September 2025 Summaries

Twilio is actively positioning AI at the core of its customer engagement strategy, partnering with industry leaders like Microsoft and OpenAI to create a robust ecosystem centered on AI and data. The Twilio AI Certification Program, launched in March 2025, is a pivotal component of this strategy, aimed at equipping partners with the technical training and delivery frameworks needed to implement AI solutions effectively. This program has recently expanded to include a wider array of partners across various regions, enhancing their capability to deliver significant business outcomes for customers using Twilio's AI innovations, such as ConversationRelay and Conversational Intelligence. By certifying partners, Twilio ensures that they can provide expertise and deployable solutions, thus accelerating customers' AI journeys and maximizing the impact of AI on customer engagement.

Kousha Talebian and Rikki Singh from Twilio present a comprehensive guide on building a multimodal AI experience using the Agentic Workflow Builder Dify, Twilio Voice, and ConversationRelay. This setup allows users to create an airline concierge service that can respond to voice commands and send confirmations via SMS, enhancing customer interaction across multiple channels. The process involves setting up accounts with Dify and Twilio, configuring the AI model, and using tools like Node.js, Ngrok, and optionally Fly.io for hosting. The guide details steps for local development and cloud deployment, enabling a seamless user experience where the AI agent provides flight options, asks clarifying questions, and sends SMS confirmations, all while maintaining a conversational tone. The authors emphasize the flexibility and scalability of this system, which can be adapted to various applications beyond the demo example.

Twilio has enhanced its documentation platform by introducing support for llms.txt and Markdown, aimed at improving workflows for those utilizing large language models (LLMs). Users can access LLM-optimized Markdown versions of documentation pages by appending a .md extension to any docs URL or through page tools links. Markdown, known for its minimalistic and clean formatting, is more efficient for LLMs than HTML, which can be cluttered with unnecessary markup. The llms.txt standard acts like a curated sitemap specifically for LLMs, facilitating easier access to structured documentation. Twilio's documentation, migrated to a "docs as code" platform built on Next.js and maintained in MDX, allows for the creation of machine-readable content optimized at the source rather than through scraping. This upgrade is intended to enhance the integration of Twilio APIs and services into products, improving retrieval precision and reducing parsing overhead for LLM tool providers.

Integrating Salesforce with Twilio's platform can enhance customer experiences by providing a seamless omnichannel approach in contact centers. The integration utilizes Twilio Studio, Serverless functions, and Flex plugin architecture to enable context-aware interactions by leveraging Salesforce's CRM data. This setup allows customer service agents to access customer profiles and context at the onset of calls or chats, facilitating intelligent routing and personalized interactions. By extending beyond the default OpenCTI adapter and utilizing Salesforce REST APIs, businesses can automate workflows and minimize manual efforts, thereby improving efficiency. The architecture is designed to be modular and scalable, accommodating organizations of various sizes looking to modernize their customer service operations through real-time customer context and intelligent task distribution.

Twilio has been recognized in the IDC FinTech Rankings 2025 Enterprise Top 50, highlighting its significant role as a technology provider for financial services institutions. This annual ranking by IDC evaluates the largest global technology providers based on their revenue from financial institutions, acknowledging the importance of these companies in helping the financial sector meet modern challenges like risk management and compliance. Twilio aids financial institutions by enhancing customer engagement through secure, personalized, real-time interactions across various communication channels, from account authentication to customer service. This recognition underscores Twilio's commitment to addressing key industry challenges, such as fraud reduction and the modernization of contact centers, while emphasizing its impact on banking, insurance, and capital markets.

