Twilio Signal 2026 | Inbal Shani, Twilio

Clips
More from Twilio Signal 2026

Inbal Shani

CPO and Head of R&D

Twilio

play_circle_outline Return to Our API-First DNA: Unifying Fragmented Products into a Platform for Faster Time-to-Value

play_circle_outline Trust and Control in Agentic AI Conversations: Twilio Agent Connect, Conversation Relay, Conversation Intelligence, and Adoption Barriers

play_circle_outline Data-Driven Global AI Infrastructure: A Neutral, Bring-Your-Own-AI Platform with Carrier Aggregation and Omnichannel Reach

play_circle_outline Future vision: one billion AI agents and improved trusted engagement controls

Info
Transcript

Inbal Shani, Twilio

Inbal Shani

CPO and Head of R&D Twilio

In this interview from Twilio Signal 2026 in San Francisco, Inbal Shani, chief product officer and head of research and development of Twilio, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss Twilio's transformation from a fragmented product company into a unified platform and infrastructure layer for AI-driven customer engagement. Shani traces a two-year strategic reset, explaining how the company returned to its API-first DNA after losing focus through acquisitions and an overstretched SaaS push. She underscores that every SIGNAL 2026 launch ships at gene... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

Why did Twilio decide to shift from being a product‑centric company with many separate offerings to a unified, integrated platform—returning to its original platform‑oriented “DNA”? add

What were the biggest questions and challenges you faced when you started thinking about AI—e.g., defining AI, identifying use cases, building foundational capabilities, and helping customers adopt AI at scale? add

What makes Twilio uniquely well positioned to succeed in the age of AI and meet customers' communication and data needs? add

Where do you see this going a year from now (at SIGNAL 2027)? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Inbal Shani, Twilio

search

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 Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio. How you doing?

Inbal Shani

>> I'm great, thank you for having me.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great to have you on. What a great event. I mean, there's so much excitement, the keynotes were amazing, the demos were amazing. What a big difference from last year to this year. Let's start there, let's start talking about what you're showing.

Inbal Shani

>> Yeah. Well, let's start with everything. We made sure that everything this time around is general available so customers can get started immediately. They don't need to wait, it's not coming soon, it's here. It's ready, get started.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I mean, that's great. I mean, that is absolutely one of the big takeaways I think the audience here want to hear is how do I get going? Let's take a step back. I mean, Twilio a year ago, product-centric company, lots of individual pieces, very capable, lots of things that were available, but your foundation that you had is now grown into this unified platform view. That unified platform view allows you to do so much more as we were talking right before this actually about that rapid time to value to build it and get it out the door fast. That I think is important to talk about. Let's go into that. Why did Twilio decide to go in this direction?

Inbal Shani

>> Ideally, when we started, we wanted to be a platform company. We started with a bunch of APIs, which is the foundation of any platform. I think somewhere along the way, we lost a little bit of our identity. We tried to build SaaS or go too much up the stack, and then when we started doing acquisitions, we didn't necessarily spend time integrating all these products. We've gave all these capabilities to our customers with a lot of expectation that they will figure out how to stitch it together, which is not the case if you want to be a platform company, which we are, that's our DNA. We started with abstracting complexity, and then when we reset our strategy two years ago, it was all about, this is our DNA. How are we going back to our DNA and what are the things we need to do for our customers? It was all around we need to build that cohesive platform.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, absolutely. And then also to add in this little thing called AI that the market's driving force. Agentic AI era, you're in this era. This is something that organizations are challenged with skill and complexity and just preventing them from doing these projects. Now, you've provided a platform that allows for acceleration of agentic AI. So if you look at it from that perspective, what are the main takeaways that Twilio can provide for customers in that space?

Inbal Shani

>> Yeah. I think when we started thinking about AI, it was the biggest question is, what is AI? What are some of the use cases that we think our customers will leverage different AI capabilities and what are these foundations we need to build for them? What we've seen is that there is a lot of experimentation, but not enough AI is hitting production. That means that one, not necessarily customers know how to adopt AI at scale. Second, what does that mean? All the aspect of trust and orchestration, it's hard. Now, if you're trying to solve with AI what previously where SaaS failed, which is creating these vertical silos within the organization, then this is not really solving the customer problems, at least not what they told us for a year. They want an end to end conversation with the customer. When we were thinking about how the conversation is changing, and for the first time in history, you have more than just humans in a conversation, you have AI agents and they need to talk to each other. They need to exchange information. Sometimes it's as an AI assistant to a human agent, sometimes it's an AI that is speaking to a consumer. And in the near future, it will be a consumer AI that is maybe talking to a human and maybe talking to an agent. And these were the foundation to build the Twilio Agent Connect, to continue evolving Conversation Relay, Conversation Intelligence, all with the idea the conversation needs to be end to end, it needs to be seamless, and it doesn't matter who participate.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I agree. I think that the interactions between human and non-human agents is obviously the future. It's where we're going, but I think that where we're at right now, 2025 was the year of innovation and experimentation. '26, the year of implementation. This is where organizations are basically, the rubber's hitting the road. It's like they're trying to get things going, they're building these projects out, but a lot of times they're stuck with either analysis paralysis or it's just too much to know in a workday. What I like is, what I was seeing in the keynote was customers can enter regardless of where they are in their journey.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And that's something I think you should talk about a little bit because when you're talking to your customers and when you made this decision to be, you were looking at being a platform company, but now you actually are a platform company, what were the most significant challenges came up with customer engagement?

