Twilio at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Focus on AI and Growth

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Twilio Inc. (NYSE:TWLO) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO Khozema outlined a strategic shift towards becoming the customer experience layer of the internet, leveraging AI and data integration. While Twilio faces challenges such as gross margin degradation, the company is committed to cash flow improvement and international expansion.

Key Takeaways

• Twilio aims to integrate communications, data, and AI to enhance customer experiences.
• The company reported $260 million in revenue from AI-native companies and a $5 billion run rate.
• Despite gross margin challenges, Twilio focuses on cash flow and price adjustments.
• Strategic partnerships with OpenAI, Databricks, Snowflake, and Microsoft aim to enhance product capabilities.
• International expansion is a key growth pillar, with presence in multiple regions.

Financial Results

• Revenue from AI-native companies reached $260 million.
• Twilio achieved a $5 billion run rate with four consecutive quarters of double-digit growth.
• The communications business constitutes approximately 95% of revenue, with Segment business contributing less than 5%.
• Recent gross margin degradation has not hindered cash flow, with price increases implemented in SMS and email products.

Operational Updates

• Twilio is developing ConversationRelay, focusing on multi-channel communication and data integration.
• The integration of Segment data with communication products enhances contextual interactions.
• Voice revenue returned to double-digit growth, driven by advancements in voice AI and reduced latency.
• Partnerships with technology leaders aim to ensure interoperability and access to advanced technologies.

Future Outlook

• Growth drivers include ISVs, self-serve enhancements, AI, and international expansion.
• Twilio anticipates gross margin stability through price increases and cost efficiencies.
• The company is cautious with AI applications in sensitive areas like mental health, prioritizing data security.

Q&A Highlights

• The voice business shows potential for future growth, supported by a higher structural gross margin.
• Twilio remains focused on customer care applications in healthcare, avoiding advice-giving in mental health contexts.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full conference call transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Good morning, everybody. Thanks for once again attending the Goldman Sachs Communication and Technology Conference. This, I think, is the fourth year in a row that we’ve had it at this venue. Tremendous excitement. Thank you once again for your support. I’m very, very delighted to have Khozema, the CEO of Twilio, almost kick us off. This is at least the first presentation we’re going to be moderating.

You’re a first. Welcome to the conference. Thanks for your continued support.

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Thanks for having me.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Wonderful. I have my colleague Matt Martino, who is also going to be joining me in this amazing fireside. He said, Kash, I’m going to ask way better questions than you. I know that you’ve been doing this longer than me, but I’m going to be better than you. We’ll see. Khozema, as you take a step back, first of all, congratulations on the significant and impressive turnaround of the company under your leadership as CEO. Having come this far, how do you see the next four or five years ahead for the company?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I mean, I guess the way that we think about the company kind of writ large is that our job is to ensure that every digital interaction between one of our customers and ultimately their consumers is nothing short of amazing. Until we deliver on that promise, we got a lot of work to do. I think from our perspective, what’s exciting about the way that we’re running the company, kind of speaking to turnaround, which again is very much a work in progress, we’re running the company better, more financial discipline, more operating rigor. The way in which we’re innovating, it’s a lot more focused, I think, now than perhaps it was before. We’ve got this awesome collection of assets, communications, plus data, plus AI.

I think as I look out five years, the way that I really see it is that we want to be able to deliver on that vision to be sure. More importantly, I think we want to be indispensable to a company by being this customer experience layer of the internet, if you will, which has to require communications, plus especially contextual data that then gets activated by AI and LLMs and stuff like that. We’re proud of kind of what’s transpired. We’re looking forward always. We’re kind of nowhere near to where we want to be.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Got it. I think Matt and I had a chance to attend your analyst day. I think Matt subsequently attended your user conference Signal. Both were amazing events. I think at Signal 2025, there was the idea about customer engagement lifecycle. Can you tell us more about what goes behind it? Are there some aspects of the customer engagement lifecycle manifest through a set of products that have a lot of potential for the company in the years ahead?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, I’d start where I ended in the prior question. The idea is how do we deliver on this notion of being the customer experience layer? If you’re a customer in whatever the industry is, it could be retail, it could be financial services, it could be health care, in every single interaction that you have between one of our customers and one of their consumers, you have to have some sort of a communications channel to be able to do that. Even if it’s a person, you know, a live agent, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later, you have to have some sort of communication that’s happening back and forth. We have all of the channels that are required to be able to do that. That’s an exciting starting point.

