're incredibly excited about the vision that we've painted for customers going forward. I think that's a great setup for investors as well, right? $3 billion of cash flow that we've committed to over the next several years. We definitely do see positive signs in terms of the growth trajectory of the company. We've given guidance that we feel good about, but fundamentally, we're running it to something higher than that. W e think that whatever that higher number is, all of that's going to fall to the bottom. I nvestors will benefit from that too. T hen coupled with all of that is another authorization on share buyback. I think just the way that we're running the company, Meta, it's a lot different.

I think from our standpoint now, the discipline and the rigor never stop. Those are forever elements. Going forward, it's about how do we start to focus more on innovation as a means to kind of set up the next three to five years.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Perfect, so your Analyst Day, you laid out a TAM of nearly $120 billion in your core markets, growing to nearly $160 billion when layering in AI. Can you just outline for investors the various growth drivers within that TAM? It's a big TAM, and just why Twilio is now better positioned competitively to capture that opportunity?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah, so I think the shift in the TAM that we see happening, I mean, it's a big TAM as it was. I f nothing else changed, let's say, I think our ability to continue growing within a growing TAM between now and 2028, let's just say just in CPaaS, I think that would be a pretty decent story. O ur ability as a company to have taken share relative to our other competitors in that marketplace, I think that was going to be there anyway. T hat continues, right? T hat's one. I think the second thing is that the intersection of the categories that we're seeing, right, with CDP, with CCaaS, with our core CPaaS business, the customer experience as a service category that's opening up. I t's not just what an analyst writes about or what we're trying to say.

This really manifests in the actual customer conversations that we're having, and as we look towards that, we see contextual data as the thing that's going to ultimately activate that growth trajectory, but more tactically, I mean, there's a lot that we're doing on self-serve that's been really exciting over the last 12 months, there's a lot that we think we can do more of with ISVs, which continues to be a great part of our story, and then I'd broaden that out to kind of partners of all kinds. I'd say partners is an area, frankly, that we've not done as great of a job in, and I think there's obviously volume leverage distribution there, and then international. I mean, we're underexposed as a company internationally.

I think there's a combination of just natural market growth, levers that we are going to activate ourselves that I think are totally a self-help story. T hen this market convergence just opens up an even broader TAM.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. K ind of on that market convergence, one of the largest value propositions for Twilio has been the ability to kind of combine communications and contextual data with Segment. The cross-sell motions over time have kind of underwhelmed maybe. Can you help outline what has been limiting those opportunities and how the changes you've made can kind of get us to achieving more of that target?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, I think your question's right. I mean, I think we've done historically two things relatively poorly, right? I think one is that the way in which we organized our go-to-market team, we went through a number of different changes there, was fundamentally flawed. R efocusing and having dedicated sales reps that can just take CDP to market because you've got to seed it to be able to kind of unlock additional opportunities going forward. But I think honestly the bigger limiter was we'd never actually launched a native product with which you could activate data inside of a communications API. O ne of the big things, and we talked a lot about this last year as a result of our Segment operational review, is at some point you have to listen to customers in terms of what they're telling you.

I think having native data capabilities through a communications API, that was paramount. We saw a bunch of success with that. We're now starting to combine that with AI workloads too, which I'm sure we'll talk about. I think that's been a real unlock in terms of customer conversations because Twilio has always been the easy button company, right? A customer wants to be able to come to the platform. They want to be able to access an API. They want to be able to consume data. T hey want that to be super simple. I think all of that is sort of in place now. T hen with respect to go-to-market, what we have done is we've kind of functionalized our go-to-market team. However, we've kept the Segment sales reps a little bit isolated. We put much heavier incentives in terms of cross-selling.

