Look, we're just delighted to have Twilio joining us here today, in San Francisco. It was raining when I came in. Was it still raining?
Yeah, still raining in the morning.
Still raining.
Yeah.
Hopefully it'll clear up soon.
On and off, on and off, it's okay.
Hopefully it'll clear up soon. Thomas Wyatt is the Chief Revenue Officer of Twilio. He's been in that role for... You've been at Twilio for 2 years, right?
Yep. Yep.
You've been in that role for 2 years. My plan is, since this is the first time that we've had Thomas Wyatt here, we're going to talk about you a little bit.
Okay.
Yeah, we'll do that for 5 minutes, and then, we'll talk about Twilio today and everything that's going on in voice.
Okay. Great.
We'll open it up to the audience for questions. Where were you born?
I grew up in Upstate New York.
You did?
A place called Syracuse, yeah. Talk about winters. Yeah.
I grew up in Denver, Colorado. By the time I was 18, I had shoveled my last sidewalk.
Yeah. Same.
I was like, "I'm going to California for college. I don't care. I don't care.
Yeah.
Then when you came out of school, where did you start?
I was fortunate enough to start my career at Cisco.
Yeah. You were there a long time, right?
They had a great program for interns.
Like, 15 years?
I was able to move around the company, various functions.
What did you start out as the very first thing you did?
Actually, the first thing I ever did was I was in the Office of the President as an intern when John Chambers was the CEO way back when.
Come on.
Learned firsthand how he ran the company.
How'd you get that?
I got lucky.
No, you didn't. Tell me, tell me.
Yeah.
How'd it really, how'd it really go?
I no, I just, I happened to started my own company in college, I think I got the attention of some people, like, as a entrepreneurial, somebody in the Office of the CEO took a liking to me, offered me a summer internship, and never looked back.
Wow. What was the company that you started in college?
It was basically the late '90s, so it was, like, building web applications online for small businesses around school.
Yeah.
It helped me pay for college, so.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
Okay. What year is it that you're doing the intern thing with John Chambers?
It was in late 1990s. 1997, 1998. Yeah.
1997, 1998. What comes next at Cisco?
I just stayed there for quite a while, and I was a general-
We can take the slow version. We got time.
Yeah.
What came after the Office of the-?
Well, I was an engineer for a while.
Yeah.
I did product management. I was in corporate development, but I spent about-
This is Cisco, this is Cisco's heyday, right?
Yeah, this was.
Yeah. People don't realize-
... the world's most
... Cisco was Google.
Yeah.
Cisco was Anthropic, right?
It was a crazy time.
Yeah.
We became the world's most valuable company for a month or so. It was most humbling experience you'd ever go through, watching the stock go down 90% and take about a decade to kinda get back to halfway where it was. I t was a great learning experience. I learned a ton from kind of navigating and being part of that journey. I obviously watched a lot of other people that had very senior roles to play in that. During my time at Cisco, I spent most of it as a general manager of different businesses, everything from startups within Cisco to multi-billion dollar businesses, and just learned a lot from it. From there on, I went to more hypergrowth companies like AppDynamics, then I went to an AI startup for four or five years before joining Twilio.
It was People.ai.
Yeah, People.ai.
Yeah.
So.
Twilio, you landed in March of 2024?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. It's been about two years.
Okay. I'm going to take a little detour here because I forgot that you were at Cisco. I nvestors are so confused right now about how is AI impacting software.
Mm-hmm.
One of the analogies that I make, and I'm wondering if you're going to agree with this analogy, is I say if you look back at what SaaS did to on-premise...
Mm-hmm
... AI is going to do something similar to SaaS.
Mm-hmm.
The number 1 software company in the year 2000 was Microsoft.
Right.
They made it through just fine. The number two software company, and they sold a lot of other stuff, but in terms of the amount of software they sold, was Sun Microsystems.
Oh, interesting.
The dot in dotcom, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Right, right.
