Twilio Signal 2026 | Kathryn Murphy, Twilio

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Kathryn Murphy

SVP Product, Communications

Twilio

play_circle_outline Twilio at SIGNAL 2026: Kathryn Murphy on Orchestration, Conversations, and Memory for Seamless Multichannel Customer Engagement

play_circle_outline Super network: Twilio handles telco complexity, compliance, regulatory management

play_circle_outline Twilio Agent Connect: Pre-Wired Open-Source Toolkit for Agentic Use Cases and Roadmap to More Tools, Channels

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Kathryn Murphy, Twilio

Kathryn Murphy

SVP Product, Communications Twilio

In this interview from Twilio Signal 2026, Kathryn Murphy, senior vice president of product at Twilio, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how Twilio is evolving from a collection of siloed communication tools into a unified, AI-ready platform for intelligent customer engagement. Murphy traces the transformation to direct customer demand — enterprises wanted their channels to work together and retain context across every interaction. She details how SIGNAL 2026 delivered on that ask with a consolidated one-console, one-bill, one-SDK experience,... Read more

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Why did the company decide to build the orchestration (conversations) features and the channel “memory” capabilities that were announced? add

What is the "super network" and why is the company investing in communication channels to handle telco complexity and support multichannel, conversational customer interactions? add

What are the company's plans to support customer demand for agentic “helper” use cases and to expand toolkits and features (e.g., marketing, notifications, compliance, channels, ease of use) for other business functions? add

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Kathryn Murphy, 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 Kathryn Murphy. Kathryn, how are you doing?

Kathryn Murphy

>> I'm doing great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you here. So you're senior vice president of Product and Communications Platform at Twilio.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> What does that mean?

Kathryn Murphy

>> So I'm basically in charge of the channels. The channels that all of our customers know and love, voice, video, email, messaging, all of those things.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, I'll tell you that the keynotes were super exciting from codes to the demos, all the conversationals going on. Why don't we talk a little bit... start there. What were your thoughts on some of the announcements that came out?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Actually, maybe a bit of an origin story. Why did we decide to build these things? Actually a couple years ago, we spent a lot of time with our customers and everyone from executives who buy our products to the developers who are using them. And there's some really clear asks from our customers. One, they were like, "Hey, Twilio. Make all these channels that you provide. Just work together. Make them work together better." And that's really what pushed us to build the orchestration capabilities, conversations. And I think the thing that was happening at the same time with that is the consumer shift. So consumers were starting to interact with brands. A brand sends a marketing email. They respond. Even when one-time passwords were going out, and we see this in the data on the Twilio platform is customers are answering. So there's this kind of like, forget what we think. Meanwhile, the consumers are shifting to this conversational kind of nature. And then the second thing customers said to us a couple years ago was, "Why can't your channels just remember things? Why is there this kind of cold start with my customer every time?" And so really, what's so exciting about all of our announcements today, and then we'll come to the agentic thing in a second, but even some of the foundational announcements is it's born out of exactly what our customers asked for.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think... I've been covering Twilio for some time now and last year to this year, major transformation. I mean, going from siloed product offerings, like individual companies under a holding company to a one platform view.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Totally.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And your orchestration and memory and communications across each one and then carrying the discussion. Now, I will say the one thing I found very interesting is not too long ago, you could do all these things.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Totally.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It would be very expensive to have that omnichannel experience, right?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And time, effort, expense, everything. Now, super easy. That's one thing I thought was interesting.

Kathryn Murphy

>> It really is. I'm so glad that you picked up on that because I'm not sure if that point actually landed so well. Okay, good. Because it's like, yeah, you could do all this with Twilio before, but you had to stitch it together yourself. We did that for you. Now, agentic just kind of accelerated the need for all that. But it's really like, "Why don't we just make it easy?" And that goes back to our customer's original cry like, "Hey, can't you just make all this stuff work together? Can't you just do it for us?"

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Well, I think the big pivot here is agentic AI is allowing the lines of businesses to develop the applications, the agents to code that they want to do to meet their job functions. Historically, you have a professional developer stitch it together, and that's where I think it's a big shift right now.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah. And the other agentic kind of shift happening too is, as everyone's trying, the whole B2B industry is in an experimental mode. And if it's not easy, if you can't just try it quickly, like over a couple of weeks, you can't prototype it out, how are we going to figure this out? And so I think Agentic, which unlocks all this super cool ability to have conversation and for brands to respond to their customers in a way they never have. Also, this is like, there's never been a time like now where we need to experiment like crazy and that demands speed.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It does. And I think from my perspective, for what I see in the research is 2025 was the year of innovation, experimentation. '26, the year of implementation.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Oh, yeah. Actually, that's really well said. Yeah, I agree.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think that's kind of how it comes together. And when I think of what you announced, your investments in the communication channels, the super network that you're building, talk a little bit about that because that's interesting.