I think the combination of having products, having kind of better sales execution, and we've done a lot over the last year that I think has validated that too. You see some of that obviously on our balance sheet. That all supports the thesis that there's a thing here and we're executing against it and we see more opportunity.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Got it. Y ou mentioned ISV and self-serve have been go-to-market motions that have started to kind of see more traction in. We saw this evidenced in kind of the double-digit growth in Q4. Can you just speak to some of the initiatives that helped drive success here? Y ou mentioned kind of partnerships being another area where you guys still have some work to do. Just what does that addition of additional kind of partners to that flywheel?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Sure. T o start on the self-serve side, I mean, obviously this is like the heritage of the company, right? I n some ways, it was sort of like a back to the future moment for us in that we'd always had a really strong brand. We'd always had a strong self-serve capability. I think inside the company, the way that we characterized it was we wanted customers to be able to get to a magic moment in minutes. O ver the last couple of years, for reasons that are I think necessary to protect the ecosystem, working with a number of our carrier partners, we've introduced a lot of friction into the process of just signing up an account, putting your use cases out there in the world.

H onestly, a lot of the work was technology work behind the scenes that's kind of hard to see for maybe the average person, but very apparent to developers, right? W hen a developer attaches themselves now, a lot of that friction is gone, right? T heir ability to seamlessly kind of go through the self-serve sign-up process is made a lot easier. Their ability to access multiple products is a lot easier. Their ability to understand exactly what's happening when they communicate with customers, it's like they're in dashboards through analytics in the self-serve platform. J ust a lot of things behind the scenes that we did to better activate people that were coming in through that funnel.

On the entirely flip side of the equation with respect to ISVs and partners, I think one thing people don't fully understand about ISVs is there's some really, really big ISVs that we're obviously super proud to call partners, some of whom will be presenting at your conference over the next few days. But actually, the tail on ISVs goes into the thousands, right? N ot only are the growth characteristics attractive, actually the gross margin characteristics are actually better than the corporate average in spite of what you might think relative to some of the big ones that are able to obviously negotiate price as a result of volume. But I think the one thing that we've never unlocked with ISVs, and the same concept extends to partners, is with ISVs specifically, we don't co-sell with a lot of them, right? W e're not really competing.

The only real product that we are ever competing in directly, we pulled away from Engage Premier, which you're familiar with. N ow there should be no friction in our ability to work with one another to go pursue customers together. L ook, I mean, there's always going to be some level of co-opetition, I guess. But ultimately, our infrastructure is required. Ultimately, we're not competing with them on the MarTech side. T o the extent that the ISV is MarTech oriented, and I think that presents an opportunity.

With partners more broadly, what I would say is as you get into these implementations where it's communications, data, and AI, if you're Morgan Stanley, you probably have the resources, the technical wherewithal to be able to string these things together on your own, given your own in-house expertise, your own developers, your IT teams are very sophisticated, but that may not be true for the average retailer. E nter SIs who now have an ability to make a buck off of stringing these different things together. That's not business we want to take on. We want to push the building blocks out. I think that's a win for everybody.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. In terms of balancing kind of developer-led motions or kind of your self-serve heritage, where do you see kind of enterprise sales entering into that? J ust what kind of efforts are you making to improve that enterprise motion?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

I think it's a couple of things. O ne is the enterprises still, they dominate the revenue line, right, in many respects. A gain, with 325,000 plus customers, clearly a huge number of those are large enterprises. They tend to be the bigger spenders as well. I think the message that's really resonating with them, and it goes to the kind of largest deal that we announced in Segment's history in Q4 to a number of other really exciting customer conversations. These are companies who are very excited about the vision of communications, data, and AI. They want to create outsized ROI, whether that's both on the bottom line with respect to reducing their cost basis in terms of AI agents and stuff like that, but also the ability to increase their revenue line.