Inbal Shani

>> I think they don't know which questions to ask, which is interesting. When a new technology is coming, all the builders, all of us, we're running, we want to experiment, we want to figure out what can we do to use that technology. And for the majority of 2024, 2025, there was a top down mandate like, "You shall do AI. You need an AI strategy." I think what we see right now is an awakening moment that the technology is very strong, but you need to figure out what is the set of problems you're trying to solve. And where customers are struggling is how do I know where I need to use AI and where I don't need to use AI and how to use AI and towards which problems? And then there is the fear of AI going to replace a human. It's not, but it can make a human a very productive human. So taking the customers through that journey, through that understanding that we'll meet you where you are. If right now you're a fully human to human conversation, your agents will benefit from that, your sales will benefit from that. Your marketing team will benefit. Scheduling an appointment with a customer, you will benefit from that because the idea of memory, that you remember your customers and you can create this personalized engagement. And now in the future, you want to add AI to the mix, great. Here's an easy way for you to get started. You don't need to boil the ocean, just get started, and then figure out how you want to continue scaling.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that clearly articulate, excuse me, clearly articulating what you're trying to get to and where you're trying to get to is important, right?

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So when you're trying to build out these platforms, it's not necessarily even about the execution, it's about what is the goal.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Speaking about journeys, you had an intense journey yourself with the company, right? In the last two years, how do you see this shift, this pivot, this change in the company? What does this mean to your customers? What does it mean to net new acquisition people trying to join? What does this mean in the market?

Inbal Shani

>> Yeah. When I joined Twilio, one of the things that I've seen really quickly when I was looking into the organization, we tried to do so many things and we're not necessarily focused on rallying behind a clear strategy of who we want to be as a company, what are the products we want to put in front of our customers, and that created a kill. The first thing is really creating a clear strategy that the company is going to drive, and it was all around talking to a lot of customers, our customers, listening to what they're trying to achieve, how are we solving that? And then coming up with a strategy to serve their current needs, also the gaps that we have created in the past, but also invent the future and being able to predict that. That was the thing we've done in R&D and generally in Twilio is create that laser focus on what are we. We're a platform company or an infrastructure company. Here are the things that make Twilio unique. If you think about the scale of Twilio, I call us the largest telco in the world, because we're the one that is aggregating so many carriers across so many countries, solving for so many channels, so many use cases so that's a giant platform. Now you want to take that platform to the next level. What are the things you need to do? It's also making the platform more reliable, more stable, more secure, so focusing on the foundation and then starting to build on top of that towards the next level.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I like that. I had Kevin on from the PGA of America and he was talking about the uniqueness, the uniqueness of the Twilio platform, what it did for him and his organization.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I'd like to ask you that. What are some of the key advantages you see for Twilio's platform that others can't replicate as easily?

Inbal Shani

>> Yeah. I think it goes back to a couple of foundations. The first one is all about the breadth of the channels, the communication, the scale of our platform, our ability to take traffic like Cyber Monday, Black Friday. You see customers, companies rely on Twilio to deliver their messages in the most important part of the year. But also on the day to day, you heard some of the stats coming from Khozema in terms of billions of messages, trillions of emails. So that's one aspect. The second thing, it is an infrastructure company. And as such, we also have a lot of data assets. So when you take communication, you combine it with data and now you're building towards the age of AI, these three things make it very unique. I think the other part which Kho covers in his keynote as well is the aspect of neutrality because each one of the hyperscalers or each one of the AI companies, if it's the startups or the native AI, they're trying to solve a problem. They're trying to solve it with their LLM in their space. We are bring your AI, bring your stack, bring your data. We will make sure that it's all coming together and it's really solving the problem we are trying to solve. And I think when you're combining these unique assets, this unique platform with that mentality that we have makes Twilio, position Twilio to be that infrastructure layer for AI in the future.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, I want to congratulate you on the last of the earnings. I mean, that was really, really impressive. I sat through the analyst day yesterday, I saw the growth of the markets and the individual regions. It's really taken off. But one of the things I would ask though is this is a pivot change for the company. How do you plan to evaluate success with the new platform capabilities? What are you looking at?

Inbal Shani

>> The first thing is adoption. We want to see customers starting to use our products, so that's deliberately why in January we launched a private beta and we invited customers to join it. Like every good product team, we had a number in mind. Here's a good number for us to represent the customers. We were so surprised by the amount of customers that wanted to join and try Twilio and try all these new products so we exceeded our own expectation, and then starting working with these customers, seeing their adoption, seeing their different use cases. When you're building a platform, you have several use case in mind, but then customers find other ways to use it so starting seeing that coming to life, that was amazing. So adoption is likely our number one. The team just shared with me that this morning they have expected X amount of signups on the new Twilio console and that exceeded expectation. I think we're in a good place that we see the market meeting our expectation and exceeding that, that for me, it's like we solve the right problem for our customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay, so you see this adoption that's coming in. I definitely have saw the numbers on the growth, so I thought that was impressive. As the customers start adopting these new capabilities in the platform, what are the areas you plan to focus on to scale and look at how these are impacting the business? What are you planning on doing?

