Twilio Signal 2026 | Vivek Zaveri, Meera.ai

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Vivek Zaveri

CEO

Meera.ai

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Vivek Zaveri, Meera.ai

Vivek Zaveri

CEO Meera.ai

In this interview from Twilio SIGNAL 2026, Vivek Zaveri, chief executive officer of Meera.ai, joins theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how an async-first conversational AI approach is replacing the legacy call-blasting model in B2C sales. Zaveri traces Meera.ai's origins to a core insight: only about 19% of people answer calls from unknown numbers, yet most enterprise outreach infrastructure was built decades ago around systems designed to simply redial. He explains how Meera.ai's "dialogue design" framework — built on the principle of "stop annoyin... Read more

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What is Meera AI, and what problem does it aim to solve? add

Should businesses initiate customer conversations through asynchronous channels (like SMS) and then transition to voice, and why? add

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome back to Twilio SIGNAL 2026. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I come to you live from San Francisco. I'm here with Vivek Zaveri from Meera AI. Vivek, how are you doing?

Vivek Zaveri

>> I'm good. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great. How's the show going for you?

Vivek Zaveri

>> It's been really good. Lot of innovation, lot of announcements. Really excited to see that the future of telecommunications is moving towards conversations.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. I mean, the keynotes, the announcements, the breakout sessions, they've been really, really exciting.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah, totally.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Were you at last year's event?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yes, I was.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So big difference from last year.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah. I think last year, they kind of planted the seed, but now they're actually putting things together. A lot of the things are finally coming together, so it's really exciting to be a builder in this time and day.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely see the truth. I think that last year I saw the vision come in. It's good to see the vision come together. So Vivek, tell me a little bit about Meera AI. What does Meera do?

Vivek Zaveri

>> So Meera AI is an AI-driven conversations platform. Our roots go back to ... I used to run a performance marketing company and I used to generate leads for my clients. And the biggest problem that they always had was getting in touch with the prospects. Because the fundamental problem is that people don't answer phones anymore. So say you go onto a website to fill out a life insurance quote. The next thing that happens is that you start getting phone calls, but life is busy. No one's answering calls. So we try to set out that problem. And the way we set out the problem is by helping businesses talk to people the way people talk to people. If I call you once and you don't answer your phone, I don't call you 10 more times. I shoot you a text. So that's the kind of vision we're trying to build is what if companies spoke to people the way people speak to people? So that's essentially what we are building.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, I think the stat is 19% of people answer calls that only 19% answer unknown numbers.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah, if you're lucky.

Paul Nashawaty

>> If you're lucky.

Vivek Zaveri

>> If you're lucky, right? I don't know the last time I answered a call that came from an unknown number. But unfortunately, a lot of the businesses built their infrastructure 10, 20 years ago, and it was built around CCAS systems that just founded the phone at you. If the call didn't work the first time, they'll try 10 more times over the next couple of days, but they never got to the root cause of the problem. And that's what we are trying to address over here with async to sync conversations.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So, okay. So tell me a little bit about the relationship that you have with Twilio and how it all comes together, the communication and conversations platform. They're pivoting right now to this one platform view versus those individual product silos. So like we were talking about a year ago, there was these silos and you had to kind of stitch it together yourself.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Now, we have this one platform. How is that pivoting what you're doing in your business?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah, so that just helps us go to market quicker. It helps us see our vision come to fruition a lot quicker. So, yeah, the things that we used to stitch together in the past, now it somewhat comes out of the box. So that is what I think is going on over here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So is that helping with the connect rate of ... We were talking about the real problem with B2C sales today, which the connections, right? Is the new approaches that Twilio is kind of announcing, does it help you with, you said go to market faster? Does that help with the platform?

Vivek Zaveri

>> It helps us build faster, but what happens is that we are coming to a point where Twilio's vision and our vision is kind of aligning from just doing OTP passwords and broadcast SMSs and things like that. We really started using Twilio about five years ago to have two-way conversations. So, yeah, that's where the shift is happening, is that the future that Twilio is trying to build on is conversations.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that's interesting. So building the future of conversations, future of where they're going is building on conversations. That means that aligning the omnichannel experience, so when you go from voice to text to whatever, the call, that conversation is there. So Meera, it starts that SMS conversation and then moves to voice very quickly. Is that true?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah. So remember, I said a few minutes ago, meeting where the customer wants to meet and speaking to them the way they want to be spoken to. So based on our data, it's very clear that the first step you take has to be through an asynchronous channel. Why an asynchronous channel? Because if someone's calling me right now, I'm sitting in an interview with you, I'm not going to answer that call. Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Correct.