Tanise Love, a Senior Employee Impact Manager at Twilio, shares her journey to the company, driven by personal loss and a desire for meaningful work that aligns with her passion for people and community. At Twilio, she co-leads the WePledge program, which encourages employees to dedicate time or resources to causes they care about, creating a significant social impact. Tanise discusses her team's role in shaping the company's social impact initiatives, emphasizing the importance of genuine empowerment and community engagement. She highlights the success of Twilio's Global Impact Week and the collaborative efforts across teams and partners to increase volunteer participation. The company's support for remote work, flexibility, and personal well-being, such as through the coworking program and benefits like ClassPass, is also praised. Tanise values Twilio's core principle of being genuine and empowering others, which allows her to bring her full self to work, fostering a culture of belonging and meaningful contribution.

The tutorial by Matthew Setter explains how to integrate Twilio Verify's Safe List API into PHP applications to manage phone numbers that should not be blocked by Twilio's Verify Fraud Guard or Geo Permissions. The guide discusses setting up a PHP project with necessary dependencies, configuring Composer, and creating routes to add, view, and delete phone numbers from the Safe List using Twilio's PHP Helper Library. It emphasizes ensuring phone numbers are in E.164 format for validation, provides utility functions for error handling, and outlines testing procedures to verify the application's functionality. The tutorial aims to help developers maintain a list of safe phone numbers within their applications while keeping them secure from suspicious activities.

Upstream data orchestration involves moving campaign logic and data management to a centralized Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Twilio Segment, which can significantly enhance personalization and operational efficiency for marketers. Traditional siloed systems, where each channel such as email, SMS, and ads operates independently, often result in fragmented customer experiences and duplicated efforts for engineering teams. By unifying customer profiles and managing business logic centrally, a CDP allows marketers to deliver deeply personalized, real-time messages across all channels without duplicating rules in each platform. This approach not only streamlines operations and improves compliance but also ensures that messages are consistent and context-rich, leveraging real-time customer data to engage audiences effectively. This centralized orchestration is particularly beneficial for complex, cross-channel campaigns that require dynamic, intent-based engagement, although simpler campaigns may still rely on traditional Marketing Automation Platforms. Overall, upstream orchestration with a CDP enables brands to unlock scalable, personalized customer engagement that enhances return on investment in marketing technology.

Segment's notification architecture faced significant reliability challenges due to its evolution into a monolithic system, which created cascading failures and inefficiencies. To address this, the team employed the Strangler Fig pattern, a strategy that allows for incremental migration by building new functionalities alongside the existing system and gradually redirecting traffic. They focused first on the API layer, extracting CRUD operations into a standalone service and employing a dual-write pattern for seamless data synchronization. This was followed by moving event processing from a cron job scheduler to a more modern orchestration platform, Orkes, which transformed monolithic procedures into task-based workflows, enabling modularity and parallel development. The orchestration approach provided clear separation between the control plane and data plane, enhancing resilience, scalability, and simplicity. This transformation journey, which combined the benefits of microservices with unified service management, demonstrated that orchestration could effectively modernize complex systems by transforming operational complexity into composable workflows. The project highlighted the importance of prioritizing customer impact, favoring orchestration over traditional microservices, and designing for reusability to drive rapid innovation while maintaining reliability.

The article outlines a two-part guide for building two-way conversational email experiences using Twilio SendGrid's Inbound Parse feature, emphasizing the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) to enhance email interactions. Part 1 focuses on setting up the infrastructure using AWS services like API Gateway, Lambda functions, and S3 buckets, ensuring secure receipt and storage of emails through signature verification. The process involves parsing emails, storing their content and attachments in S3, and triggering events for further processing through AWS SNS, demonstrating a robust method for handling inbound emails. Part 2 extends this by leveraging GenAI on AWS Bedrock to summarize and categorize email content, allowing for intelligent routing and response actions, catered to various business needs such as support and sales inquiries. While this setup is not beginner-friendly and requires certain technical prerequisites, it provides a comprehensive foundation for enterprises looking to harness email as an effective channel for GenAI applications, despite limitations like payload size constraints on AWS API Gateway.

