Twilio Signal 2026 | Rikki Singh, Twilio

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Rikki Singh

Vice President, Emerging Technologies

Twilio

play_circle_outline Twilio Forward: Pursuing Horizon-Three Innovations to Double Value While AI Compresses Adoption Timelines

play_circle_outline Orchestrating Conversation Memory and Claude Skills with Twilio Cloud Connector for Seamless Omnichannel, In‑IDE LLM Workflows

play_circle_outline 2027 vision: unified infrastructure managing agent/human/agent-to-agent identity, permissions, and rogue behavior.

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Rikki Singh, Twilio

Rikki Singh

Vice President, Emerging Technologies Twilio

In this interview from Twilio SIGNAL 2026 in San Francisco, Rikki Singh, vice president of emerging technologies at Twilio, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how Twilio is evolving its unified platform to power the next generation of agentic customer engagement. Singh leads Twilio Forward, the company's dedicated innovation team working across three horizons — with AI squarely in the near-term while longer-range bets include non-terrestrial networks, quantum computing and verifiable credentials. He explains how Twilio's shift from individual ... Read more

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What is your role leading Twilio Forward, and what does Twilio Forward focus on (time horizons, target technologies such as non‑terrestrial networks and quantum), including whether AI is part of its scope? add

What are the three new Twilio Forward initiatives announced at SIGNAL, and what do they mean (please explain them in more detail)? add

How do you see the future of communication platforms developing over the next year, and what do you expect will happen by Twilio SIGNAL 2027? add

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Rikki Singh, Twilio

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello, and welcome back to Twilio SIGNAL 2026. My name is Paul Nash. Why I come to you live from San Francisco. I'm here with Rikki Singh, VP of R&D, emerging technologies and innovation at Twilio. Rikki, how are you doing?

Rikki Singh

>> I'm good, Paul. Thanks for having me here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thanks for being on. It's always great to talk to you. Why don't we tell the audience a little bit about how you lead the Twilio Forward team, your Horizon three initiatives, kind of the conversation we were just having right before.

Rikki Singh

>> Sure. I lead Twilio Forward, which is Twilio's innovation team. We focus on what in three to five years is going to help us double our value. What kind of technologies are going to be there relevant, but then also, what does it mean for Twilio to adopt and evolve as a result of those technologies? And we look at everything all the way from non-terrestrial networks to quantum, and think about implications for us. And of course, I always get the question, is AI part of it? And I think, yes, but we consider that to be more horizon one and two. It's happening right now versus think of it as a two, three years out.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, it's exciting times. I love to have those discussions with you, always talking, pontificating of where we're going and what the future's going, how the changes are happening. It's an important part of understanding the marketing dynamics, the market dynamics of what's happening there.

Rikki Singh

>> Absolutely. And it's all compressed, right? We're operating on such a compressed timeline. Things that you would think that we'll see adoption in a year, like get compressed to six months or less. And you have companies that ship every week. The whole dynamic... The technology has always been dynamic. I think the timelines have just compressed.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. All right, let's talk about that. Because your team fitting into the broader R&D organization, there's all these different impacts and things that kind of... All these different... Especially with AI, right? AI is constantly changing. How does it fit into the approach of the innovation of the company and the overall team? The keynote was exciting. The unified platform approach, just a year ago going from a siloed approach to more unified platform. Super exciting. How does that all work together?

Rikki Singh

>> Yeah. I think, one, we do not talk about our individual products anymore, like you rightly pointed out. We are a platform. We have several composable platform components that you could use to solve any problem as it relates to engagement. For my team specifically, we operate across horizons. The more near term horizon focus has been, how has AI changed the way builders build? And we see that with the IDEs and the AI tools that exist within these IDEs for developers to build. The next thing that we think about is what happens when, instead of human to human, the conversation is between agents to human or agent to agent. And then when I think about horizon three, it's things like non-terrestrial networks or verifiable credentials. Where is the world headed? My team operates across all three. And then as we think about some of the more near term things, we're very excited about the announcements we're going to make tomorrow. Whether that is about how you can build with Twilio inside any of your favorite AI IDEs. Whether that is... Claude is a big one there, of course. But then, also if you're in any of the AI projects, per se. Stripe is a great example for that one. And then, yeah, we'll be talking about agent to human as well. I can go any direction.

