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Ensuring your data is AI ready

Segment’s customer data platform (CDP) collects, cleans, and activates AI-ready data so businesses can ensure AI applications are more precise, intelligent, and impactful.

Jun 6, 2023

By Katrina Wong


AI is only as good as your data

When it comes to AI, we (companies and humans alike) are at a rare inflection point. While AI is not new and many companies are already making predictions, generative AI has expanded what’s possible. Companies will differentiate the experiences they build for customers with AI and those who don’t risk falling behind. In fact, a recent Twilio Segment report found that 92% of businesses today are using AI-driven personalization to drive growth. 

We can’t imagine how AI will be used in the next 10 years and what impact it will have on humanity, though it’s up to all of us to work together to unleash its potential. But with everything moving so quickly, it can be difficult to know where to start.  

With so much unknown, here’s one thing we do know: AI is only as good as your customer data. 

For customer engagement, the “intelligence” in AI is trained on customer data. If your customer data is siloed, inconsistent, stale, or incomplete, even the most innovative AI applications will have less impact. Success will come down to having the best trained model. 

A trusted data infrastructure with unified, consistent, real-time, and consented data is critical to your AI strategy. Our Segment customer data platform (CDP) collects, cleans, and activates AI-ready data so businesses can ensure AI applications are more precise, intelligent, and impactful.

Build intelligent customer engagement into every channel

Today, Twilio previewed CustomerAI technology that will be showcased at Twilio’s annual user and developer conference, SIGNAL, later this year. Twilio’s CustomerAI couples the power of large language models (LLMs) with the rich customer data that flows through Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform, to help companies unlock the potential of their customers. With powerful capabilities like predictions, generative, and workflow automations, CustomerAI makes AI consumable for business users across teams.

“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.”

- Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio

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At SIGNAL, Twilio will showcase the ways that CustomerAI can unlock digital greatness, including how it can: 

  • Enrich Segment’s ‘Golden Profiles’: Using LLM and natural language processing (NLP), Twilio will infer traits about a customer in real-time based on customer conversations, such as messages, and automatically update Segment customer profiles with these learned attributes. Profiles can be updated with both unstructured customer conversation data as well as structured database information to more deeply understand customers and interact with them based on predictions like propensity to purchase or propensity to churn.

  • Transform the contact center: Leverage data from unified customer profiles to make every conversation personal. Dynamically connect each customer to the right agent with routing intelligence. Coach your people so they understand your customer instantly. All informed by the customer’s Segment profile as well as LLM that has been trained on the knowledgebase. 

  • Optimize personalized marketing experiences: Working in tandem with the Segment ‘golden profile,’ generative and predictive AI will streamline the ideation and execution of campaigns, while curating high quality, bespoke end-user experiences. Predictive AI will offer marketers guidance on the most impactful Segment customer journey for each customer; for example, whether they will prefer to see a paid ad or a custom email. Generative and predictive AI will also make recommendations for the most optimal marketing channel, send-time, and content for that tactic. Informed by ‘golden profile’ data in Segment, this is also personalized to the individual customer — a welcome custom approach that boosts brand loyalty, according to 86% of consumers today.

  • Visualize and control critical customer metrics: In a central dashboard, business leaders and marketers will be able to access AI-powered insights and smart recommendations about their customers. With visibility into predicted traits such as propensity to purchase, and others such as estimated lifetime value (LTV) and churn risk, businesses can make informed decisions about their engagement strategies. Here, additional insights will also be surfaced, including customer journey performance, channel performance, and message effectiveness.

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Activating Data + Intelligence

With CustomerAI, we’re making it faster and easier for companies to deliver truly personalized experiences to customers—pushing the envelope of what’s possible for businesses.

“Customers are real-time. And they interact with companies in lots of different ways. A customer might be having a tough experience and engaged with the call center, but does marketing know about that? And is marketing suppressing a message or sending something with the right tone? This is one example and traditionally it's been super hard to pull off. But that's exactly what CustomerAI is helping companies to do: make customer engagement real-time and personalized.”

- Kathryn Murphy, SVP of Product Management at Twilio

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While some of these applications will be released later this year, you can already start laying the groundwork for your AI strategy with trusted data infrastructure today. Segment CDP enables companies to collect, clean, and activate AI-ready data. You can build intelligent engagement into every channel, including your own. Segment’s Customer Data Platform is also extensible so companies can build on their own custom channels, in addition to our 450+ out-the-box connections. We can’t wait to see what you build. 

Twilio and Segment will be sharing more about CustomerAI at the SIGNAL conference in August.

In the meantime, check out how Segment can help your AI strategy today with trusted data infrastructure in this June 21 webinar: Register here.

The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

Get the report
SOP 2023

The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

Get the report
SOP 2023

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