The article outlines how to create a multi-agent solution using Flowise, an open-source visual agent builder, in conjunction with Twilio Voice and ConversationRelay, to manage various customer service scenarios via voice channels. By leveraging Flowise's capabilities, users can design workflows where specialized agents handle tasks like scheduling, fitness guidance, and general inquiries, each using a ReAct wrapper to execute a RAG pipeline with tailored tools and knowledge. The tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for setting up the environment, including necessary accounts and plugins, constructing agents within Flowise, and deploying the application both locally and on the cloud with Fly.io. This approach allows for streamlined customer interactions by swiftly routing inquiries to the appropriate agent, enhancing efficiency in customer support and marketing lead qualification. The article also highlights the potential for further customization and extension of this multi-agent framework to accommodate more complex scenarios.

The blog post discusses how to create generative AI email experiences using Twilio SendGrid's Inbound Parse and AWS Bedrock. It provides a detailed guide on processing inbound emails by summarizing and categorizing them with AI, and responding accordingly. The process involves breaking it into two parts: verifying and parsing inbound emails, and using AI to generate responses based on categorized inquiries such as sales, support, or account issues. The system utilizes AWS services like Lambda and EventBridge to manage the email content and attachments stored in S3 buckets, enabling automated responses tailored to specific categories. While the setup offers a comprehensive framework for email management, the post emphasizes that it is a starter kit and not yet suitable for production use without further customization and integration into existing systems. The solution showcases the potential for businesses to enhance their email communication by integrating AI-driven responses, although it requires further development to meet enterprise standards.

The text provides a comprehensive guide on holiday email marketing best practices for 2025 and beyond, focusing on planning, execution, and post-holiday strategies to optimize campaign performance. It emphasizes the importance of early preparation, understanding recipient contexts, and maintaining email list hygiene to improve engagement and avoid deliverability issues. The guide includes tips on crafting personalized content, managing email frequency, and segmenting audiences to enhance message relevance. It also highlights the significance of learning from past successes, testing various elements like subject lines and CTAs, and adapting to changing circumstances to ensure effective communication. Additionally, it advises on post-holiday management to address potential churn by monitoring engagement metrics and adjusting strategies accordingly. The overarching theme is to create valuable, timely, and personalized email experiences that stand out amidst holiday season noise while fostering ongoing subscriber relationships.

Google is set to introduce significant updates to the Gmail inbox in 2025, focusing on enhancing user experience by allowing customers to sort promotional emails by relevancy, ensuring that brands with which users interact more frequently appear prominently. Additionally, Gmail will introduce 'nudges' to highlight specific deals and offers, encouraging senders to reevaluate their engagement strategies and sunset policies. Another enhancement will consolidate order-related emails and shipping updates in a new section called 'Purchases,' centralizing purchase and delivery information, although packages arriving within 24 hours will still be prioritized in the primary inbox. These changes underscore the need for email marketers to fine-tune their strategies to maintain engagement and visibility within the updated Gmail framework.

The article explores the concept of "vibe coding," where AI agents like Anthropic's Claude Code autonomously generate code with minimal human input, illustrated through the creation of a web application using Twilio APIs for automated SMS and WhatsApp messaging. The author, Amanda Lange, shares her experience transitioning from using OpenAI's ChatGPT to Claude Code for more ambitious projects, highlighting the setup challenges associated with Claude Code, which assumes users are familiar with command-line tools and basic coding concepts. Despite initial setbacks, the AI successfully generated a functional C# application with a user-friendly dashboard, capable of managing contacts and sending promotional messages, though it required debugging and security enhancements before being suitable for a production environment. The article emphasizes the importance of human oversight in ensuring code security and reliability, particularly for those less experienced with coding, and concludes that while AI-driven coding can streamline the development of simple applications, it demands a foundational understanding of coding practices.

