Pizza box sketch
Twilio’s journey began with a pizza box. Projects published in this stage are mostly an early thought or exploration. We share these to spark discussion and invite collaboration.
Twilio Alpha
Twilio Alpha is run by Twilio's Emerging Technology & Innovation team as a way to showcase our research and give developers hands-on access to our work. We are a small team of builders investigating the future of customer engagement through artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
Projects
About
Twilio Alpha is led by Twilio's Emerging Technology & Innovation team, a team of developers and builders focused on investigating the future of customer engagement. We operate by running lean experiments and use “pizza box sketches” and prototypes to demonstrate our ideas to customers, leveraging your feedback to drive the next iteration of our work.
Our team is built on the foundation of the Twilio Magic, and we operate with three driving principles to guide our work:
Customer and developer obsession
We strive to be the most customer-obsessed research team in the industry.
Ship early, ship often
We seek early validation for our ideas and continuously seek ways to experiment and learn with our customers.
Share as we go
We publish our work internally and externally to gain real customer and developer insights, and to foster collaboration with other innovators.
Every day we wake up thinking about how the world of customer engagement is going to be disrupted as technology continues to advance and customers' expectations and preferences evolve. At Twilio, we have the privilege of serving more than 300,000 customers and millions of developers on our platform.
Twilio Alpha gives you a firsthand look into our research and lets you shape our work. We are inspired by other leading research teams, like GitHub Next, who also embrace the spirit of sharing their research as we all explore this new frontier. Since artificial intelligence is moving at a blistering pace, it's more critical than ever to publish our work as it's happening and get your hands on our prototypes in their earliest stages — rough edges and all. We can't wait to see what we can build together.
Project stages
We strive to share projects at different stages in their lifecycle. In general you will find active projects that fall into the following categories.
Prototype
With prototypes, we test early feasibility of our ideas. We might share protoypes either in videos or, in some cases, as limited interactive demos.
Developer Preview
If a project reaches this stage, we are inviting you all to try it and give us feedback.
A project in Developer Preview might not always turn into a product, but your feedback will help us make that decision.
Current research areas
Right now, our research interests are mostly centered around autonomous agents and the impact that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will have on customer engagement and Twilio. Specifically, we are interested in:
What are the future channels for customer engagement in a world of AGI?
What role do personalization and customer data play with agents & AGI?
The role of APIs and developer experience with AGI
Let’s chat
We share our projects and research interests because we believe the future is shaped by builders collectively, and we want to work with our community and customers.
If you want to learn more about a project, have feedback, or are interested in collaborating on some research, let us know!