Because of, right? 'Cause of the operating system.
That's right.
Solaris or whatever they used to call it, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Where did they go? Where they went is they struggled for 10 more years, and they got bought by Oracle for 0.6 times revenue.
Wow.
That's what happened to Sun.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Do you think that what we're going through? The punchline is if you look at the top 20 software companies in the year 2000, 65% of them, no one went bankrupt.
Mm-hmm.
T hey went to one or two times revenue, and they got bought by Oracle or some PE firm.
Sure.
They didn't make it through. Do you think that we see a similar level of... Is it equally hard for the SaaS companies to make it through the AI era? What are your thoughts?
I mean, it's, I think it's a tough question. It may depend a little bit on what-
Yeah, I didn't prep you at all for it.
Yeah.
I'm really sorry.
I think of what we'd define as SaaS companies and where they are in terms of the workflows in which they automate. I think the companies that have consumption-based business models will be obviously a little bit easier in terms of making the adoption. Many of them have already started to. I also think that some of the software providers have very sticky whether it's proprietary data or connections to highly regulated environments, those particular areas are probably going to be a little bit stronger.
That being said, I think it's tough for anyone to fully anticipate the power of what AI will do to any industry at this point. From our focus perspective at Twilio is that whatever the application may be, that sits on top of the infrastructure that we provide, we know it's going to require some level of communications and some level of personalization, and that those are the areas that we think we can help.
Yeah. Okay. When you joined in 2024, your first role was within Segment?
Yes. I came in to help bring the Segment business to profitability.
Oh, that was you.
Yeah.
Yeah. Tell us about that. Let people know what was going on with Segment.
I've always loved the product. I was a customer of Segment for multiple places, whether I was a CMO at AppDynamics or a chief product officer at People.ai. We were both using Segment. I just always felt like it was core to how we truly understand who our consumers were. The Twilio opportunity was presented to me, I just thought, boy, there's a lot Twilio could do if it could deeply integrate kind of the customer memory layer of what Segment could provide deeper into the core Twilio platform itself. I think the company hadn't quite done all the integrations that it needed to at that time.
Yeah.
I also know the business needed to be put back onto a more profitable trajectory and reinvigorated. For me to come in and to have a role to play in that was a lot of fun. It was a challenge at the time. J oining in 2024, there's a lot of questions about Segment's business and the fit within Twilio. I think over time, we've proven that the core capability does matter in the AI era, and now we're building it natively into our platform.
I think you're good at this point. It was a rough transition, but I think you're good.
Yeah.
How did you become the chief revenue officer of the whole thing? In October 2024
Yeah. What we decided was-
take you to coffee or like how does this happen?
Well, what's funny is, even chief revenue officer is not really probably the best definition of what my role is.
Okay.
It's in a way it's the go-to-market organization, the global operations of Twilio is really the charter. The reason why Khozema Shipchandler thought I would be a good fit for it was Twilio's own go-to-market is a transformation that we kicked off about a year and a half ago, and it's a lot of general management, which is really my strength. Whether it's shifting to more of a solution sales motion, whether it's, changing the way we do some of our back office capabilities, those are all transformational projects that are going on at Twilio over the last couple of years.
When we decided that it was going to be important to take the Segment sales organization and the communication organization, which were two different business units, merge them together, integrate our R&D organization into building one integrated platform.
Mm.
We wanted to do the same for the go-to-market organization as well, and so it was sort of a natural kind of.
I didn't realize, so there were 2 R&D organizations before y ou put them together.
Yeah. Yeah.
How did that go? How do you do that?
We did that, at the beginning of last calendar year, so and it's gone really well. T he integration has gone well, and that's why you're starting to see a lot more of our products more seamlessly integrated. Some of the solutions that we've brought to market recently and will bring to market over the next couple of quarters, you're going to see a lot of that core capability becomes less of a loosely connected, but much more deeply integrated set of services. Customers have been asking for that. For us, this is a great time to deliver on that promise.