I think the second thing is that as exciting as AI is, as incredible as the LLMs are, where things get really interesting is where you’re able to apply context to the communication so that you’re able to drive both persistence and this notion of customer memory, so that over long periods of time, our customers can develop longer-term relationships with their consumers and be able to feed them increasingly more value, more intimate interactions over time. That’s what we’re really, really focused on. Of course, we develop some of our own AI, but we’re also leaning into the LLMs and the capabilities that they’re bringing. In terms of products, where you see all of this come together, and you saw this demo, our ConversationRelay product, I’d say, is pretty exciting.

The ConversationRelay product, for those that don’t know, what it allows for is, and we used it in the context of actually a pretty complex transaction, a mortgage application, where you can speak to a virtual agent during the context of that interaction. The virtual agent is able to store all of the data that transpires during the course of that conversation. Using our Conversational Intelligence capabilities, it’s able to harvest the words and the context that really matters. You’re able to complete the transaction through that interaction. You’re able to switch channels. For example, if you need forms delivered to you, you probably want that done over email. If you want to be able to send a confirmation of a transaction, you probably want that done over SMS.

You have this complex interaction and something that is very emotionally charged, very complex, like a mortgage and a home purchase in the first place, where you’re able to handle that transaction through multiple channels, use context. As you can imagine, the mortgage companies, the financial services companies, they don’t envision that being kind of a one and done. What they really want to be able to do is develop this lifetime relationship that actually probably starts with renting, you know, if you’re a college graduate, and then progresses to various home purchases over time. Their ability to harvest all of that data and be able to drive additional interactions over time allows us to be able to create more value for them and for them to be able to create more value with their consumers.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Before I turn it over to Matt, I just want to dwell on that for a second because there’s this fear that AI is going to do what software does. The way you explained it to me, the context that Twilio has with its customer engagement layer is important for the LLMs to actually work. Can you tell us more why that is so differentiated and why is it that conventional belief, perhaps misguided as it is, might have you believe that the LLMs are going to figure it all out magically and just obviate the need for not just Twilio, but any other software layer? What is wrong with that? What is mistaken with that?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I don’t think it’s entirely mistaken. I mean, I do think that there’s a lot of truth to LLMs being very disruptive to a lot of different SaaS companies, especially single-point applications. If you can orchestrate all of that, especially systems of record, I think there is disruption that’s about to happen. What’s a little bit different for us is that we’re not a SaaS company in sort of the classic sense. We operate at the infrastructure layer. Just at the bare primitives, like what we do is we’re allowing for this level of connectivity across 150 countries, thousands of different telecommunications companies. I don’t think that that’s well served by LLMs. I’m not going to say never. I think people get into trouble when they make statements like that. I don’t really think we’re susceptible in the same way.

The super network that we have that sort of underpins our capability to deliver on these things, I really think that that is like sort of our own version of AI before AI was cool, you know, that allows you to be able to deliver these seamless interactions all over the world in microseconds across whatever the channel is. I think that that is very unlikely to be disrupted by AI. That’s one thing. The second thing is that I actually think AI and the LLMs in particular, like they very much augment what we do.

The reason I say it that way is that if you think about the brands we serve, again, it doesn’t matter what the industry is, health care, financial services, insurance, retail, I find it incredibly, incredibly difficult to believe that there would come a day in which they turn over their proprietary data, their knowledge about their consumers to the LLMs. If they did do that, they would completely allow for their own hard-won customer relationships to be disintermediated. Instead, we’re hearing quite the opposite, where their CISOs are basically saying, hey, listen, this data needs to be safe and secure. It’s got to be in my data warehouse. You’ve got to be interoperable with my data warehouse. I want no copies of this data. I want all of the transactions to take place there. The LLM will augment and power.