I think the misnomer perhaps inside of Twilio before was it takes this super consultative, specialized sales rep. I think that's not true, actually, for us at least. I think instead we can lead with developers. A lot of these enterprises come in actually through developers. W e can kind of build those relationships over time. Ultimately, every one of our customers, the only thing they really care about is ROI. I f we can prove ROI to enterprise customers in the same way that we can to everybody else, that's a really compelling story. Getting in the door is not really the hard part. Ensuring that we have compelling ROI in front of them, that's the thing that we've really got to train the reps up for. T hen I think, again, as I said, I think partners can play a really crucial role.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Y ou alluded to kind of the AI opportunity. At your analyst day, you kind of outlined this $260 million of revenue that you've had over the last 12 months from these customers. Just how does AI unlock contextual data and your broader value proposition? W here are you kind of seeing that success to date?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. T here's kind of two things in there, I guess. One is with respect to AI. I mean, I think the opportunities in AI are obviously amazing. The technology is incredible. W e're really excited. I think with respect to we quoted a few numbers, right? $260 million in revenue, 9,000 companies, 90% of the Fortune 50. At some level, no matter where you are in the Twilio life cycle, all of it is attractive to us, right? It could be as simple as an AI startup who's activating against our infrastructure, which could be voice capabilities, and they're getting going that way. It could be even simpler. I mean, it could be that they need some authentication capability, and they're coming to Twilio. W e're sending out a bunch of 2FA or SMS as notifications on their behalf.

Obviously, the kind of higher order stuff is companies that are coming in and using a variety of capabilities, right? T hat communications data, the AI or the contextual data, and then AI all in the mix. I think ultimately that's what we believe is sort of the destiny of the company. I think it's validated in the customer conversations that we've been having. I think the reason we're so bullish on it, Meta, is because in all of the customer conversations that we have, yes, companies are very excited about AI writ large. I think there's a continuum, right? Y ou're going to have, let's say, non-regulated industries like food delivery, restaurants, retail, e-commerce. The stakes are just lower than in healthcare or financial services, right, or insurance. I think that maybe drives the adoption cycle in some ways.

Although I was at a healthcare conference last week, and I was a little surprised by how quickly folks are ready, but anyway, I think the key point is that companies will never give up their contextual data. It would be crazy for them to give up their contextual data to help train up large language models, as amazing as they are, to be able to disintermediate them from their consumers one day. That's just not going to happen, right, and I think you see that also. It's not just Twilio saying that. I think you see that through the lens of the big cloud providers. You see that through the lens of the big data warehouse providers. The CISO has a lot of power right now, right? They do not want data to leave their environment.

If anything, they want a platform like ours to interoperate with their environment, but to keep the data there, right, to be able to drive value outside. W hile an LLM may integrate, the data stays there. W hatever the training is that's done stays in the customer's operating environment, doesn't leave. F or obvious reasons, you wouldn't want if you're retailer A versus retailer B, you probably don't want a model being trained up so that you can sell more stuff over to retailer B, right? I think it's sort of intuitively obvious, but now we're hearing it time and time and time again inside of our customer environments.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Got it. I mean, how do you see yourselves as able to really establish yourselves as kind of that vendor-agnostic platform for AI names to reach customers versus trying to kind of offer something on your own?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, I think, again, it speaks to using the strengths that we have, having 325,000 plus customers. That's a pretty good starting point, right, to grow off of, to cross-sell into, to upsell into. Again, I think there's sort of a continuum here in terms of our revenue stack, right? A lot of it in the early days, if we just sold more Verify, which has very high ROI, very protective to our customers, that's a relatively straightforward sale. If we did more Voice Intelligence, again, very high ROI, uses, let's call it AI light capabilities, I think there's a progression, right? Not everybody's going to go necessarily for a big bang, and we don't need them to necessarily. T hat's kind of through the lens of how we sell, through the lens of how customers are buying.

I mean, I'll give you an example that's relatively recent from that healthcare conference. We ran a demo that we put together in two days, okay, in a hackathon. This is all public, and basically what we did is that we developed an AI agent, again, using contextual data about healthcare consumers that's basically able to solve billing inquiries as they come in, okay? Now, for all industries, about 80% of all call volume is driven by billing. For the healthcare, I was actually myself astounded by the statistic. For the healthcare industry, it's 97%. Okay, so now you've got an AI agent who's able to not just drive the interaction, right? T hat's kind of the flip from IVR to an agent, right, is, okay, it's a one-for-one replace, but it's driving the interaction. But in addition to that, no queue, right? That's pretty attractive if you're a customer.