Vivek Zaveri

>> But if they send me a text saying, "Hey, this is who I am, this is why I'm trying to get in touch with you. Call me when you get a chance or let me know when you're free and I'll call you." All we really did at Meera is emulate how we talk to each other and scale it for businesses and that turns out works really well.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. But sometimes, what seems so simple is actually a big deal.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yes, because if I have a headache, I'm going to pop an Advil, but what is the root cause of that problem? Everyone wants a quick fix and that's just human nature. Someone didn't answer the phone five times, call them 10 times, maybe they'll answer more, but it doesn't work that way. So, yes, it's the quick fix world. Consumers are smarter than they've ever been and technology companies like iOS and Android are really helping consumers prevent all this nuisance coming through to them. So, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me, but I want to double click down on, you mentioned async to sync, right? I want to talk about that a little bit. So async to sync orchestration, you have design or dialogue design, right? That's part of your offering?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah. Dialogue design is our way of engaging with customers at scale. When should I send the message? What should I say in the message? How do I follow up if the user doesn't respond? How long does that cadence go? Dialogue design is built on the principle of stop annoying, start engaging.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Okay. Yeah.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Simple. Very simple. So as long as you're not annoying your customers and you're engaging with them, and give them a chance to breathe and come back to you when they want to. So sure, it may not be a quick fix, but it is a fix. And ultimately, if you keep the consumer happy, everyone in the ecosystem wins. That's the premise of what Meera is.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that makes sense. So some of these announcements that were just made with orchestration, memory, communications across the platform, that allows you to go faster to do this, but does it change any of your dynamics and how you build?

Vivek Zaveri

>> It doesn't. The mission and the vision remains constant. It remains the same. How you get there changes. Instead of taking stairs, I'll take an escalator perhaps or an elevator. So those are the nuances, but some of the building blocks that come together. So instead of buying five bricks, I can get away with three bricks because one of those bricks has components of the other two that are missing and things like that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So who are your main customers? Who do you talk to? The persona that you talk to, is it the developer? Is it the lines of business? Who would be buying your product?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah. So our ideal customer is a midsize to an enterprise business with a complex sales cycle. About 35% to 45% of the US GDP is spent on complex sales. What are complex sales are sales that require consultation, so insurance. Either they're regulated industries or you can't just buy something with a credit card. So financial services, lending products, mortgage products, insurance, higher education, home services. Try get a new roof put by just going to Home Depot's website and swiping your credit card. Just not possible. Someone has to come, measure it, give you a quote, there's a little bit of back and forth and then you move forward. So those are our customers and they're mid-market to enterprise. They have a large sales team or a large customer success team of 100 or more in the call center.

Paul Nashawaty

>> How's outbound AI kind of working in this lens? Because this is another factor that we're seeing. I mean, you can't go in any conversation right now without talking about AI, but how is outbound AI in the sales cycle helping this or hurting it?

Vivek Zaveri

>> Yeah. So outbound AI can be broken down into two pieces, sync and async. So async is the way to go because sync, if I'm calling someone using AI, it has the same effect of a robocall, right? In the sense that you're calling me on my personal device without my permission. And also, even if you have the best AI in the world, if people are not answering, picking up the phone, what is it good for? So that is the root cause that needs to be solved no matter what you use.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Gotcha.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Right? So, yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes sense. Okay. So what's next for Meera in conversational AI and B2C?

Vivek Zaveri

>> What's next for Meera is having an omnichannel approach where conversations go from one channel to another. It's a single line of truth and also like being able to have intelligent conversations, contextual conversations. So that's where Meera is going. And again, Meera is mission driven. Every Meera campaign is mission driven. Either the goal is to drive phone calls or qualify leads or setup appointments or invite people to events. So it always has a mission or a goal in mind. So we are trying to add more of those missions, for example, abandoned carts in e-commerce. Those are some of the new things that we are playing around with. We are really excited about e-commerce and those use cases as well.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. I think that's an exciting future. What do you want the audience to know? What's the one takeaway you want the audience to hear from?

Vivek Zaveri

>> I think the only takeaway I would give is if you want to win, stop annoying, start engaging, meet your customers where they want to be met. It doesn't take rocket science. Just simple courtesy. Stop annoying.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Makes sense. I like it. Vivek, thank you for being on today. This has been really great.

Vivek Zaveri

>> Thank you so much.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Thank you. And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty to come to you live from Twilio's SIGNAL 2026 on theCUBE, your leading source of tech news.