The context, though, is what I’m really interested in in terms of being able to drive the interaction and having that sit on top of our CPaaS layer. I think that is really defensible in terms of moat and stuff like that.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Yeah. Khozema, you’ve talked a lot about contextual data at the start of the conversation. Segment standalone growth has been relatively sluggish for some time. As we understand, that creation is increasing in our core communications portfolio. Can you talk about some of the innovation you’re bringing to market in this capacity and the early traction you’re observing around this?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I mean, I think we certainly want to maintain the growth characteristics of the Segment business. What’s way more important going forward for us is how does Segment actually complement the whole? The reality is, to just put it in perspective, we’re talking about less than 5% of our revenue, right? Whereas Communications tends to be about 95% of our revenue. As long as that product and feature capability can augment what we’re doing in Communications, that’s where it gets exciting. To answer your question more directly, the way we want it to operate is that when a customer comes to us to be able to avail themselves of voice or SMS or email, they immediately start utilizing data characteristics so that they can drive context from the very get-go.

You know we’ve always been a company that abstracts this communications complexity away from our customers so that we can work on that and they can do what they do best. I think now that comes with data. Through a single API, they can immediately get going. They can start incorporating all of the different data elements that go with all of these different transactions and consumer history and then use the channels to be able to activate against that. Conversational Intelligence, I would say, is perhaps the most fully born product in that way. We’ve also launched APIs with respect to Flex, with respect to Voice, our Conversational Intelligence product. That on a standalone basis, if you overlay it on top of Voice, that has that capability. There are a number of different places that you can go with this.

Ultimately, what we’re really shooting for on behalf of our customers is persistence in that data and then customer memory.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Right. You talked about ConversationRelay a couple of times. I think it’s one of the more exciting parts of the Twilio story. You’ve stated several times that voice is poised for a renaissance. Twilio has been doing voice for years now, right? What excites you most about the opportunity today?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: I think two things. One is, you know, every interaction basically that’s taking place, and you see this in venture funding, right? There are thousands, I mean, literally thousands of venture-backed voice AI companies that are emerging. We are delighted to count most of them as our customers, right? That’s an exciting starting point. The way that you see that show up in the numbers is that, you know, as recently as the last quarter that we reported, we’ve seen this return to double-digit growth in voice. I think what’s especially exciting about that is that, you know, if you’re talking about real-life agents, voice had become a little bit clunky. Especially as you’re talking about fighting things like robocalling and stuff like that, outbound voice to consumers became super clunky, right? In most cases, I suspect you weren’t even picking up the phone, just as I wasn’t, right?

Because you didn’t know who was on the other side. Now, for all of this incoming stuff, it’s perfectly suited. The really interesting thing about that is that you’re able to drive lower cost. You’re able to drive more revenue because you have limitless time, effectively. Because the consumer, they don’t really care about how long it takes you, right? It matters in a real-life agent dynamic because they’re measured on cycle time. With a virtual agent, you have unlimited time. Most importantly, the consumer’s problems are actually getting solved. I think you’re starting to see that really develop. From a Twilio standpoint too, our top 10 voice AI companies, they’re growing at six, their revenue run rates are six figures, in many cases, seven figures. That’s exciting. What’s equally exciting about that is it’s a tiny percentage of our revenue, right? On the one hand, we’re not super exposed.

On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of upside here.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, you talked a lot about the AI customers. You guys disclosed in the analyst data you have $260 million in revenue from the AI natives, right? Twilio was a direct participant in the hypergrowth from companies born out of the cloud cycle. You’ve seen many cycles yourself. Any parallels you draw on here as to why next-gen companies continue to build with Twilio?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: I think the big things, from my perspective, all cycles have their ups and downs, right? It wouldn’t shock me to have us experience a down as part of this cycle. I think what’s more important about AI is that I think it’s very much a secular trend. I know lots is sort of being written about, are we in sort of a hype cycle? Maybe. I don’t know one way or the other. I think long term, there’s just absolutely no question in my mind and probably on the minds of all of your speakers over the next few days that this is very much not a trend, but it’s going to become the fabric of everything that we do. I think for Twilio, just to knit a few concepts together, this idea of context is really powerful. I think it really presents an unlock for our customers.