Fraud is increasingly sophisticated due to the rise of generative AI, which enables more personalized and rapid attacks, such as phishing and credential stuffing, leaving many organizations unprepared to counteract them effectively. A recent report by Twilio and Liminal highlights the necessity of integrating authentication and fraud prevention into a unified, adaptive defense strategy to address these evolving threats. Traditional methods, like multi-factor authentication, are proving insufficient, prompting businesses to adopt multi-signal scoring and probabilistic signals for enhanced detection. Organizations are increasingly investing in comprehensive platforms over siloed tools, aiming to streamline vendor management and improve fraud prevention, with an estimated $496 million in fraud loss savings reported by large banks using these advanced methods. This evolution towards layered, intelligence-driven defenses is essential for protecting both customers and businesses from the growing threat of AI-driven fraud.

The detailed guide explores the creation of a smart inventory chatbot on WhatsApp using Flask, LangChain, LangGraph, OpenAI, and Twilio's WhatsApp messaging API. It outlines the process of integrating AI to enhance chatbot capabilities, allowing it to understand context and perform tasks such as retrieving product details, checking stock availability, listing products, and placing orders. The setup involves configuring a Flask backend, utilizing SQLAlchemy for database interaction, and employing Pyngrok to expose the local server to the internet. The guide also covers integrating Twilio's API for message handling and setting up a LangGraph-based agent to manage conversational flow, ensuring personalized interactions by maintaining session history. The chatbot is designed to interact with a PostgreSQL database, updating inventory data and facilitating user inquiries about product availability, ultimately creating a robust system that handles real-time customer queries via WhatsApp.

A real-time support chat system can be constructed using the Twilio Conversations API and the Go programming language, enabling seamless communication between customer service agents and customers. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a secure and scalable live chat application by focusing on generating secure access tokens with Go, initializing the Twilio Conversations client on the front end, and managing conversations based on user identity. The process involves setting up a backend to handle token generation and conversation creation, as well as building a user-friendly interface for both agents and customers. The project requires a basic understanding of Go, a Twilio account, and some tools like Node.js and Ngrok for local development. The guide provides detailed instructions for installing dependencies, configuring environment variables, and implementing both the backend logic and frontend interface. The chat system allows users to send and receive messages in real-time, with a visually distinct interface that differentiates message authors. Additional functionality can be introduced, such as support for multiple chat rooms and message storage, to further enhance the system. The complete source code is available on GitHub for further adaptation and customization.

Jacob Snipes' tutorial provides a detailed guide on building a .NET-based Micro-Weather Wisdom SMS service using Twilio and OpenAI, aimed at delivering personalized weather advice via SMS. The service integrates multiple technologies, such as Meteomatics for weather data, OpenAI for generating tailored advice, and Twilio for SMS communication. It involves setting up a project environment, implementing weather and AI services, configuring SMS communication, and establishing a scheduling service for daily updates. The application is designed following .NET best practices, including dependency injection and secure handling of API credentials. Users are guided on configuring Twilio webhooks and testing the service using ngrok for public URL exposure. The tutorial also offers troubleshooting tips and suggestions for enhancements, like database integration and user management. The service exemplifies efficient API integration, background processing, and reliable SMS communication, making it a robust solution for delivering weather insights.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has introduced SIP code 603+ as a new standard for indicating analytics-based blocked calls in the U.S., replacing the previous codes 603, 607, and 608. This change aims to create a uniform and consistent way for carriers to signal when a call is blocked due to analytics, allowing callers to more easily access redress with operators for legitimate calls. Carriers are encouraged to begin adopting 603+ immediately, with a mandatory industry-wide implementation by March 25, 2026. While Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking, Programmable Voice SIP, and Bring Your Own Carrier Trunking products will incorporate the new code, there is no impact on non-SIP Programmable Voice services. The transition to SIP 603+ is designed to simplify the identification of blocked calls due to suspected spam, and most customers will not need to take action unless their systems specifically track the older codes. Twilio advises customers to update their systems to recognize 603+ as carriers transition to this new standard.