All right. Awesome. Okay. My standard question is, how's business? What would you say?
I was told you might ask me that.
Yeah. Were you prepped for that? Yeah. Good.
Well, listen, I think it's business is going quite well right now. We just redid our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. On balance from a growth perspective, this has been one of the most balanced and strong quarters we've had in years. Whether it's, we look at really four key growth levers for Twilio that we're focused on. The first is the self-service business, and that grew in the high 20s. Our partner and ecosystem, our ISVs, have been incredible growers for us in the high 20s as well. We've seen strong balance in our international regions, and we've seen really good cross-sell and up-sell momentum. In fact, our multi-product customers were up 26% year-over-year.
Whether it's the existing growth levers, whether it's the new business motion between our self-service channel and our direct sales model, we've seen rapid acceleration in our best new business quarter in multiple years. In general, feeling pretty good about the setup going into 2026.
Yeah. It's the right time to be having to do this conference and answer that question.
Yeah.
If self-service is in the high 20s partners is in the 20s, multi-product you say is up 26?
Yeah. Multi-product customer counts that's the way we measure.
Yeah
Yeah.
Overall growth, I think, was 14%? What were the things that were weighing it down? What are the things that are not growing as fast?
Yeah. I think it's if you look at just the way the business is set up, core messaging, I don't remember the exact number, but it's, I think it was in the mid-teens. Voice was an accelerated much higher than that. Email was a little less than the company average. Part of that is we're going through a bit of an email transformation. The core email business is growing at the company average, but we're de-emphasizing one of our SKUs in email. It's the marketing campaign SKU.
It's something that's not as strategic for us anymore. That's a little bit of a drag on the growth rate there. Segment's growing below the company average. On balance, if the primary things that we're looking at, the channels themselves, whether it's voice, messaging, RCS, email, but more importantly, the software add-ons, the high margin products that sit on top of those channels, those are all growing north of 20%.
Awesome. It's really great to see this business come back.
Thank you.
So we-
Appreciate it.
... we helped take it public, in the early days...
Oh, man!
... it was, we have more leads than we can respond to.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
That got you to $ several billion.
Sure
Segment happens, and things kind of slowed. Now it feels like with voice.
Yeah
... maybe you're getting back to a, "We have more leads than we can respond to"-
Yeah
... at least in that area. Help us understand what's going on with voice A, in the industry? We have Ciena presenting here later today-
Yep. Great.
... and in my prep call, they're like, I forget what the percentage was, like, 90% of everything they're doing is voice, right?
Yeah.
Also help us understand why it is that if you're using a voice agent, you need Twilio.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Even if the voice agent comes from, say, ElevenLabs.
Sure.
Let's do the industry first. What's going on with voice?
Yeah. Well, just in general, I think we all realize that the voice is having its renaissance in some ways...
Yeah
... because the user experience of how agents and applications are being built from scratch is changing. Voice is becoming a far more prominent way of unlocking a lot of the use cases that customers have struggled with in the past. O ne of the most obvious ones is customer care. It's like, how could you scale your customer care using virtual agents, and voice is the way a lot of cases get resolved, and being able to connect a voice agent to a large language model with persistent memory is a use case that customers care a lot about. More broadly, there's just a lot of more inbound demand of voice, and I think immediately people think it's purely just the AI startups. The AI startups are absolutely a catalyst, but it's not the only catalyst for voice.
Yeah.
We're seeing voice acceleration and strength with our traditional ISVs as well. Many of the software providers that are even public today, the SaaS companies, they're embedding more voice capabilities into their products because they need to modernize and make those products more AI-centric. We're also seeing traditional enterprise customers want to rebuild the way they do outbound marketing or customer care or, and they're using the kind of building your own voice systems as well. The combination of all of those three cohorts has brought more acceleration to, and interest to our business. From a voice, where does Twilio help perspective-
Yeah
... the-
Someone told me if you have an agent, you still need a phone number, for example.