I think that the AI’s ability to do three things at once: drive out cost, increase revenue, and solve customer problems, that’s really exciting. I think inside of Twilio, our own ability to be able to drive productivity, especially as it relates to customer service and SDRs, which is just the starting point, that’s really exciting too. Importantly, we’re not overexposed, as I said a moment ago. It still remains a fraction of our revenue. We’re excited about the upside potential there. Being back to kind of double-digit growth in that context feels pretty good.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Yeah. Just one segue and then I’ll turn it back to you, Matt. $260 million is a lot of money. If an AI voice startup did that amount of revenue, of course, it’s your revenue from the AI voice startups. That is pretty significant. What is happening with these AI voice startups? I’m asking you this because over the weekend, I was watching Andrew Ng, the Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, who’s also a CEO, talk about voice as a frontier that AI models have not really quite taken on. He saw it as a fertile opportunity. You’re telling me about these voice startups. What’s going on? What do these voice startups do exactly? What is kind of a very interesting thing that these companies do that can get us arms around what exactly is?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: I think in many cases, if not most, a lot of them are very much customer service oriented, which is just the beginning. I think there’s a lot of different directions that this stuff can go in. For now, it seems to be customer service. What’s exciting about it is that I’ll just speak about it from a Twilio perspective. I can talk about it more generically if you’d like. What we find in our own capabilities, as well as in the partners that we work with, is that latency, which historically had been sort of the roadblock here, is more or less becoming a solved problem, right? You don’t have these awkward pauses when you have these interactions take place between a human on one side and then a voice AI agent on the other side. I think that’s important.

The second thing is that, again, your ability to incorporate context, right? No customer cares really what they’re interacting with on the other side. In fact, we have a certain amount of research that says, especially in health care, most customers would prefer to interact with a voice AI because if it’s a person, there’s this feeling that there’s this asymmetry in knowledge between the two sides, whereas a voice AI is just that. It’s just virtual, right?

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Can you spell your first name again? Your last name again? I’m sorry.

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: That stuff’s gone, right? That’s the interesting thing, right? All of these horrific IVR menus that we’ve become used to, if you can identify a voice signature up front and then do a light verification on the backside of that, because you got to take out spoofing, because that is a real thing. If you can get past that, you’re right into the conversation, able to drive the interaction and outcome. What’s also interesting, I’ve said this a couple of times, but maybe just to put a fine point on it, there is a revenue upsell opportunity for the businesses as well, right? If you think about this like in a retail context, food delivery, there’s an actual customer that we have, 35% of their orders come in still, to this day, over the phone, OK? They’ve flipped to doing voice AI interactions instead of human interactions.

It has the cost, obvious cost impacts, as you would think. The ability to upsell inside of that interaction, because again, the human agent has to worry about cycle time. They’re trying to rifle through an order and move on to the next one, because otherwise, another customer is waiting on hold, right? The voice AI’s capacity is unlimited, right? Think about game day when you’re ordering pizza or wings or something. We just had the opening of the NFL season this last weekend. Those are heightened periods in which.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Yesterday was game day in New York.

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, for me, it was more about tennis. Anyway, the reality is that they lose a ton of business on those days because you cannot get through. Now all of that’s gone. Not only is it gone, but the voice AI agent, during the course of the interaction, using context and memory about the customer, can actually refer to prior purchase history and suggest upselling other products that are super high margin and allow them to have a better customer relationship. The customer doesn’t mind because this is stuff that they want. They don’t want this with every brand, OK? The brands that they really interact with frequently and really care about, they definitely want it. The research all shows that.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: That’s great. Thank you. Khozema, maybe let’s touch quickly on some of the more recent business momentum that Twilio has observed. You guys have delivered four consecutive quarters of accelerating double-digit growth. It’s an impressive feat at a $5 billion run rate. What are the primary drivers fueling kind of the improving growth profile here?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: I’d point to a few that are really big. I mean, I think ISVs have definitely been a big part of the story. The interesting thing and what’s sometimes misunderstood about ISVs, I think people tend to think about the mega senders, like the really big guys. I’m sure those guys are at your conference. It’s a super, super long tail. The irony of this category is that ISVs sort of writ large pull up the overall average margin rate, just given the absolute breadth of ISVs that we have in our portfolio. I’d say that’s been a big one. The second one I’d really point to is self-serve. Self-serve has been awesome for us.