But most importantly, able to solve the problem in real time, right, using data that the AI agent knows about that specific consumer. That's hard, right? I t's not possible without one's ability to actually use contextual data as the means to drive that. And I'll just tell you a funny story. As I was leaving that particular conference, one of the healthcare CEOs approached me and said, "Hey, listen, my number one issue in my business is people not showing up for appointments on time, okay?" H e said, "Do you guys think you could help us send a text message that would remind them to show up for their appointments?" I was like, "We have been doing that for 16 years, okay?" But I'm not being flippant. It gives you the range of opportunities to be able to unlock ROI in these various industries.

It doesn't have to be all AI, all the time, all in. Again, if you look at it through the lens of ROI, there's growth from that relatively simple example of notifications, which is real ROI for them, right? If customers are showing up on time, all the way through to these more sort of agentic offerings, I think it's really cool, and I mean, it's super exciting to be in technology right now, frankly.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. I mean, maybe on that, those are two great cases where you have a solution today for a customer that maybe didn't even know that you were the person who could provide that solution. A s organizations turn to system integrators, particularly when it comes to AI and they're a little bit more like, "I don't know where to start," what can you do to kind of improve relationships with system integrators to make sure that people know that you have these solutions?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. Great question. I mean, we have a good brand. That's a good starting point, right? I think if you're a systems integrator, what you know at some level, some core level is that you need communications infrastructure, right? T ypically, I think we find that that value would accrue to us just because we're a well-known brand. That said, I think it's on us, though, to really reinvigorate our partners program, right? W e have hired a new head of our partners programs. He's kind of a seasoned veteran, having done partnerships in a variety of industries, predominantly in technology, over the course of his career. I've been very excited about what I've seen so far in terms of just these early relationships. But again, I think we've got to be careful about not overpromising from the word go. Again, I think it's this continuum of things.

We've got to make sure there's a set of capabilities that are building blocks from our side that they can then string together so that they can see their way to making money off of Twilio by doing the integrations. I think historically, we've not done a great job of that, and there's a lot of at least effort going towards that today.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay, so maybe diving back into kind of the reacceleration that you've seen, you've seen reacceleration past two quarters, and particularly a pickup in deals kind of greater than $500K. Just what are the keys to kind of sustaining this recovery that you've seen, and kind of what drivers do you think ultimately kind of got you to that reacceleration?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it is honestly unlocked through innovation. I mean, I think just to unpack it sort of fully, the reason we've been excited about what we initially called stability and then what we've seen since has become reacceleration is that it's pretty spread out. There's no idiosyncratic factor like social or crypto or something like that that's really driving it. Instead, we're seeing strength across industries, I think, which is pretty encouraging for our overall business. T hat's kind of the starting point. I think the second thing is, as we showed during our investor day, there's a number of these new features that are pretty accretive to our top line, like a Verify, like a Voice Intelligence, but also very ROI enhancing for our customers, right? I t's truly like a win-win, right?

Our customers, they actually in many cases get to ROI in like 30 days. F or us, these are upsell capabilities that add price and obviously accelerate revenue volumes. As I mentioned, we put a lot of investments into self-serve. We've kind of equally put maybe not technology investments, although some with ISVs actually, but also kind of human investments and partners, as I mentioned a moment ago. I think that helps, right, kind of provide a little bit more wind in our sails. But I think ultimately, long term, this is going to be an innovation story, right? I think our ability to make it easy, button simple for customers to avail themselves of data while they're using communications workloads, that's going to be the story sort of over the medium term. But in the short term, it's all self-help. It is a go-to-market execution story.