You still need.
Is that true?
Yeah.
That's, like, that's a really easy message to convey to an investor, right?
Exactly.
Just because it's just 'cause it's an AI agent still needs a phone number.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's a very basic thing is you need to be able to connect to the carriers and connect through a phone number. Twilio provides masks all the complexity of compliance and carrier infrastructure. We've got thousands of carrier connections globally. We've been doing voice for years at scale. The ability to become compliant with those phone numbers, the ability to make sure that you can protect them from account takeovers and fraud prevention. There's just a lot of complexity around quality. Customers, if you're a new AI startup or even enterprise customer, you're like, "Look, I don't want to deal with any of that complexity.
Let me just plug into the Twilio APIs and have them solve that for me, and I can go verticalize my voice application with a proprietary user experience or a workflow that's specific to the problems that they're trying to solve. What we see is we're definitely like the core of the infrastructure of those voice services and then increasingly a lot of our customers are adding some of our AI capabilities on top of our voice channels to make their products even stickier, and so we're seeing good growth there as well.
Okay. Tell us something. Besides a phone number, what else do you need? Then let's talk about the AI capabilities a little bit.
You basically need the ability to handle the voice orchestration and the conversion of speech-to-text, text-to-speech, the ability to connect it to a large language model, the ability to detect things like sentiment analysis, the ability to connect that to what you might also be hearing across other channels, whether it's messaging or email or RCS. What customers are looking for is a platform where they can just plug into an API and you can get the combination of branded messaging from traditional messages like RCS to a branded voice application to branded email and have a consistent conversational insight layer above all of that orchestrated by a single agent infrastructure, and that's largely what Twilio provides them.
Yeah. You mentioned new products that are coming earlier. What's coming that you can tell us, obviously?
I mean, I can't get ahead of.
Like what are you excited about?
... public announcements.
Don't get too excited.
But, uh, but, uh-
Just big picture, what's coming?
I think we've been talking a lot about adding more seamless integration of our core channels and more orchestration and more customer memory layers on top of the Twilio platform. You can expect to see us talk a lot more about that over the next couple months.
Awesome. When's SIGNAL?
It's in May.
In May.
In San Francisco. Yeah.
Okay. it's here?
Yeah. Yeah.
Where are you going to do it?
Good question. I don't know the answer.
Don't know.
You guys know the answer?
Marriott.
Marriott.
At the Marriott?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, cool. Same as last year. Yeah. What are you seeing banks, since we're a bank, right? What are you seeing banks do with voice?
Yeah. I mean, we're seeing some really interesting use cases around mortgages.
Oh, interesting.
... for example, like the consumer mortgage, application process. It's a good example where a customer-
I can apply for mortgages by talking instead of fil-. No way.
Well, you can do a combination. What typically happens with mortgages, we all know it's a complicated process that usually takes a couple of steps. Some of them are automated, others require underwriting evaluation by a human, and maybe takes a couple of-
Yeah
... days to get approvals. That's a great example where you can come to a bank website online, you can begin a process of applying for a loan using a virtual agent through whether it's voice or messaging-.
Yeah
... to be able to connect you and knows you already because of the relationship you have once you log in. You take that persistent memory, it helps fill out the forms for you. If you need to escalate to speak to a human representative because you have a very complex situation, you can escalate in context to a human all through the Twilio experience. That's one where we've seen a lot of customers that have been using that as an outbound way to generate new revenue streams through voice agents.
That's a great one. Okay. Any questions from our audience? Sure. In the front row.
We're seeing that voice is really hot right now, which can be seen with all these startups like ElevenLabs, and then like you said, Ciena using 90% of it as voice. My question is what comes after voice? You have these great email-
Mm-hmm
messaging capabilities. Like, is there a way that connects AI to those?
