Twilio Signal 2026 | Andy O'Dower, Twilio

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Andy O'Dower

Vice President Voice and Video

Twilio

play_circle_outline Andy O'Dower Joins Twilio as Field CTO, Driving Platform Evangelism and Customer-Driven R&D

play_circle_outline Twilio Unifies: Omnichannel Conversational AI for Personalized, Seamless Customer Journeys

play_circle_outline Agentic Orchestration: Conversation Memory, APIs, and Tools for Migrating Legacy Systems to Twilio

play_circle_outline Developer experience improvements: rapid time-to-value, one console, AI assistant guidance

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Andy O'Dower, Twilio

Andy O'Dower

Vice President Voice and Video Twilio

In this interview from Twilio Signal 2026, Andy O'Dower, vice president and field chief technology officer of Twilio, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how Twilio is repositioning its platform as the unified communications and data layer for AI-driven, conversational customer engagement. O'Dower, newly appointed to the field CTO role after five-plus years leading product across voice, video and conversational AI, describes a pivotal shift underway — from siloed channel APIs to a unified platform built for a new conversational era. He explains... Read more

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What is their role at Twilio, and what are their main responsibilities? add

How has Twilio changed compared to a year ago? add

What challenges do organizations face when trying to modernize their customer experience and migrate channels to a platform like Twilio, and how can those challenges be addressed? add

What is the new "aha" moment for your platform now that it includes an AI assistant, memory, and seamless cross-channel orchestration? add

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Andy O'Dower, Twilio

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome back to Twilio Signal 2026. My name is Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from San Francisco. I'm here with Andy O'Dower, field CTO for Twilio. Andy, how you doing?

Andy O'Dower

>> Good, good. Thanks for having me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, thanks for being here. So new role for you, but same power and excitement that you've been driving for the company. Tell us a little bit about your new role.

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah, sure. So I've been at Twilio five years, over five years now, leading product across voice, video, conversational AI, Flex as well. And now taking on this new role as field CTO, it's really over the entire platform. And that's really exciting because we have so many more products and features and capabilities that we've been launching across this entire platform. And it's a really change for the business. And so for my role now, it's really two parts if you think about it. And I'm leading a team and growing a team of senior technologists and solution architects and engineers that understand the depth and breadth of the whole platform that we're offering. And so it's twofold. It's outward facing, really evangelizing the platform out to our top customers that are really building on all the solutions that we offer, talking with investors, talking with analysts, talking with the market, talking with people like yourself about really what it is the Twilio platform evolution is and what it means for customers and all the different solutions that customers can build on it far beyond singular products that maybe in the past customers viewed us for of main channel APIs. And so the other part of the role is bringing all this feedback in from the market. So I sit on the R&D side of the organization and I've been on the R&D side of the organization. So it's bringing back that feedback from customers, from the market, from analysts, from others who have feedback about what we can do to improve the platform, make it more valuable. So it's really twofold, that outward facing and that inward bringing in that feedback because we're really obsessed with our customer feedback and how we can improve really outcomes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Andy O'Dower

>> And so it's really exciting to be doing both of these things out in the field.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's very apparent. This is a different Twilio than a year ago. Last year was about RCS and the products and very siloed. This year, it's a unified platform approach. Absolutely love it. I love the message. The keynotes were very powerful. The room was popping. It was standing room only. And the excitement in the room, you could feel the buzz. And the demos really brought it to life, that unified communication across it. Do you want to talk a little bit about that or...?

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. And the demos really bring it to life. I mean, if you think about it, we've got hundreds of thousands of our customers that are building solutions for communications between businesses and consumers. The trends that are happening right now, especially with AI too, is you're really training a generation of consumers to be able to talk to, yell at computers, devices, and AI to really get what they want. They want answers, they want transactions, they want outcomes, and they want it to be seamless and fluid across their whole journey. And so when we show these demos, the power of the platform from all the conversations, products that we launched, you really get that to life. And it's relatable too. Because as a consumer, whether it's in a healthcare situation or I'm buying a car or buying a house or getting a mortgage, I want to have an interaction that's seamless. I want the business to understand who I am. I want it to be personalized. I want it to be conversational because again, I experience other AI from OpenAI and Gemini and everything else in my daily life now that I want that interaction to be personal and effective. And so if you think about it, you see these demos, it makes it personal for you sitting in the audience to say, "I've lived that, I've experienced that. " And then the big opportunity is, but many businesses don't even have that yet. And so you take that example and that demo and think, "What if the bank interaction I had yesterday had that? What if the real estate company I'm going to engage next week has that? What if the car buying experience last month had that? " So there's so much more room to grow and take these experiences out to every industry across the board. It's super exciting. So like talking to our developers and builders in the room, they're kind of salivating thinking, I can't wait to get ahold of that to then go transform the industry that I operate in. So it's really exciting.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, if I think about it from an omnichannel experience, historically, that would have been a lot of effort, a lot of time and a lot of money to make it all work.

