Platform extensibility enhances adaptability, fosters innovation, and allows businesses to seamlessly integrate new features and tools. Learn about the key trends impacting extensibility in the years to come.
We’ve all come to expect a certain degree of extensibility in our everyday tools. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all support extensions that range from ad blockers to password managers. Smartphones have a suite of apps that we regularly use for checking our email, online banking, browsing social media…(really, anything you can think of).
Extensibility curates our experiences to match our tastes, needs, and preferences – something that extends to the B2B space as well. It’s rare – if not unheard of – for a business to have a single platform in their tech stack.
Sure, a platform can check off several important boxes, but it’s almost always used alongside other tools and systems. Second, businesses want to be able to tailor these platforms to fit their unique use cases, rather than have a cookie-cutter way of solving problems. This has been the throughline for extensibility, using a blend of APIs, plugins, and modularity to customize the technology being used.
But as tech stacks continue to evolve, the use cases around extensibility will as well.
Extensibility isn’t new. We talked about the extensibility of modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox, but Netscape Navigator had plugins way back in the nineties.
But that doesn’t mean extensibility is a stagnant concept. In fact, we’ve seen a few prominent trends start to emerge.
The first trend we’ve observed recently is warehouse interoperability, or the ability to access the historical data stored in warehouses to enrich real-time event data.
The possibilities of combining these two datasets is endless. One example is predictive maintenance, or the ability to anticipate equipment breakdown based on real-time sensor data and historical maintenance records. Another possibility is delivering dynamic, one-to-one personalization by understanding each user interaction within the broader context of the customer journey.
For example, say a customer is browsing a product on your website, but historical data shows they almost never make an online purchase – they tend to buy in-store. You could send a promotional pop-up about the availability of this item in a nearby location along with a discount code to encourage a conversion.
The second trend is AI-powered extensibility. AI is rapidly becoming an integral extension of many products, offering enhanced automation, personalization, and decision-making.
Tasks that would have previously been arduous to complete can now be checked off in a matter of minutes with the help of AI copilots – like building custom integrations or leveraging LLMs to provide highly personalized customer support almost instantaneously.
AI copilots often rely on natural language for querying and interpreting prompts; meaning teams with varying technical skill sets can still benefit from using these tools. This allows users to interact with applications in a more intuitive way, customizing and extending them to better meet their specific needs.
After years of fakeouts and false starts, Google has finally reneged on its promise to deprecate third-party cookies. The end of third-party cookies had been looming over digital advertising for years, threatening to take away (what had been) the cornerstone of personalization and retargeting online. But even though third-party cookies have been given another lifeline, this doesn’t mean digital advertising will resume as it was.
For one, consumers know what’s happening behind the scenes, and are much more inclined to opt-out of third-party cookies to avoid being tracked. This is why first-party data has been championed in recent years, for its focus on building customer relationships and transparency.
But the competitive edge that first-party data provides is tied to its activation – how are you leveraging it across different ad platforms and channels? This is where an extensible platform becomes crucial; to send customer traits and audience lists built with first-party data to the appropriate downstream tools.
Then, there’s the focus on server-to-server integrations with ad platforms like Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. This enables businesses to send real-time data about user behavior, such as recent purchases, directly to these platforms without relying on tags or tracking codes. This approach is more reliable, as it bypasses issues like ad blockers that can interfere with traditional tracking methods. By using this data, businesses can better understand how well their ads are performing and the impact they have on user behavior.
The core idea of extensibility is to create a platform that's more than just a product, but a foundation on which an ecosystem can be built.
With a well-designed extensible architecture, updates and new features can often be implemented as modules or plugins (reducing the need for extensive changes to the core system). Once the initial extensible framework is in place, adding new features or integrations often requires fewer resources than in a monolithic system. This efficiency allows businesses to do more with less, optimizing their resource allocation.
Overall, extensible platforms combat obsolescence, helping businesses adapt to broader technological trends without requiring that they rebuild their entire system.
Learn more about Twilio Segment’s commitment to extensibility, and how we’ve joined the MACH Alliance to continue to serve businesses of all sizes with a flexible, modern tech ecosystem.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.