Twilio Signal 2026 | Kevin Zellmer, Apply Digital

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Kevin Zellmer

SVP Alliances

Apply Digital

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play_circle_outline Torque AI Launches at GCP Next with Agentic Workflow for Scalable, Personalized Content — First Clients Live

play_circle_outline Torque AI: Built on Gemini/Vertex in Private GCP — Compliant, Business-Friendly LLM Driving CPG Innovation and Proven ROI

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Kevin Zellmer, Apply Digital

Kevin Zellmer

SVP Alliances Apply Digital

In this interview from Twilio Signal 2026, Kevin Zellmer, senior vice president of alliances at Apply Digital, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how Apply Digital's Torque AI and Twilio's newly unified platform are converging to enable personalized, agentic content creation at enterprise scale. Zellmer describes Apply Digital as a 750-person consultancy serving global brands across CPG, retail, sports and media. He details the launch of Torque AI — an agentic content creation platform built on Gemini and GCP — explaining how it delivers compl... Read more

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What does Applied Digital do, and what has the company been working on recently? add

What is Torque, when was it released and who is using it, and how does it enable agentic, personalized content creation at scale (including compliance workflows and integration with GCP/Gemini and multichannel orchestration)? add

Is Torque primarily a technical product or a line-of-business product — in other words, what is Torque’s product persona and how is it designed/deployed? add

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Kevin Zellmer, Apply Digital

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome to Twilio Signal 2026. My name is Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from San Francisco. It is great to be here. Lots of excitements going on. I'm here with Kevin Zellmer from Applied Digital. He's the SVP of Alliances. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin Zellmer

>> I'm doing well. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Why don't you kind of tell us a little bit about Applied Digital and what we've been up to?

Kevin Zellmer

>> Yeah, of course. Thanks for having us, first of all. Appreciate it. Applied Digital is a consultancy that really focuses on consumer engagement and digital transformation for customers. We have broad set of enterprise customers around the world. We're a 750 person shop. If you think of us as a white glove boutique, that's really what we like to do. But we're all about how do we build customer experience for the engagement of our customers end users. So big airlines, big CPG brands, retail, sports, media. All of our customer base spans those.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Very cool. Being at Twilio Signal, and this is a big event. What's happening? You have a new release of Torque AI coming out or is out, if I understand that correctly. So tell us a little bit about that. What does that mean for you, for Twilio, for the relationship? How does that all come together?

Kevin Zellmer

>> Yeah, it's great. We released Torque two weeks ago now at GCP Next. We have our first client's been live on it now. We use them as a beta big CPG brand. Second client's coming on board. And really the significance of Torque was around how do you create an agentic workflow around content creation. So as an agency, we come in at the strategy level, this is how you want to engage with your customer. These are the ways to engage with this customer. And going down that path, what typically happens is the personalization and the data come into play. And it's a workflow that's human today. How do I create enough personalized content to make it through to all these different segmentations? So when we start thinking about what Twilio announced with orchestration layers, how they engage with customers across multichannels, that content creation orchestration level is only going to become more complex. And we're trying to solve that with Gemini and GCP. The product's out. You can go to torque.ai, see it at the applied digital website. Happy to have conversations with everybody and anybody. But it really does start to take that next generation into what is personalization. How do you create content at scale that's compliant, that goes through the compliance workflows prior to being released so you don't have to have content that's created, and then send it to legal. Then is it on brand? The engine that we build with our customers all on their GCP instances continues to work through that process. So the content comes out, it's ready to go, and then it can be proofread or proofed by whatever that last leg is, and it goes out in the market.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So when we look at what was announced here at the keynote that was just that we saw our memory, we saw a conversational orchestrator. All these things are impacting an omnichannel delivery. What does that mean to Torque AI? Obviously, historically a year ago at Signal, Twilio was very much siloed. There was very product siloed and you had to stitch it together to make it all work. Now it seems like this one view, unified approach, one platform approach. It's very different than the message a year ago. So what does that mean for this?