Everything that we’ve talked about in the context of AI, you can bet that we’re applying it to our console experience to make it super easy, super simple for a customer to be able to navigate and get to that next use case or even the initial use case. You guys have followed us for a long time, so you probably know that a couple of years ago, because of a lot of regulatory stuff that was kind of shoved into the mix, we threw a lot of, albeit necessary, but all the same complexity and clunkiness into the onboarding and sign-up process. That stuff is predominantly gone, or we’ve made it really, really easy to navigate those workflows.

We’re trying to make it more and more intuitive so that if you’re an actual human developer, you can just kind of sail through the process and get up and running to that magic moment, as we’ve kind of talked about it in the past. If you’re a virtual agent, really the only thing that we need to make sure of is that your intentions are business-oriented and positive. Otherwise, if it’s someone that’s entered a prompt and just trying to reach an API endpoint, if it’s an MCP, and again, you’re just trying to reach an endpoint, even if it’s a virtual agent, we’re ready for that too. I think that’s been a really exciting part of the story. We talked about AI. That’s been great. Finally, international. International has been wildly underpenetrated from our perspective.

It’s a little tougher in the sense that we want to maintain our pricing discipline there. We don’t want to just chase business, which I do think some of our competitors have done in some cases. I think that’s why we remain underpenetrated. There have been a number of instances in which we’ve been able to do competitive takeouts, so much so that customers of ours who were previously using multiple providers have kind of gone all in on Twilio. That’s been exciting.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Yeah, maybe we double-click on the international piece, right? It is a strategic growth pillar for Twilio. Is there any difference in the go-to-market playbook there? Like why can you guys win, especially given kind of the pricing dynamics in that market?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I mean, again, the irony of international, lower gross margin rate, but better unit economics. Those unit economics have been really stable over long periods of time. I think the reason anyone wins to start with is that these phone numbers and SMS in particular, it tends to be like the ubiquitous channel. I’d love to see WhatsApp take off for a variety of reasons. SMS remains a really ubiquitous way to communicate with customers. All that said, the way that we approach it is we’re very deliberate about where we have boots on ground. We only have boots on in the UK, Germany, in Western Europe. In South America, it’s Colombia and Brazil. In Asia, it’s Singapore, Australia, and Japan. Very deliberately, those are the only international markets in which we actually have people. We do serve customers from other geographies.

In Singapore, for example, we tend to serve Southeast Asia. We tend to serve outbound China. We have difficulty participating in China itself, but when they’re sending outbound to other countries, we’ll serve China in that way. That’s kind of the way that we do it. For us, it’s really about maintaining price discipline. I think we tend to serve a lot of enterprise customers because they want to be part of the broader Twilio story in which it’s less price sensitive. They’re putting together an entire package to deliver value to their consumers. That’s a better way for us to win out there, I’d say.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Maybe the pricing dynamics is a good segue into some of the gross margin dynamics you guys have been observing more recently. Some of that’s been tied to the messaging mix. You also saw an unanticipated headwind from A2P fees. What steps is Twilio taking to stabilize and improve the gross margin in the near and long term?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I mean, the most important thing I’d say about the whole topic, and then I’ll answer your question, is in spite of the degradation in gross margins in recent periods, it has not impeded whatsoever our ability to continue to drive cash flow, right? We are very, very focused on driving cash flow and ensuring that, you know, as part of the framework that we laid out, that we continue to drive improved cash flows over time. We’ve seen some short-term dynamics. I’d call them largely mix-oriented as a result of things that we’ve seen in our messaging business. On balance, I’d take that all day long. We want to continue winning in that product. The A2P fee thing, like it has no bearing whatsoever on the pricing characteristics. It doesn’t even change the gross profit dollars. The other thing about it is it hasn’t actually impacted demand.

