Twilio Segment's Auto-Instrumentation reimagines how businesses collect and react to customer data by eliminating engineering bottlenecks in data strategy. This AI-powered solution simplifies setup, automates event tracking, and enables real-time iteration, driving down costs by up to 90% while accelerating insights and adaptability.
As an engineer who helps businesses collect 1st-party data, I think engineers should STOP collecting data. Their time is more valuable.
Instead, AI can be a big help. AI can transform your business in several ways - It can significantly reduce the time & cost to collect and analyze large quantities of data. It can generate inferences and automate changes to your marketing campaigns accordingly.
At Twilio Segment, we’re committed to helping businesses step into this AI-powered world. But as we evaluated typical business cases across Segment customers, we kept reaching the same conclusion - Engineering can often be the bottleneck to your data strategy. As your organization’s needs constantly evolve, it becomes extremely expensive to constantly re-invest in Data Collection across all your websites & apps.
To enable your business to harness the power of AI in its data strategy, we have to lower the barrier to entry for setting up & maintaining your Data Collection. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Auto-Instrumentation, Segment’s new automated, AI-powered approach to CDP.
Auto-Instrumentation has been designed from the ground-up to give businesses the ability to learn about their customers, and react to changing customer preferences within a matter of clicks! Keep reading to learn how to make AI work for your engineers, not the other way around.
1. One-time Setup
Website and app engineers can update their codebase to include the latest Auto-Instrumentation bundle from Segment. Once this is done, Auto-Instrumentation keeps track of most common user activity (navigations, clicks & form inputs), as well as relevant changes in state
Once this is done, your engineering team can re-deploy your apps.
Beginning April 15th, 2025 we are onboarding select customers to our Private Beta of Auto-Instrumentation. Click here to find out how to harness AI in your customer strategy, while driving down setup costs by up to 90%
Businesses have used Analytics for decades to accomplish the following:
Collect data on user behavior (aka Instrument)
Generate insights from this collected data (Analyze)
Change its business offerings, prices, marketing, etc. (Adapt)
Evaluate the impact of changes (which takes us back to step 1)
In the past, step 1 (collecting data) has often caused major up-front investments to get set up across multiple platforms (web, iOS & Android).
Moreover, even if you have your data gathering dialed in, every website/app update requires re-visiting your data strategy, as well as your engineering team’s time.
The same engineers that would otherwise be needed to implement step 1 could be better utilized to:
Deliver new experiences to your customers
improve scale & security.
Focus on UX, performance & scale
How can businesses iterate the speed of AI if every single iteration gets bottlenecked at the first step?
Auto-Instrumentation is a perspective on the role that data gathering should play (and more importantly, shouldn’t play) in a business’s operations.
It’s a perspective that businesses should both drive product and business needs, and also react to its customer’s changing needs, at the speed of thought- without the recurring bottleneck of engineering priorities.
Auto-Instrumentation is about taking the Engineering OUT of CDP!
Streaming data - data collected in near-real-time from your websites & apps - has a distinct advantage over other forms of CDP… if you can learn about your users in real-time, you can react to their changing needs a lot faster!
To react to customer data real time, we first need to collect this data real-time. Let’s take a look at how Auto-Instrumentation accomplishes this.
1. One-time Setup
Website and app engineers can update their codebase to include the latest Auto-Instrumentation bundle from Segment. Once this is done, Auto-Instrumentation keeps track of most common user activity (navigations, clicks & form inputs), as well as relevant changes in state
Once this is done, your engineering team can re-deploy your apps.
2. Define Event Rules
Customers can use the Segment dashboard to automatically monitor captured user activity and select which activity they want to convert to Events.
Select the Events that matter to you and enrich them with related user activity, identity and traits, including suggestions from CDP Co-Pilot!
Once these Rules are defined, they can be delivered over-the-top to your end-user’s devices (at the next website or app launch). From here on out, end-user devices will directly translate automatically captured Events.
3. Iterate!
This is the fun part! Let’s say your site or app launches a new feature or has a new campaign banner ad. You probably want to assess the success of this feature immediately. Are people using the new tab on your app? Are they clicking on your latest sales promo?
With Auto-Instrumentation, simply head over to the Segment dashboard to review this new user activity and create new Rules for these Events. Preview & deploy these new rules, directly back to your end-user devices over-the-top!
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of AI. It can turbo-charge your business’ ability to learn about, and react to, customer behaviors and preferences. Our investment in a modern, lightweight CDP - which itself benefits from AI-driven suggestions - is just the first step on this journey.
Over the next few months, we’ll onboard a select few customers to our Private Beta, where we’re introduce them to our AI-powered business intelligence that designed to greatly reduce adoption & update costs. We’re hoping that you’re one of them.
Beginning April 15th, 2025 we are onboarding select customers to our Private Beta of Auto-Instrumentation. Click here to find out how to harness AI in your customer strategy, while driving down setup costs by up to 90%