Yahoo Mail's recent reduction in its free storage limit from 1TB to 20GB has led to an increase in email delivery blocks due to full mailboxes, impacting email senders, particularly those with relaxed sunset policies or re-engagement campaigns. This change aligns Yahoo Mail with other major providers but significantly lowers the previous storage capacity, prompting users to consider upgrading to higher storage plans. As a result of the new limit, Twilio SendGrid observed a substantial rise in 'mailbox full' blocks, with a 5,500% increase in such blocks over recent weeks. Senders are advised to reassess their sunset policies and sending strategies to mitigate the effects of these storage limit changes, potentially utilizing frequency reduction models and professional services for optimization.

Twilio has revamped its onboarding experience to prioritize a builder-first approach, allowing users to prototype without initial compliance or credit card requirements. The new process is designed to streamline the setup with three main goals: enabling immediate prototyping, providing personalized guidance for common use cases, and reducing the need for extensive documentation research. A significant feature is the Virtual Phone, which lets users test and send messages in a sandbox environment without compliance delays. Additionally, the onboarding experience now includes a personalized survey to tailor the user's journey, a "For You" page for role-specific guidance, and embedded documentation within tutorials to facilitate a seamless building process. These improvements have led to a significant increase in the speed of first message activation and production launches.

Twilio is implementing a Heightened Awareness Period (HAP) from November 24, 2025, to January 5, 2026, to ensure reliable messaging during the holiday shopping season when message traffic surges. This period involves closely monitoring and adjusting message throughput to U.S. recipients, particularly for toll-free numbers, short codes, and 10DLC numbers, to prevent network congestion and delays, especially for critical messages like two-factor authentication and delivery notifications. Most Twilio users don't need to take action, but those relying on high-volume messaging should coordinate with their account team by October 31, 2025, to ensure their throughput needs are met for peak times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If necessary, users can reserve additional message throughput for short codes, toll-free, and 10DLC traffic by contacting their Twilio account team and signing a supplementary order form by November 21, 2025. Once the HAP concludes, accounts will revert to pre-HAP message limits unless an agreement to maintain increased throughput is in place. Twilio encourages users to reach out to their account teams or support for questions to ensure seamless communication during this crucial period.

Twilio has been recognized on Fast Company's 2025 Best Workplaces for Innovators list, an accolade that highlights the company's commitment to fostering a culture of creativity and innovation. This recognition underscores Twilio's dedication to empowering its vast community of developers, customers, partners, and employees to drive technological advancements and solve real-world problems. The company prides itself on its core value of being "Builders," encouraging bold ideas and fearless iteration to enhance customer engagement through its platform. Twilio recently hosted "Tweek," a week-long internal hackathon that brought together over 850 employees to develop new technologies, many of which have become integral to the company's offerings. The honor from Fast Company serves as a milestone that motivates Twilio to continue evolving its customer engagement platform by integrating communications, data, and AI to redefine business-customer interactions.

The evolution of crisis communication is transforming emergency response systems by integrating digital technology to enhance preparedness and response. Traditional siren-based alerts are being replaced with SMS, WhatsApp messages, and multilingual hotlines, enabling real-time, two-way communication. This shift is driven by humanitarian organizations and government agencies adopting agile, technology-driven methods that empower communities to act proactively. Examples include Atma Connect in Indonesia using SMS alerts to prevent flood damage and the Pacific Disaster Center expanding its reach with Twilio's SMS services. These innovations allow local responders to efficiently coordinate volunteers, deliver aid, and manage multilingual helpdesks, enhancing their capacity to save lives without increasing team size. The approach emphasizes trust, timing, and connection, creating a framework for scalable, effective communication that positions readiness as a dynamic capability rather than a static checklist. The initiative is supported by organizations like Twilio.org, which provides tools and funding to advance climate resilience and crisis response efforts.