I mean, again, these channels are very resilient. SMS is ubiquitous. It’s super cheap, especially inside the U.S. Now, back to your question, I do think gross margin stability to a degree is basically a self-help story for us. We have undertaken a number of actions. Being the market leader, we passed through some price increases, starting on SMS. Like that in the U.S. in particular, we’ve raised prices there. That has immediately hit our self-serve customers. It’ll ripple through all of our other contracts over time. That’ll take two to three years just based on the way that those negotiations work. We’ve also passed through what amounts to a price increase in our email product. Effectively, what we did there was to lift the floor on free trials. So instead now, once you hit a certain threshold, you’ll start paying for that versus just getting unlimited free.

Inside of the company, you know, there are also things that we’re doing to be able to drive cost. You know, we use AWS, for example. There are more efficiencies that we can get out of that. We’ve been working for a while on transitioning some of our legacy on-prem stuff entirely to the cloud. That double bubble will start to collapse over the next few periods. That will start to benefit. Finally, we’re continuing to just drive the kind of blocking and tackling that you would do. FX hedging, I mean, we obviously have done some over the past. I think the tricky thing for us is that we’re predominantly, not entirely, but predominantly U.S. dollar denominated in terms of our top line. Our bottom line can fluctuate as a result of where we go in source COGS.

We are doing some things in terms of the way that we build that will allow for more of a natural hedge between those two lines in the P&L. All of those things in totality, I think, allow for us to just kind of stabilize gross margins. Over time, it’s certainly my expectation that many of these other products that we’ve been talking about, they start contributing in a way in which they allow gross margins to come up over time.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Very helpful. I want to shift to the expanding partner ecosystem. You’ve launched partnerships with several marquee players: OpenAI, Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft. Can you talk a little bit about the opportunities you see here from a technical and commerciality perspective?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, I mean, they’re all different just based on the nature of what those folks do. I think to maybe state the obvious, we want to work and be associated with the best. You know, those names that you just rattled off, I mean, I think that they’re the best when it comes to the various kinds of capabilities that they offer. We’re not necessarily going to be exclusive with anybody. I think especially with the LLMs, you want to maintain optionality. A lot of our customers have made choices about various providers that they want to interact with. Whether it’s, by the way, at the LLM layer, the cloud layer, or the data warehouse layer, everybody has made a different choice. There tends to be four or more players depending on who we’re talking about, so flexibility really counts.

I think just to kind of double-click on a few of these, with Microsoft, what’s especially exciting is that their Azure AI workloads have proven to be pretty awesome. I think the functionality that they’re delivering to customers has been great. We’ve been co-developing products with them. We launched one at Signal. We launched one the very following week at their conference. We’re building out more product capability. What’s been exciting to me to watch is that without any real leadership involved, the product folks and the engineering folks from both sides have been able to get into rooms and create a lot of innovation. I think you’ll start to see that bloom over the next several quarters. On the AI front, the OpenAI thing’s been awesome. We’re really, really proud of the work that we’ve done with those guys.

I think one of the cooler things that we did, obviously, was last Christmas when they were doing their 12 days of Christmas or whatever they called it, 12 days of OpenAI, I forget now. They called us like two days before they wanted a thing done. We were the 1-800 ChatGPT thing. We were able to get that launched within literally less than 48 hours, make sure it was ruggedized for the volumes that it would inevitably experience. That thing really flew. With the data warehouse guys, interoperability is really important. Our customers are asking for that zero copy, the CISOs in particular. Databricks and Snowflake are obviously leading companies, but so is Redshift, for example. You want to have broad relationships with all these folks. I think we’ve been able to do that.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Maybe take a few questions if you guys have any. Just raise your hand. We’ll bring a mic over to you. Why don’t you speak up? Yeah. Hey, Sean. I can hear you. I can paraphrase the question.

Unidentified speaker: Curiously, for like a JIRA application, I guess I wouldn’t have asked for an email answer. Maybe they’re not using Voice for freelance, but they’re still using Voice for. How do you think about the economics on that, and basically framing on just how big you think Voice can get and how it ties onto your business?