Yes, absolutely. The way we think about it is there's a lot of interest right now specifically on the voice channel, as you said, and there's an ecosystem of AI startups that have been building apps on top of the voice channel. What they're also realizing is that customers want to take that conversation from voice to other channels as well, and they want to do it in full context. Ciena is a good example of that. We've got a great partnership with them. They've been a great customer for us, and they're expanding beyond voice to other channels as well, like RCS, WhatsApp, et cetera. Go back to that mortgage use case.
The idea of the mortgage is you might have that voice conversation, but then you want to follow up with a confirmation via email or maybe an SMS 3 hours later that requires an approval, j ust to get through a process. Doing those individual channels in isolation doesn't allow you to have an integrated experience with 1 single memory, with 1 single orchestration layer, and that's why Twilio is looking at it from much more of a multi-channel model. As we said, a lot of customers really just get started with 1 channel and voice, and then they realize they gotta do these other things. What we're seeing now is some of our early voice customers are expanding to other channels. I think there might have been a question in the back.
It's a bit blinding light on. Oh, yeah, I see one back there. Go ahead, Kincaid.
The three big mobile providers have increased their A2P fees recently. Have you seen a change in customer behavior related to that?
We have not. There's been no material changes. Customers don't like it, when the fees go up, but they've not necessarily changed their spending patterns or behaviors. I would anticipate if they continue to go up higher and higher, you might start to see customers move to other channels within the Twilio platform. For right now, we've not seen it.
Oh, please.
Quick one.
Oh, we have to remember to repeat the questions, by the way.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah. I forgot to.
Oh, shoot. Okay.
In this new world of an agent-to-agent communication, no human in the loop, how does Twilio is reinventing?
How do we reinvent agent-to-agent communications without-?
Not a human agent.
Right.
AI agent.
There's nothing in our current workflow today that requires a human agent to be in the loop. It's purely something, that an enterprise can decide whether they want to or not. T he way we're connecting our agents together is there is orchestration layer between various agents. Because we're so API-centric leveraging MCP protocols and other things, it's actually pretty easy for us to do that. What we find is that customers or more complex use cases in enterprise, want to make sure that the agents are interpreting things correctly. A lot of the rules and business flows were deterministic in nature. Having a probabilistic model that isn't at any sort of checks and boundaries, some customers are a little concerned about that right now.
I think the bigger issue isn't the technology, it's much more around the business process and the governance of what are you going to allow these agents to do in the enterprise. In terms of the small business and startup land, they're already, like, just going all in. Their governance models are far more reduced than what we see in the banks, for example. They're. They have much more structured rules and regulations about the agents.
It's a lot easier when you're starting from scratch.
It really is. It's a lot of fun when you can.
It really is. Yeah.
It really is.
I have a, I have a kid who's at one of the AI startups in San Francisco.
Yeah.
They just go so fast.
Yeah
... because there's no baggage.
There's no baggage.
T here's no baggage. All right. We'll do a short version of this. What's the competitive environment like? Who do you actually compete against now?
We still have our own the traditional competitors that we have in CPaaS and I think those companies, we feel really good about...
Yeah
... taking market share in those-.
Yeah
... those spaces as well. Right now, though, the world is changing, right?
Yeah.
I think we have to be thinking about competition in a different way, and it's really actually unclear exactly where competition will emerge from. Our job is just to focus on what our customers are asking for, and they're asking for a lot more than CPaaS from us.
Yeah.
We're just racing to be able to provide them the capabilities out of the box. I think a lot of what we're trying to do now is just establish partnerships with the right players, the agent builders, the hyperscalers, the AI labs, the companies that are ultimately the origination point of where a lot of these apps and agents are being built, and making sure that Twilio is a default part of that experience.
That's a perfect place to stop.
Great.
Thank you so much, Thomas.
Yeah. It was a lot of fun.
It was great to have you here.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah. It's easy, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of fun. Thank you.