It's predominantly cross-sell. You saw the stat, right, at our investor day that customers that use more than one product drive 90% of our revenue, yet the majority of our customers don't, right? I'd say that's a huge opportunity for us. W hat's great about it is, again, we're very aligned to customers. When you're using two products, you're not doing it for fun. You're doing it because you get ROI from that. I think putting it on us to drive an ROI story. That's a game we're happy to play all day long.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Got it. S ome of the questions that were old and new again, maybe on the RCS messaging, which seems like a question we've been asking since 2019. How has that messaging platform evolved since its beta launch? J ust how do you think about kind of the threat, the opportunity that kind of comes with RCS?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I don't think it's a threat. I'm sort of neutral to kind of mildly optimistic about it. I mean, I'd love for it to take off, frankly, okay? I think we have a great partnership with Google, and so I think there's a lot to be excited about there. I think that at least today, I see a little bit more limited utility, right? I think some of the reasons for that are for notifications or authentication, you probably wouldn't use RCS, right? I mean, it would be overweight for those kinds of use cases. I think an example I've used sometimes is you travel all the time, right? I travel all the time. But a lot of that is actually driven in the app, right? T he airlines have worked hard to get you in the app.

They're not about to have you leave the app, right? I mean, you've given up valuable real estate on your device for them to kind of dictate the consumer relationship. That's really, really attractive to them. They're not going to flip it over to another place, certainly not to give up data, I think, which I think is a threat. I think what you will put up with from the airlines, and most of them do this today, you'll put up with SMS messages because they need you to know if something went wrong or is going right, hopefully most of the time. Similarly, emails, right? They'll send you a lot of emails to kind of confirm choices, to confirm seating, meals, stuff like that. I think it just has kind of more limited utility in that way.

Then I think structurally, there are some interoperability issues still, right, with respect to Apple. I'm cautiously optimistic, but today, at least, I see it as kind of a neutral.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

All right. I feel like they're only going to tell me bad news and then text, and then maybe the in-app tell me good news, upgrade and.

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Well, I don't know. I mean, actually, I mean, just not to. I know you're making a joke, but I think the other side of it is, think about it, okay? If you're in the app, I think what's really interesting for us and should be for them too is they have a lot of information about you inside the app, right? W e already do this for some airlines. Let's say, God forbid, your flight is canceled, right? You're a frequent traveler. It would be so simple for them to just push you a coupon to say, "Hey, look, thanks for your. We appreciate your loyalty. We apologize for the trouble that we've caused you. Here's a coupon to go visit our lounge. Have a few drinks on us for the hardship that we're putting you through." That wouldn't be so complicated, right?

Again, using contextual data that they have for you, they can even create a rank ordering of who those customers are, but it requires contextual data. Now, with them, they have the ability to control that inside the app. For Twilio, this is awesome because it combines what we were just talking about, communications, data, and then you use a little bit of AI, not a lot, a little bit of AI to create a better experience. You can take what's going to be otherwise a terrible experience for the customer. No one likes a flight cancellation, and just make it better incrementally, right? Incrementally better. These things work, actually.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Okay. That's a great example. I look forward to them incorporating that, so.

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

I think you'll see it soon, actually.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Perfect. Y ou've seen acceleration in the business over the last two quarters, as we just mentioned, but maybe we're a little bit more cautious in terms of your 2025 outlook than investors were expecting, particularly after Q4 earnings. Just how do you look at kind of the guidance philosophy and just what factors could cause the strength you saw exiting the year not continue into the next year?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, I understand the question, okay? But we also put out our earnings about three weeks after we just put out the framework, right? I'm a little surprised that anyone was surprised that we would somehow alter all of our guidance all over again. L ook, I think we're a couple of months in. We feel pretty good about the kind of tailwind that we saw in Q4. We certainly feel good about the setup for the year. I don't think our philosophy around guidance has really changed all that much. I mean, you know the company better than most. The usage dynamics kind of dictate a little bit of the way that we have to guide. I'd say it's about the most dynamic macro environment that I've seen, certainly in a couple of years, and it's not more complicated than that, right?

We are running the company towards double-digit growth. We feel good about the things that we're doing to be able to kind of get there over time, whether it's go-to-market, whether it's product investments, and we want this to be an execution story, not just one of guidance.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Another highlight of the company over the past couple of years has been profitability. You guys had your first quarter of GAAP profitability last quarter. You've been operating or orienting the company towards double-digit growth. But can you just highlight for investors kind of what kind of margin upside you think is in the model with double-digit growth?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Well, look, I mean, I think we've.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

More potential.

