Last week, at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in New York, San Francisco-based cloud communication and customer engagement platform Twilio Inc. (TWLO) announced its strategic partnership with technology giant Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN). Right on cue, the market welcomed the announcement with more than a 5% intraday gain in the former’s share price while surging by as much as 11.7% during the trading session.
The Partner
As a dominant player in the CPaaS (Communications-Platform-as-a-Service) market, TWLO provides businesses with the tools to integrate voice calls, text messages, and security verification tools into their software and apps to drive customer engagement by facilitating seamless and personalized interactions on demand. This empowers businesses to expand their customer base and communicate with clients across the globe.
While potential growth avenues for TWLO include expanding its CPaaS offerings and forging partnerships with other major tech companies, competition from established tech giants could impact the company’s operations and revenue generation. However, that concern seems to have been mitigated by TWLO’s artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled strategic partnership with AMZN.
The Partnership
The renewal of vows and strengthening of ties, which seeks to enhance the company’s predictive AI proficiency, has closely followed a vote of confidence from the tech giant in which AMZN announced that it has acquired 1% stake in TWLO earlier in the week with its ownership of 1.77 million shares worth more than $108 million.
The association between the two businesses started back in 2016 when TWLO began serving as a Marketplace partner for AWS, which had become the world's largest cloud infrastructure platform. It signed two deals with AMZN to directly integrate its communication tools into AWS, which enabled developers to easily add TWLO's voice calls, text messages, audio clips, and other features to their mobile apps.
Fast forward to June 2022, and TWLO revealed its CustomerAI, which adds a technology layer that integrates generative AI and predictive AI tools into the company's customer engagement platform.
According to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, who was employed with AMZN between 2004 and 2005, “With generative and predictive intelligence, Twilio’s high-quality interaction data, and Segment profiles working together, every experience can be highly personalized and tuned with a level of sophistication that was previously only attainable by the tech giants. With Twilio CustomerAI, brands can transform their customer relationships and unlock their full potential.”
The Heavyweight
Coincidentally, also in June 2023, AWS, in response to the recent noise around AI being made by frontrunner Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) and challenger Alphabet Inc. - Class A (GOOGL), announced an allocation of $100 million for a center to help companies use generative AI. This technology has captivated the public imagination and shaped the business narrative since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT.
While $100 million might be an apparent drop in the bucket for a company with $64 billion in cash and half a trillion dollars a year in operating expenses, the investment acknowledges the significance of generative AI and the importance of being a part of the conversation.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky insists that the AI trend is real. For AMZN, that momentum applies to its Bedrock generative AI service and its Titan models, as well as the new innovation center.
While it might seem that the company, which got a head start of no less than seven years over MSFT and GOOGL in the business of renting out servers and data storage to companies and other organizations, might be late to the generative AI game, Selipsky, echoing Amazon founder and longtime CEO Jeff Bezos, said the company has succeeded by listening to customers.
In fact, AMZN’s leadership in the cloud infrastructure market could give the company heft and mileage in the generative AI race. “AI is going to be this next wave of innovation in the cloud,” Selipsky said. “It’s going to be the next big thing that pushes even more customers to want to be in the cloud. Really, you need the cloud for generative AI.”
Moreover, according to Selipsky, AWS provides a measure of credibility in offering generative AI that eludes others in the space. He emphasized, “I can’t tell you how many Fortune 500 companies I’ve talked to who banned ChatGPT in the enterprise. Because at least the initial versions of it just didn’t have that concept of enterprise security.”
Bottom line
TWLO Senior Director of Product Alex Millet expressed his optimism around the company’s partnership with AMZN, “With AWS’ predictive AI technologies, we are rapidly developing AI-native features and APIs.” He further added, “We believe our tools will change the way marketers, contact centers, developers, and data teams deliver these world-class customer experiences.”
Hence, while the OpenAI-MSFT alliance is garnering attention and reaping the first-mover advantage with GOOGL scrambling to play catchup, the coalition of AMZN and TWLO has the potential to emerge as the dark horse in what AWS CEO has termed as a “10K race.”