Paul Nashawaty

>> All right, absolutely. Well, let's start there. Let's bring it back to what happened today. The keynote that we saw was really exciting. I loved the orchestration, the communications, the memory tying it all together. Having that omnichannel experience, but having it really passing the information. Love that. The demos were exciting. They were really cool. But tell me a little bit about the three new Twilio Forward initiatives that you're announcing here at SIGNAL. And what does that mean? You started touching on them, but double click down into them.

Rikki Singh

>> Absolutely. Today you heard a lot of cool announcements. You heard about conversation memory, conversation orchestration, conversation intelligence. Guess what? Tomorrow a developer wakes up, they are in their favorite IDE. They'll be using their favorite coding assistant, let's say Claude, for example. And they are not going to be the ones going in looking up docs. They're going to be asking Claude, "Help me set up conversation memory." And we release the products. Claude's training data does not include details about these products. What happens next? And that's where the Twilio Cloud Connector and Cloud Skills, the plugins come in. Where you could hook up the Twilio MCP server through the Cloud connector and essentially start coding in native language. You could ask it to, "Hey, help me set up conversation memory, or help me set up an orchestration between voice and messaging." And it will help you do that within whatever IDE you use.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, this is exciting, because this is definitely in my wheelhouse. This is what I focus on. I focus on app dev. I focus as a developer, the developer persona. Developers very much live in their world. They love to work in their bespoke environments. They love to use their IDEs, as you said, rightfully so. You're passing the insights up through the Twilio MCP server, but you're also using the native skills for the deeper integration.

Rikki Singh

>> And not just deeper integration. I would think of it as like, we have 1,800 APIs, and we just announced a bunch more. We don't expect you to... And think about it, there's a whole set of things that happen with the POC. But building at scale, engagement experiences is challenging. And you have the tribal knowledge among Twilio developers, among our TAMs, our solution engineers. We want to bring all of that expertise of building at scale to the developers. That's where we're using Skills. The best way to think about Twilio Skills as part of Claude plugins is they are your customer engagement domain expert that you could hook into your IDE and then essentially build with.

Paul Nashawaty

>> All right, let's talk a little bit about that. What are the critical components to really fully unlock the potential of AI? Especially when you look at the Twilio platform, the unified approach, it can go in a hundred directions, right? But what are those critical components that you're thinking of?

Rikki Singh

>> From a platform product perspective, I think that... We talked about this, which is our goal is to let you be, bring your own LLM, bring your own memory if you need to. But for us, the main goal is let's make sure you're not putting in effort to do multichannel orchestration. To be able to get insights from your conversations, to be able to pick up and drop off threads as they happen with your customers. That's where we've spent a lot of time leveraging AI on our end. I know I touched upon how we help you build in the IDEs. I did also want to talk about another set of our developers. Some of our developers start from scratch. They're setting up a whole new stack, setting up a new business. For them, they have to... If the moment you're spinning up a new stack, you have to go and like buy six different services from six different vendors. Somebody's setting up a database for you. Somebody's going to be your billing provider. And you have to hand roll all of this glue by yourself and just hope that it works. We saw Stripe come out with Stripe Projects. And we realized, you know what, when you're setting up a stack like that, setting up a business, yes you need billing. But guess what's the next thing you need? You need a channel to talk to your customers, let them know you've billed them, send them a reminder. And so we partnered with Stripe, and we're going to be announcing this tomorrow. When you set up Stripe Project and you look for a communications provider, you're going to find Twilio right in there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> This is important, right? Because when we look at the Stripe Project launch, and I know that the developer preview was there and I was really excited to see that, because that was really, really interesting to me. Especially from the payment portal. But when you look at it, it's more than just setting up a partnership. That connector's been there for a long time. It's about the frictionless easability, usability to accelerate those projects. Maybe you can touch a little bit more on that.