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, look, I think we've said five to 600 basis points, right, of margin accretion over the next few years. We certainly feel good about that, right? I'm not going to change guidance on stage or create news. But I think what I would say is we feel very good about our headcount. Okay? We don't see a need to dramatically increase the number of resources. I think on the contrary, we've seen really, really good productivity gains inside the company as it relates to support and SDRs in particular. R ight now, we're quite focused on taking what we've learned there and driving it through the rest of the organization. Anywhere there's kind of repetitive work, I think it's an opportunity, or there's some internal-facing agent, so to speak.

I think if you just kind of run the math, if we get there and we feel pretty good about our headcount, as I said, you should see upside if we achieve those results. A s we've been kind of consistent about, that'll kind of drop to the bottom line. I think the reason we're bullish about the 5 to 600 is we are just starting with some of these AI automation investments. We're just starting with respect to what we characterize as workforce planning. T hen I think there's another side to the story, which you alluded to with respect to GAAP, which is we've also done a lot of change on the equity line, right? Just in terms of really managing burn, kind of putting aside stock buyback, really managing the burn equation. Obviously, that creates kind of change for employees as well.

I think employees have been remarkably engaged. Obviously, stock performance helps, but I think they want to be a part of the story over the next three to five years. T hey've really hung in there, and our attritions remain relatively low.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

I mean, M&A used to be kind of a bigger part of Twilio. You guys haven't done as much. You've just talked about the $3 billion you're going to generate over the next few years. You've talked about kind of share repurchases. Just how are you thinking about M&A as kind of a part of your strategy?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, it's in there. I think to be honest, I mean, I think we have sort of a mixed track record on M&A. W e're very circumspect about where we put that next dollar of M&A investment. I think when we've been adjacent, we've been a lot more successful. I think Segment, we've sort of unpacked the lessons learned from that particular experience, and we know what we would do differently if we had it all over again. I think we're running sort of pre-mortems, if you will, to understand what the traps could be. But look, I think for us, it's predominantly going to be tech tuck-ins and stuff like that. I wouldn't take from that that there's anything imminent planned. There's no signal I'm trying to send there.

It's kind of early in terms of M&A for us, but it's something that we're evaluating, and it's part of the overall capital allocation of the company.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Okay. T hen just kind of last question, something we're asking everybody at this conference. Just how are you using AI internally, and have you had any demonstrated success from it?

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Yeah. I mean, I think the two biggest areas are in customer support and with respect to our SDRs, so in customer support today, 75% of incoming tickets are deflected. That is a massive lift in productivity, so you can imagine, as a result of double-digit growth, you also see increases in ticket volumes, and in spite of those ticket volumes, we have not had to add any headcount, and in fact, quite the opposite. We're using AI as a mechanism to deflect those tickets, and most of those questions, I mean, a lot of them turn out to be billing, as I said a moment ago, those just get answered by a virtual agent, whether it's over the phone or via text message, so a lot of people are doing that. You're probably hearing that from a lot of companies.

The more interesting one, from my perspective, frankly, is we took the exact same technology and said this is all homegrown tech, by the way, too. W e took the exact same technology and said, "All right, well, what if we turned it outwards so that as we get leads, we use those as a way to kind of vet leads," right? T he job of an SDR can be pretty laborious, like having to sift through all this volume. I n the case of inbound leads, now 80% get deflected or, I'd say more appropriate words, filtered, right? N ow the leads that an actual SDR is handling, so there's a productivity benefit. But the more important benefit I would point to is that it's actually a qualified lead, right, on the way in.

I think those are two really profound things that we've seen inside the company. We've done a lot with AI and ML, which I've spoken of before in terms of just accelerating our onboarding process, our compliance process. That's taken work that used to take three months. It's about three seconds now. T hat's pretty powerful. I think the idea is taking some of these things now and spreading them to other departments. But yeah, we're seeing pretty good results. W e're kind of contemplating do we productize this stuff over time.

Meta Marshall
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

All right. Perfect, well, Khozema Shipchandler, very exciting to have you here today, and congrats on all you guys have accomplished over the past few years.

Khozema Shipchandler
CEO, Twilio

Thank you.

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