Andy O'Dower

>> Yep.

Paul Nashawaty

>> You could do it. I mean, I remember the days when you walk and by a coffee shop and you watch what trigger a beacon and the beacon would give you, "Hey, I got a coupon to go in for the coffee." That personalized experience is there. It was difficult. It wasn't easy. What I saw with orchestration, memory and communications across the platform, that really made it seamless and it really brought it to life. So, all right, in this new role that you're in, you're talking to a lot of customers, they're transforming their environment. What are the biggest challenges you see in businesses, see in the Agentic era? What are you seeing around these challenges?

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah, I think there's so much demand and interest to, like I said earlier, to transform what that experience is. Then there's the gap of how do I get there with my current systems and what do I have? Do I have legacy systems? Do I have disparate data silos that set out there? Do I have maybe singular channels that maybe I use a little bit of Twilio here? I have some traffic over here and email. I have a legacy phone system over here, but my CEO and CFO and board are all over me to innovate. So I think that's where we see these disparate pieces, an appetite to do change and innovation. And that's why we've introduced these layers of orchestration that help take the burden of work off of our customer's plates. And I had a customer tell me last night at dinner and said, "Everything that Twilio is building, I don't want to build anymore. I want to stop doing that." And so there's change management in terms of how do I navigate all this great data to provide that personalized experience that I saw in the demo. So that's where we introduce things like conversation memory and orchestration to help you with that. Then there's building tools to cross channels and say, "Well, I don't have my traffic on Twilio here. I don't have my traffic on Twilio here, but I want that experience." So we have new APIs to be able to help you migrate traffic over to Twilio to take advantage of that. The other thing is the developer experience and the builder experiences, I don't have an army of people to be able to do all of this. I have the appetite. I feel like there's solutions out there. And so we're going to continue to introduce a lot more tools, Claude skills, Agentic coding tools where you're able to get up and running much faster than you were before with the same team size that you already have. Because a lot of our customers are also navigating a difficulty of, where do I put my R&D effort? Where do I put my engineers?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, on top of that, I'm seeing in my research that 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists. The big challenge they run into is complexity and skill gap issues. So they're pushing back on vendors to simplify this approach. And that's exactly what I was seeing in the keynote. Koh was up there, he's talking about the vision. I love seeing that vision kind of come to life. And what we were talking about just even a year ago has really started to kind of mature and that's really exciting.

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. That simplicity I think is absolutely critical because you can see an amazing experience, your head starts to spin about what the possibilities are. You see Twilio for all the robust APIs that we have. And then you think, how do I get up and running and get started? So that's always that next layer of simple and easy to get started. And that's how we've got tens of millions of developers. They've got that Twilio magic moment that says, wow, that was amazing. 17 years ago it was a phone call via API, then SMS, then email, then omnichannel, and now you have these layers of orchestration. It's maintaining that same aha magic moment, quickly get started and get up and running and then go to scale. And then you can get all the complexity over time as you want and need because it's API based.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But think about it. So for the audience that's watching, you have different levels of maturity in their journey, right? And they may be at very early in their journey, maybe even reluctant on moving from a system that is fragile and doesn't want to get broken to a very mature audience that may be like, "Hey, we already know how to do all this ourselves." One of the things that I took away from the keynote and from the announcements that we're seeing in the press releases and such is the rapid time to value is that sure, you can do it yourself, you can build it yourself, you go into own it. And if you own it, that means you own it, right? Which means that at two o'clock in the morning when something breaks, you have to fix it. Where Twilio is providing that rapid time to value, rapid execution. And during the analyst day yesterday, we were hearing about customer panels where they were driving their acceleration from literally from months to days. A lot of people talk about that, a lot of vendors talk about that, but that was proof in the pudding, right? I was like showing it work. What are your thoughts around that from customer experiences?