Kevin Zellmer

>> Yeah. You bring up a couple great points. Last year at this time, we were a big segment user. And our customers all use segment around loyalty, personalization, whatever that outbound communication is to that channel. But then you had that omnichannel very siloed. And as Paul and as Co and everybody said today, you didn't have any memory. You didn't know that you just got off the phone, you got transferred. Please give me your name, please give me your phone number, please give me your membership number. Terrible user experience, right? Now that goes away. And when you think about how the new orchestration level can work within Twilio, coupled with segment and coupled with data and everything on the back end, that content creation of Torque is super important because that's the only way you can make content at scale that's going to fit within that. And so whether I'm talking to you via SMS, whether it's WhatsApp, whether it's RCS, whatever that channel's going to be, the content may be a bit nuanced. The region will be a bit nuanced. The product offering could be nuanced. Now you can do that at scale and it fits into that delivery mechanism. So from the pipes, the old Cisco, we're going to create the pipes to the internet, that's what Twilio's doing today and it's great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay. Well, talk a little bit about this. Most environments are not greenfield opportunities. There's a heritage data source that's-

Kevin Zellmer

>> It's legacy.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's legacy that's there. What does that mean if these different data sources have to be fed in? What does it mean into the solution?

Kevin Zellmer

>> So I think there's going to be a couple instances there. So take Greenfield out of it and look at new products. We're seeing a lot of customers come and say, "Hey, I have this new launch, these new things. I want to start here and go new." At first because it's going to be fastest time to market. The ROI is going to be the most efficient. And then as you look at the legacy stuff, that is going to be a question. How do we transform off not even old Twilio, but what's these other legacy systems that are out there that people have been working with? How do we get them off of that? That's going to be a bigger transformation. It's going to take a little bit more nuance, a lot more detail, but everybody has to go here because when you start to think about the control of these billions of agents and how do you release that, there's no other way to do it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay. So then I want to talk a little bit about, because you touched on this when we first opened, the automation process, the amount of volume of data and context that's out there, what happens if you don't automate? What happens if you're very manual process and you're passing things over? The customer experience is typically lagging. Is that-

Kevin Zellmer

>> Yeah. Well, I think it goes back to even the digital experience. So take agents out of this and let's go back five or seven years or even back to 1998. If you had a good web experience, it was a differentiator. People came back to your website because that experience was meaningful and grabbed you and you became a loyal fan. I think the same thing's going to happen here. I personally don't think agents are going to take over SaaS and the world's coming to an end, but they're going to accelerate everything. They're going to make everything better and they're going to make everything more unique to you and how you like to interact. So the experience that they shared with the car company on stage was a great one where you pick up the phone, you get disconnected, they call you back, you call them back, they know who you are. That's what people are going to expect. And if you can't deliver that expectation, you're going to be a consumer brand or a company that's going to be left behind.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree. I think historically this has been an area that typically costs a lot of money to bring it together. And one of the things that I was reading up on with Applied Digital is you've reduced that. I agree with you that agents are not going to take away SaaS, but they're going to make it better. They're going to make it easier to use. But let's talk a little bit about the cost because people will think of these omnichannel experience is super expensive, if you're trying to pass things along. That's changed.

Kevin Zellmer

>> 100%. The large CPG customer we currently have on Torque, what we did over a course of seven, eight, nine months, in building out how they created content, and in this case it was for innovation of new products, we were able to save them tens of millions of dollars. We were able to take the ROI of that and they could reinvest that. So when we start looking at the costs, I think there's two ways to look at it. It's not necessarily a net new cost. You don't have to go find this money. It's a reallocation of funds that you're going to have via improvements in the workflow and the processes that you already have. So if we can streamline those, does that free up other people to do other things because that workflow is now more efficient? Is the time to market drastically decrease? So you have better innovation, better whatever that metric is you want to measure. I think that's going to change the measurement of this and then how the cost analysis is, and then hopefully ROI is faster. But you have to be seeing this as an analyst as well, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> I do. I do. Absolutely. And I think that's one of the big pushes and changes that we're seeing is heritage systems are being decommissioned because the cost factors, there's a number of things. One, there's two things that stop projects from moving forward, complexity and skill gap issues. And if you can remove those barriers, then your digital acceleration and AI projects will accelerate.

Kevin Zellmer

>> 100%. And that skill gap is a big issue. So again, in our CPG example, I think we had 70% usage across within a few quarters. So that workflow management and that change management and teaching the team on how to do it, that's something that we take a lot of pride in. And when you start to see all these AI stats, which I'm sure you see, 95% never get out of POC, they're forgetting about how do you change the workflow? How do you change the environment? That change management is so critical to success. The whole business needs to evolve. How do you use AI? That's going to change the way you work. And if you can do that, then it becomes far more successful.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. So all right, let's talk a little bit about Torque and your persona. Is it a heavy technical product? Is it a heavy line of business product? What's the product persona?