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Economics of Voice and how it works in the context of your business. How big can it be?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah. Just as a starting point, I mean, like any additional Voice business that we do is really powerful in terms of the way that it contributes to the P&L because it starts with higher structural gross margin. That’s a pretty good starting point. Any additional dollars that we get in the Voice business are good for us. I think the relationship that we have with Sierra is an important one. What’s especially interesting about it, I would say, is that to be sure, there’s the Voice infrastructure component that they’re using, but they’re also exploring a number of areas with our intelligence products, which add additional margin on top of just being in their infrastructure layer.

A number of these collaborations that I spoke of a moment ago with respect to Microsoft, same thing with those guys, where our product folks are getting into a room, engineering folks are getting into a room, and they’re co-developing what we can both take out to market together. I think that’s really exciting. Obviously, they’re a great name. They’re a great company to be associated with. We want there to be 100 of those, fundamentally. As it relates to Voice writ large, I think we are optimistic about where that goes. I’m not going to guide you necessarily or talk about it in terms of the proportion of the business. I think starting with a return to double digit, that feels pretty good. I think that’s got tailwind.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: We have only a minute and 52 seconds left. Anybody wants to jump in with a really quick question? All right, there’s one. Yes, please.

Unidentified speaker: Hi, Kash. My name is VK. I’m a private wealth client of Goldman Sachs since 2016. Just a question about voice agents with therapeutic health care. I know Twilio actually powers 1-800 Kukula for TripVR, which is in the digital therapeutic space. When you’re talking about something as sensitive as mental health and digital therapeutics, and we are going to see so many AI startups get into that space, how is Twilio kind of addressing the sensitive aspects of people’s mental health, talking to an AI voice agent? It’s all about giving more accessibility and inclusivity for something that’s not used that often. There’s always these downsides. What is your take on that?

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Yeah, it’s a great question. Going very slowly, to be honest. I’ll give you an example in the SMS world, and then I’ll bridge it to voice. In an SMS context, one thing that we do today, for example, is that we do send notifications to elderly patients about when to take drugs. They’ve already been prescribed something. The number one reason that it doesn’t work is because they don’t take it when they’re supposed to or on time. Using SMS, we just send simple reminders that say, take this drug at this time. We don’t provide any other context other than that and very, very specific instructions that are dictated by the hospital, the pharmacy, whoever our customer is. In the mental health context, we are not today in the business, and it’s not our business to start providing advice. We would caution our customers to go very slow.

By the way, this is not limited to health care. Insurance, same thing. Financial services, same thing. Retail and e-commerce is pretty low stakes, right? I mean, if you get a sausage versus a pepperoni, maybe you’re upset about that, but it’s not the end of the world, right? In a financial transaction or a health care transaction, it is a big deal. For the most part, what we do in health care is serve use cases that are more customer care-oriented, where there’s a specific solution to a problem that can be identified using the context of the data that exists inside of a customer’s environment and whatever context arises in that conversation. It doesn’t tend to be, oh, by the way, with this set of characteristics, here’s some advice. We’re not in that yet.

I would imagine that over time, what starts to happen is that you will have a lot of that traffic pass through our voice infrastructure. That does not allow us into the intelligence game, if you will. Over time, we will layer that with intelligence so that the providers of those services are able to use the different bits that are specifically relevant to therapeutic outcomes to be able to drive interactions in the future. Again, our caution to clients is go slow. Make sure you guys know what you’re getting into because hallucinations in some of these industries can result in a bad day.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: On that note, there’s plenty of stuff ahead. It’s a four-day conference with a ton of presentations. Thank you for your time and attention. I want to just point out to you, Khozema, that it’s very rare, and I really want to applaud you, that a CFO turns into a CEO of a software company and is able to achieve a significant turnaround. Kudos. I don’t know how you did it. One day, we’ll have to chat separately. How did you make that happen? How did you turn on the CEO hat, the technical leadership hat, and make it happen? I hope you’ll be long remembered for that.

Khozema, CEO, Twilio: Thanks a lot.

Kash, Moderator, Goldman Sachs: Thank you.

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