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. And that's why over time, if you look at every layer of the Twilio stack, it just has to work. Zimma talked about that too. I mean, when you're infrastructure, you have to work and you have to work at global scale all the time. Our customers don't have small ambitions. They have big ambitions to grow global and to be global scale. So as we roll these things out, we think about them, even if it's a higher level feature of orchestration and customer memory and things like that, those have to operate at the same level of scale, low latency, dependability, reliability globally as our super network across 4,800 carriers and all of our channel APIs that deliver more traffic and handle more traffic in this session right now than many other customers might experience in an entire year. So they expect that. So as we roll these things out, you have the power of the magic moment to be able to say, "Wow, this works." The aha moment. "I can deploy this much faster than I ever thought possible." And it's really complex across multiple channels and data and memory and orchestration and it's reliable and it's at large scale because at the end of the day, back to that point earlier, where do I spend my R&D time? I can't worry about all of these things down the stack at the infrastructure layer. I just need to know and trust that it works. And I think that's really the mix that we bring. It's not just new feature that adds some icing on the cake to an experience. It's a new feature that will stay global scale and that will grow with your business. And we're always thinking how do our customers grow in every language, in every geo and all reliability across the board for everything we build, because we want you to maintain the magic moment and try new things and build new things on Twilio, not worry about the infrastructure reliability aspect of it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. That makes sense. I love the reference to the aha moment because that is true, but a lot of people are still reluctant, right? They don't want to try. There are some things that, I mean, I don't want to be a product pitch for you, but there's some things I saw today in the keynote and what I heard about over the announcements that it removes the barrier of entry to try. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. And I think you could see that in what we call that one console experience that also has an AI assistant all along the way with you to teach you if you're having trouble in a build or anything else like that. That original aha moment with messaging your voice, quick API calls, my phone lights up, it rings, I share with my team and say, look at the proof of concept I built right away and we can do this and Twilio can do this and it's usage based pricing. So as we grow, they'll grow with us and it's easy to get started. So I think that new aha moment now for much of our experience is, "and I can do this seamlessly across channels". So let's call and do a test and then hang up and then message. And it remembered the context and it had the memory and it automagically did it for us. And so we're orchestrating across channels and then let's wait five minutes and then call back again and switch languages. And it remembered that and it handled that. So now it's this across channel with memory experience and the orchestration is automatically handled for us. And then you can say, "What else could we build with this? What new industries might we go after with this? " And I think that's the new magic moment whereas it might have been previously a single channel or a single product magic moment. Now it's all of these things working in concert together and that's the platform and that's the magic of the platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I love it. And maybe you can touch a little bit on this because this is something that comes up quite a bit is governance, regulations and compliance and data sovereignty, right? All of these things kind of come into play when in these conversations Twilio has an answer.

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. I think back to that basis of us being APIs at our core, we want to be interoperable. We want to meet you, the developer, where you are. We want to meet you, the mid-market company, where you are and we want to meet you, the enterprise, where you are in your journey with where your tech stack is because everybody wants to innovate, but to your point earlier, they're going to have pieces of their infrastructure that they're committed to for a long period of time or a short period of time. And we want to meet you where you are so you can see time to value and you want to do it securely and compliantly. So we think about privacy by design, security by design, scale and reliability by design, because we're talking about communications that can be sensitive in all sorts of regulated industries and verticals. And now we're talking about the content of the message with things like conversational intelligence that are helping analyze the content of a call, the content of a message and things like that. So that's where it's key for us to be hyper secure, hyper reliable there. And I think the one thing that builders and customers come to us for is that trust. I would say the other piece of trust is the communications that then go out to a consumer. So the trust in branded RCS, the trust in branded calling, the trust for them analyzing with APIs like our lookup API of who's calling my business. Are they fraudsters? Are they spammers? So really keeping a trusted ecosystem built goes many ways. It's making sure there's trusted players that come onto the Twilio platform. It's making sure that our customers, when they're reaching out to their consumers, their communications are trusted, whether it's an AI agent to a human or a human to an AI agent or human to human, those need to be trusted. And that's a new frontier for us as well, and we're vesting heavily on that side because we see this Agentic world really growing. Trust is the key thing.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That's a big part of the messaging. I was picking that up. So Andy, closing thoughts. What do you want the audience to walk away from? Being in this new role, field CTO, you're exposed to a lot of things globally. There's a lot of initiatives going on, whether these companies are on they're very much establishing their journey or just getting started. What do you want the audience to know?

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah. I think this major theme that we talked about today, very, very much around conversational. And I think we have shifted an era from just mobile apps and UIs. We had the mobile explosion. Obviously, you've had the web explosion even before that. And you've had a generation of interface with how consumers and businesses interact. They've interacted heavy UI, a lot of hunting and pecking around UIs and mobile apps and everything else like that and waiting. And then they've had disjointed experiences across messaging and email and voice and everything else like that. That era is shifting away. We are in a new era now where, again, any communication with a customer and a business can be conversational at any point in the funnel, in the funnel, in the stage. Early shopping experience, all the way to customer service and contact center and sales and marketing everywhere in between is a conversation across all these channels and it can be personalized and it can be remembered and it can be across any channel and it can really take out a lot of friction. And the demo that we showed earlier is when it just works, it kind of is invisible in the background. And you can get back to your life and just have an amazing experience that's super fast and easy and get things done. And so if you think about that new age, how do you get there? And that's why we're introducing this platform to really help you get there, with all the different pieces and puzzles with trust baked in and global coverage baked in to be able to say, wow, everything's conversational. I actually now have a platform that has the depth and breadth and the trust and reputation and now super ease of use to get up and get running, to get started, to create that new future for every vertical that exists out there. So it's super exciting.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, it really is super exciting. I can't wait to see it in the real world, so it impacts my day-to-day life.

Andy O'Dower

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But Andy, always great to talk to you. It's always a pleasure having you on and talk to you. Thank you for being on.

Andy O'Dower

>> Thank you. Appreciate it.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty coming to you from Signal 2026 from The Cube, your leading source of tech news.