Inbal Shani

>> We're planning to look across, one, what is happening with our basic channel adoption because all this traffic from these customers that are coming through our infrastructure layer, new infrastructure layer, will drive traffic to the channels. And some of the things is like, if you think about Twilio four years ago, Twilio was known as an SMS company, but suddenly it's SMS and it's messaging at large and then it's email and then it's voice and then it's agentic. It's coming together with all these things and you start seeing much more complex use case that our customers are building on top of Twilio. That's one aspect, like what are the problems they're solving on Twilio now that maybe they could not solve two years ago or four years ago. We've started seeing new customers that are coming with different ideas and different needs and are using Twilio to solve different set of problems, so that will be an interesting journey for us. And as I said, some of these launches are anticipating the future of a billion AI agent coming. They're not here yet, so being able to follow these trends and seeing what customers are doing. And for me, the more we can help customers make their agents more productive, make their marketing team more successful, create a better relationship with their customers, that will be a huge win for them and for us.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree. I think that's absolutely, and I also want to... I know we glossed over it in the beginning. I want to touch on it and bring it back here. The importance of shift in metrics to time to value, that's also very important here. I think certainly you can, as a customer, you can build it, you can do it yourself, but if you build it, you own it, right?

Inbal Shani

>> Right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And at two o'clock in the morning when something breaks, you own it.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And that time to value is not always there. So what advice would you give the audience to understand? Obviously they can do things themselves, but the rapid time to value, the ease of use, reducing friction, those are all things I got out of the keynote.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> When Kho was talking, when the audience was talking, it was really apparent that the audience was interacting very much.

Inbal Shani

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. So what are your thoughts there?

Inbal Shani

>> I think the first thing is we call it time to magic because that's the magic moment, right? The first time you create your first engagement with your customer, that's a magical moment for any business. But when you're looking into the time to value, there's a lot of stitching that needed to happen in the past. You wanted to use more than a single channel, you need to stitch that logic by yourself. You wanted to add data into the conversation and make it smarter, you need to do that yourself. So I think my best advice for customers is figure out what is that problem you're trying to solve. What is that the one that you, if you will implement it will be a needle mover for your customers and start there and start breaking it into the pieces, what do I need to do? And then go to our console and try it out.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Try it, yeah.

Inbal Shani

>> What's the best thing to do?

Paul Nashawaty

>> I like this. I usually don't like to ask the question about future proofing because it's really not a thing. But when you start thinking about the platform and anticipating the customer needs, just a few years ago, we could have done all these things that we're doing today with a professional developer, right? You could build it, it would take time, it would take money, it would take... But what you've done is now you've let the lines of business actually do the deployment using AI to make it frictionless to make this happen. And that's where you have that time to magic that you're talking about, that time to value gets rapidly pushed into play and then now, but you don't have to, it's more of a self-service model. You don't have to have to put a help desk ticket in and wait for something to change. It can work dynamically.

Inbal Shani

>> Yeah. I want to caveat that because I will say it depends on the use case.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Inbal Shani

>> If your use case is very straightforward, you can do it yourself, but the moment you're starting to stitch different line of businesses together, you do need your IT organization, you do need your product and engineering organization.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Of course.

Inbal Shani

>> But if historically they needed to be experts in Twilio in order to do their job, now they don't. And it can be a self-serve, it can be a sales engage. But if you go to the console, the reason why we spend time in launching the developer workbench, the AI assistant is we wanted to remove as much of this friction and getting Twilio ready to the world that almost every developer today use some sort of a coding assistant. Every builder use some sort of an abstraction layer on top of the ability to generate code and we build it in a world that is ready for these users. If you are a technical user or non-technical user, you can solve the problem, but this is still an infrastructure company, so your developers are still in the mix.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So Inbal, we're here at SIGNAL 2027 a year from now, where do you see this going?

Inbal Shani

>> Oh, first, I want to see one billion agent.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay. All right.

Inbal Shani

>> Because I think for us that means that we did remove that fear, that complexity, that hesitation that customer have in adoption. I think the second thing is, and we hinted on that a little bit at the end of the keynote is, how are we making these engagement more trusted? Because some of the challenges we see with customers going all in on automation, all in on AI is that what happens when that agent is not doing what it's supposed to do? How do I control what they're doing? How do I intervene exactly at the right moment when a customer is getting frustrated in a conversation with an AI agent? Twilio 2027 will be all about adding additional capabilities into that, and I cannot tell more, but the sky is the limit.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Very good. Well, I look forward to it. And well, thank you for being on today. It's been really great having you.

Inbal Shani

>> Thank you for having me, it was fun.

Paul Nashawaty

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