Kevin Zellmer

>> So what we did is we created, so it's based on Vertex, VO, it's all now Gemini's a couple of weeks ago. The new naming nomenclature for this month. But what we did is we really thought about how do you create a non-prompt workflow within an agentic system that enables anybody to be trained up and actually make them more efficient. So when we start to think about how it works, it's on the GCP instance. So our customers own this data. We're creating, essentially, we're using the Gemini model, but we're creating a private environment for all of their material. So when we think about an innovation, what's your brand look like? What are the brand nuances based on region? What are the color palettes? All those things, what is the tone? We create all that with the customer so that when they're creating this new content, it comes out brand compliant. And that takes about 30 days. So what used to take 9 or 12 months, we're constricting it up and running in 30 days and then make it useful and start to continue to iterate from that point.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So change management, guidance, company, it's really transforming those workflows. I think governance, compliance and regulations come into effect.

Kevin Zellmer

>> 100%.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Especially as you're starting to leverage lines of businesses to do your job and enabling them to be successful. So very, very important there. So all right. So talk a little bit about customer use cases. So Twilio and Braze enable customers to reach their audiences better. Where does the rubber hit the road?

Kevin Zellmer

>> Well, I think this rubber hits the road-based on the content. So now you have phone, text, like there's so many channels. It's going to pop up in your car, wherever it may be. But the relevance of the message now becomes really important. Because now you have all these channels, I could spam you to death and now I've went too far, and now I don't like your brand anymore. So you've created a negative brand identity versus positive, but if I can figure out through other methods of analysis, how and when I should be messaging you, what I should be messaging you about, what are the triggers that you are geo-located if you happen to be driving by the store and I know you typically need something on a Tuesday night, can I ping you and give you offers? All those kinds of things that tie into a bigger loyalty program, tie into a bigger communication plan, that's what I think what's going to make people successful.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think you're right. Now, how receptive do you think the overall market is? Historically you'd have things like beacons and watches and things, you walk by a coffee shop and it gives you a coupon, you're like, "Hey, come on in." And that's a little bit intrusive. How receptive do you think the market is to have that personalization really come to life?

Kevin Zellmer

>> It's funny you say this, and I chuckle because I worked with Thomas Wyatt at Cisco way back when we had digital signage. And you'd walk by and the sign would automatically become . And it never really was as great as it could have been. But I think everybody still wants that experience. They want to like, "Oh yeah, thanks for the nudge." And whether nudge is the right word or not, how we do that is, I don't think yet figured out perfectly, but they want to still figure it out. They want to figure out what is the right method. And it's going to be different for you. It's going to be different for me. It's going to be different for the camera team. Everybody's going to have their own unique experience and this structure that Twilio built with all the orchestration layers, plus say the example we have with Torque and the content creation, it enables you to do that. And it's pretty cool when you really think about, "Oh yeah, I actually forgot I needed this."

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. I don't think we're going to go as far as the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. And that's a little bit extreme.

Kevin Zellmer

>> A little scary thing there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But I do think that it's an enhancement for people's lives, right?

Kevin Zellmer

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It helps them. It makes it easier, especially when you don't have to continuously provide information when you've already provided it. That's really helpful.

Kevin Zellmer

>> It's so annoying.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a question. We're at Twilio Signal 2027. We're sitting here a year from now. What do you see happening and where do you think the market's going?

Kevin Zellmer

>> It'd be great to have some crazy usage stats. Where like, "Hey, X number of billions of bots are based on the orchestration platform. And these are the results that we're getting and it's all up and to the right." And I think there's going to be those examples. I think next year customer keynotes will be like, "We created this and look what we were able to accomplish." And again, just like going back into the early dot coms, there's going to be these things that we think are big now. And in 10 years we're like, remember when we thought like a billion bots was big or agents was big? I think understanding usage and time to market, that's going to be something really interested of how fast can we really build an enterprise, not a consumer level, but an enterprise level integration and experience for mass customers. So when we start thinking of the Fortune 100 brands, regardless of what vertical they're in, when we think about that engagement, that's what I think next year will be the start of.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I look forward to it actually because it's going to grow and it's going to evolve. And you know what? I think we're just in the evolution stage or early stages of this, this is going to change into something great. Kevin, thank you for being on. This has been really great having you on. It's been very insightful.

Kevin Zellmer

>> Thanks for having us. Anytime.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you. And thank you for watching Paul Nashawaty to come to you live from Twilio Signal 2026, coming to you live from theCUBE. You're leading source of tech news.