The tutorial by Margot Hughan discusses using Twilio Programmable SIP and TypeScript to perform a warm transfer from a virtual agent, powered by OpenAI's newly available Realtime API, to a human agent. OpenAI's Realtime API, featuring a multilingual and multimodal gpt-realtime model, can analyze a caller's pitch and tone to understand their sentiment and intent. The guide provides a step-by-step process, including establishing a Webhook with OpenAI, configuring a Twilio number, setting up a Node.js/TypeScript environment, and orchestrating a call conference that seamlessly transitions a user to a human agent upon request. By leveraging Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking and the SIP Connector for OpenAI, the system ensures that users experience minimal disruption during the transition, enhancing customer service interactions. The tutorial emphasizes the use of environment variables and provides detailed instructions for managing WebSocket connections to facilitate communication between the virtual and human agents.

The choice between SMS and push notifications depends on various factors such as audience, industry, and product. While both channels offer timely messaging, they differ in terms of engagement, visibility, and delivery method. SMS tends to have a higher open rate, but users have less control over their preferences, whereas push notifications allow for greater customization and can be less intrusive. When time is of the essence, SMS is often preferred, while push notifications are better suited for situations where urgency is not as critical. In some cases, using both channels together can enhance campaigns and ensure audience engagement.

Slater Rainney Twilion explains the importance of understanding message length and encoding in the context of Twilio's newly launched RCS Business Messaging platform, which affects how messages are categorized, processed, and billed. The article delves into the technical aspects of message encoding, particularly focusing on the differences between UTF-8 used in RCS and the GSM-7 and UCS-2 encodings used in SMS. RCS messages are categorized based on length and content, with different billing models in various regions, such as basic and single messages in most countries and rich and rich media messages in the US. The article highlights the complexity of character encoding, especially when using emojis and non-Latin characters, which can significantly impact the byte count of a message due to the variable-length nature of UTF-8 encoding. The discussion underscores the need for businesses to accurately calculate message length to avoid unexpected costs, as RCS messages have limits on basic message length and are subject to per-segment charges in certain regions.

Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework designed to facilitate the development of web applications and APIs by offering a range of features such as Pub/Sub, validation, and database management. The tutorial focuses on using Laravel's Query Builder to interact with databases, providing a comprehensive guide on writing and executing queries efficiently. It walks through creating a data table, demonstrating how to perform CRUD operations and implement functionalities like filtering, searching, and pagination. The tutorial also includes practical examples of different query clauses, including select, where, join, group by, and aggregate functions, while highlighting error handling and advanced querying techniques. By building a data table, users can learn to create dynamic and interactive components, manage data efficiently, and enhance their Laravel skills. The guide concludes with suggestions for further improving the data table, emphasizing the framework's adaptability and potential for customization.

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), introduced in 2021, is part of Apple's broader initiative to give users greater control over their data, particularly affecting email engagement metrics by anonymizing open tracking. As of 2025, iOS 18 introduces further changes, including AI-generated previews and new inbox categories, complicating how emails are noticed and tracked. MPP masks IP addresses and generates "machine opens," making open rates unreliable and necessitating a shift towards click-based metrics for measuring engagement. This has prompted email marketers to adapt by prioritizing clicks over opens, rethinking automation workflows, and utilizing new Apple-specific inbox features to maintain visibility. While MPP adoption varies across different email providers, its impact is more pronounced among users of Apple's own mail domains, forcing marketers to refine their strategies to navigate these privacy changes effectively.

AI email marketing in 2025 leverages machine learning to enhance personalization, efficiency, and optimization of email campaigns, transforming traditional mass email strategies into highly customized and engaging communications. By analyzing subscriber behavior in real-time, AI tools automatically optimize send times, personalize content at scale, and make data-driven predictions about customer engagement, leading to improved open rates and conversions. These tools, such as those offered by Twilio SendGrid, not only aid in personalization through insights like subject line performance and optimal sending times but also offer automation for routine tasks, allowing marketing teams to focus on strategic efforts. Moreover, AI enhances predictive analysis, journey mapping, anomaly detection, churn prediction, and sentiment analysis, providing marketers with powerful insights and proactive engagement strategies. While AI does not replace marketers, it complements their efforts by handling data-heavy tasks, thus allowing for more creative and strategic decision-making.