Kathryn Murphy

>> So super network is a little bit of an old concept at Twilio that we're bringing back here. I think telco and channels is complicated. It's also undifferentiated. It's not like... When I think of our customers, becoming an expert on telco is not what makes them great with their customers. And so what makes them great with our customers is having lots of ability to communicate with them, give them rich content experiences. It's that kind of stuff, not wiring up sip trunking or doing some of these things. And so I think we're bringing back this concept again of super network because the world has become clearly multichannel, clearly conversational. Having a larger network that we just take care of that complexity, the complexity of not just hooking it up and managing compliance, managing all the regulatory things, like that's what we do best and we do for our customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So, okay, let's double click down on that because I think there is definitely an area. I don't want to gloss over it because this is an area of investment that I'm seeing here at Twilio, right? So from an investment, how are you helping customers really reach the communication across these channels? I know you're making it connected in this one platform, but what does it mean?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah. So today we announced the one experience and it's like a two... There's kind of like two big... There's maybe three things. First of all, yes, it's one console, but more importantly, it's one bill, one commit. So rewinding back to like, "Hey..." customers saying, "Hey, Twilio, make this easier for me." Part of the friction that executives who are the buyers would express is like, "Well, I buy messaging and then I decide, well, I want to add email," and that's a whole new buying cycle. So really making it easy to just have one commit and say, "I'm going to try any of the channels or try to reach my customer." But the second part for the developer is this one SDK. So we rebuilt one of our big channels, email. It's like an acquisition that we did many years ago of SendGrid, but it was never sort of a first class channel. It now is a first class channel.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Gotcha. A.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Nd under the same SDK, same bill, same console.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, the audience went crazy during the keynote when that was announced. So that was...

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah. I mean, it's just something simple like that, but yet, again, like you say everything else is true. It's all multichannel. It all needs to be connected. Removing some of those paper cuts, like a separate API for SendGrid, a separate API, a separate bill for that really, really matters.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I also do want to be clear though, what my understanding is, and you tell me if I'm wrong, is the role of open source is important. The whole of ecosystem is important. What you're providing is a unified view, but allowing for developers to continue to use their bespoked environment. So if they want to use an IDE that they're using, they can still use it.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And they can feed that information from Twilio into their IDE and they can feed the information from the platform anywhere they want to use it, but they can also use their bespoke

Kathryn Murphy

>> Environments. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's totally true. And let's go further because our developers, like many other developers, our Twilio developers, everybody's using a coding agent. So whether it's Claude Code or GitHub Copilot or something, it's no longer just like my IDE. I have coding agents working with me. How do we make sure that it's easy for those agents to work with Twilio too? It's like that we're not just talking about humans anymore. It's like it's a combo, right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, that goes to the next part of the conversation. Let's talk about trust, right?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> How does trust play into these communications, whether it's human, non-human, whatever it may be?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah. I mean, that's another area of always investment and I think increased focus from us because we are worried about that. So agentic, there's the dynamics of the cut trust. We have two levels of trust. There's the businesses that run on Twilio trusting Twilio, and then there's the tools that we give our customers so that they can maintain trust with their customers. And so both are important, but separate. When it comes to customers trusting Twilio, we continue to expand our reach across the super network and countries and channels, but also invest in reliability and scalability and fraud protection and all those types of things. For our customers, having trust with their customers, it's enhancements like branded calling, making sure that they're not scared of that phone call. It's RCS and WhatsApp, which have those kind of verified branded experiences. And then it's also products like our verify product, making sure that we have ways that customers can confirm that they really are who they say they are.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I mean, that's really cool. I mean, I like that. It ties it all together, but it also feels like there's reassurance. I think AI in general is going to be a know-like-trust kind of environment.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Totally.

Paul Nashawaty

>> You have to get more comfortable with it. And the more we use it, the more we get comfortable with it. All right. Let's talk about voice because voice is a big part of it too. So it's having a renaissance moment in the voice AI capabilities, right?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> We're seeing that it'll continue to have communications across the age of AI. What's your thought? I mean voice is not dead.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Oh no, no. It's very far from it. Last year at SIGNAL this time we announced conversation relay and we've sort of now graduated that to be... And we had some conversation intelligence with it, but we've graduated that to be across channels now. But voice is, in the wave of agentic adding the capabilities on top, like the ability to do turn detection, transcription, et cetera, really important, but also core stack is really important. The connectivity, HD audio, these kinds of things become critical to being able to support a new era of voice that's happening here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I encourage the audience to watch the demos because the demos really, really showed that. It was really cool to see it. And there was a couple of things that happened during the demo that were unexpected which I thought was interesting, but it just rolled right through.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Which is like also human life.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Exactly.

Kathryn Murphy

>> It's like that's how it would happen perhaps with a human. And so it's very cool to see how AI has come along and...

Paul Nashawaty

>> Totally....

Kathryn Murphy

>> acts a little more like we do.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Totally, totally. So, Kathryn, a year from now, we're sitting here, 2027, we're at Twilio SIGNAL. What are we talking about? What's happened in the last year?

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah. So I think, one, we see what we feel already demand from our customers is many more helper use cases. So we didn't really talk about this yet, but part of what we announced this SIGNAL is a Twilio agent connect because everyone is so into the Agentic use cases right now, like help us figure it out. And so what do we do? We actually stitch together kind of an open source toolkit that's already pre-wired all the Twilio channels, the conversation relay, conversation intelligence, ready to go for that use case, which, again, it's like we're not building the apps, but we're building the toolkits to help customers do what they need to do. They're already saying, "Great. Now what are you going to do next? Help me with my marketing use cases, help me with my notification use cases, help me with our next thing." So I think-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Getting into these lines of businesses....

Kathryn Murphy

>> we're really going to start trying to help unlock more functions across the business with more helper toolkits.

Paul Nashawaty

>> No, that's awesome. That's really cool.

Kathryn Murphy

>> And then I guess the second thing is like, I think you're going to start seeing a lot more... We've been focused on ease and speed and generally, but making some of the blocking and tackling things easier, making compliance easier, expanding more over the top channels and just creating like a richer, bigger super network over the next year.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, friction and complexity is always top of mind when we talk to customers. So I think that's a smart way to go. Kathryn, always a pleasure to talk to you. This has been great.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yes, likewise.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you for being on theCUBE today.

Kathryn Murphy

>> Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you.

Paul Nashawaty

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