Rikki Singh

>> It's that. It's like we have assumed that you're going to have an agent trying to do this for you. And for an agent to then go to all these different vendor websites, it's challenging. your agent, once you've spun up Stripe Projects, you could just ask your agent to add Twilio to it and it would do that right there in the CLI. You never leave the CLI. You never reenter your credentials, because Stripe passes that to us. You never reenter your billing information, because we get a shared payment token from Stripe. And guess what? We send your API credentials confidentially into your environment. It's secure, it's seamless and it's extremely low friction. It's not just letting humans experience low friction, it's an agentic infrastructure that just lets you build on it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Let's talk a little bit about that. These environments, they're not necessarily greenfield environments, right? There's a lot of environments that have heritage, legacy workflows, legacy environments, legacy datasets. How do you protect that information so it's available and there's governance, compliance, and regulations and controls in place in order for that to work?

Rikki Singh

>> Yeah. That's the reason why we're making different sets of announcements across the various use cases. When I think greenfield, that's where Stripe Projects is most effective, because you're spinning up a bunch of services to start something new. When I think brownfield, as you're describing, that's where what I would suggest is whatever your favorite ID is, hook us into that. Whether you're using Claude, whether you're using Cursor, you're using Figma maybe to design your enterprise experiences. You could be using Replit. We will be in all those interfaces for you to be able to build Twilio orchestration, Twilio Voice, whatever product you may be using right in that environment.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's really cool. I think it's awesome that it's right there, right at your fingertips. All right, I was looking at your recent blog that you wrote on the agent to human approach. Let's talk about that. Because as you were talking about, there's this world of agents to agents, human to human, human to agent, agent to human.

Rikki Singh

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's all going everywhere. What are we doing with that?

Rikki Singh

>> I think that today a lot of conversation... Or I should say, yesterday a lot of conversation was human to human. And clearly there's a new player on the block, that's agents. I think we've taken channels, whether that was email or messaging, we've taken channels that were built for human to human interaction and started using them with agents and just assumed that's going to work. And I think that's where if you bring into the fold the non-determinism that comes with agents, it makes it very challenging. Our idea behind A2H was, yes, you can engage with agents in natural language, but you genuinely want to bring some determinism to that interaction, especially if you want to give them high risk, high autonomy tasks. If you want them to transact on your behalf, if you want them to have conversations on your behalf, you don't want that to be as non-deterministic as it happens to be right now. And that's where when we thought about... We looked at communication patterns across the board, and we realized there are actually five intents that formed the basis of a lot of the interaction that happens between agent and human, and we tried to codify those intents along with the kind of payload each might take. An intent could be just inform. The agent is talking to the human just to inform them about the action. It could be an escalation, so an escalate. It could be an authorize, when I'm asking for permission to do something. We define these intents such that they try to bring a little bit more determinism to a very non-deterministic ecosystem, while at the same time they're very extensible. You could use the same authorized payload for authorizing a transaction, but you could also use it for, say, authorizing a code check-in. The payload structure evolves, but you could use the same foundational interaction model for either of those two. That was the thinking behind A2H. And we knew that we'd seen agent to agent and A2A as the protocol already out there. That did a lot of what was needed when we thought about machine to machine interaction, but we felt like we had skipped this element of there is a human in the loop, there probably will be a human in the loop for the foreseeable future. And you want to make sure when that human is tapped on, they know exactly what the agent is trying to do, why it's trying to do that, and is able to guide it accordingly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. And I think that there's also an element here of enforcing policy controls, approving agent actions, even reviewing audit trails. But I think this is something that's to come as we put it all together. That's an exciting part. All right, let me ask you this. We're at Twilio SIGNAL 2027, next year. A year from now. Where do you see all of this going, and what do you think is going to happen?

Rikki Singh

>> I think where I see all of this going is a unified platform that is able to have or able to manage at scale agent and human as well as agent to agent. When I say agent to agent, enterprise agents engaging with consumer agents interactions seamlessly. Not just from a communication channel perspective, but also from a perspective of identity, from a perspective of permissions, from a perspective of managing rogue behavior. We want to be the trusted infrastructure for the future of communication, not just the current communication, and I see us do that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I definitely see you as an infrastructure enabler, for sure. Rikki, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Always a pleasure having you on. Thank you for being on today.

Rikki Singh

>> Thank you. Thank you so much, Paul.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty, coming to you live from Twilio SIGNAL 2026 from theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.