NYSE-listed Twilio sets sights on Asia-Pacific as AI adoption grows in customer service

[SINGAPORE] When Khozema Shipchandler was called to step up as CEO at communications platform Twilio in 2024, the company was in a tight spot.

Revenue growth had slowed during the Covid-19 pandemic. There had been several rounds of redundancies.

Activist investors were clamouring for changes at Twilio, which resulted in co-founder Jeff Lawson stepping down and handing the reins over to Shipchandler, then the firm’s chief financial officer.

Those investors were also campaigning for Twilio to sell off Segment, a customer data platform acquired in 2020, as well as to initiate capital returns and buybacks.

The communications platform enables companies to communicate with customers via text messages and voice calls through its application programming interfaces.

Shipchandler recounted to The Business Times: “We had losses, we were consuming cash, our growth had materially decelerated, and some of our colleagues at that time asked: ‘Why did you even take the job given the state of affairs?’”

But he took the job because he felt that Twilio had “good products” and a “good product market fit with great employees”.

The most significant move he made at the start was to be clear and transparent with employees about the state of things. He communicated his plan to turn around the company through innovation and financial discipline.

These efforts delivered results.

Twilio’s share price was US$73.21 on Jan 8, 2024, when Shipchandler took over. Fast-forward to two years later, it is trading at more than US$300, close to its all-time high of over US$330 in 2021.

Its market capitalisation is just under US$42 billion.

The company’s latest second-quarter financial results showed that it is still growing, with revenue up 22 per cent at US$1.5 billion from US$1.2 billion a year earlier. Net income jumped to US$1.1 billion, from US$22.4 million in Q2 2025.

Achieving this turnaround was not easy. Shipchandler had taken over from a beloved founder, and given his corporate background – he had spent many years at General Electric – many were expecting him to simply slash his way back to profitability.

“The biggest fight that we took on was with investors who wanted to sell what turned out to be one of the most crucial assets of the company,” he said.

Segment, the business that activist investors wanted Twilio to sell and Shipchandler fought to keep, helped the company ride the artificial intelligence wave.

With Segment, which provides context for AI in customer interactions, Twilio is better able to capture and clean customer data, and unify it across a company’s website, apps and servers.

The context needed for customer service includes a customer’s purchase history, any interactions with the brand such as customer support, and their recent transactions.

Businesses using a generic AI model for customer service lack this context. Without it, AI is unlikely to solve the problem the customer is contacting the company about, said Shipchandler.

“Without all these crucial elements of context, what happens on the AI side is: It drives up costs, reduces trust and doesn’t actually solve the problem,” he added.

Having context will allow AI to act appropriately, with an added benefit of lowering token consumption and reducing costs. Communication remains the essential underlying infrastructure needed to make the interaction between the customer and company happen, said Shipchandler.

Now, Twilio is setting its sights on the Asia-Pacific as its next engine of growth.

Growing in the Asia-Pacific region

Twilio is looking to grow its business in the Asia-Pacific, counting companies such as Endowus, Philippine Airlines and Singlife as customers.

“It’s a fast-growing region, and has a number of sophisticated and technologically innovative customers,” said Shipchandler.

Customers in the region use more of Twilio’s technology stack, including its communications infrastructure as well as its identity tools, which verify if the customer interaction is with an AI or a human to improve trust with customers.

It does not break down its numbers by geographic regions, but Shipchandler said that the company has been growing in the 15 to 20 per cent range globally.

“I think our expectations in the Asia-Pacific and certainly in Singapore should be in excess of that,” he added.

The Asia-Pacific is an underpenetrated market from Twilio’s perspective, but it has the advantage of customers being technologically innovative.

Twilio will use its blueprints from what has worked in other parts of its global operations and bring them to Singapore and the wider region. Shipchandler said this will enable the company to grow faster.

Twilio will be serving the Asia-Pacific from offices in Australia, Singapore and Japan, and will aim to build on its businesses in those markets.

The company is avoiding the pitfall of tackling the region as homogenous, and will be tweaking its offering for each market.

“Every market has its own peculiarities and we’ve got to meet the market where it is, and so what we offer in Singapore is going to be purposefully different from what we offer in Australia,” said Shipchandler.

He noted that the company is one of the rare AI infrastructure winners, with a moat that cannot be replicated so easily. The company’s product-market fit, paired with its financial performance, makes it attractive for investors as well, he added.

“I think the real action is not what we did over the last two to three years – it’s what we are about to do over the next two to three years, using our financial and innovation strength to create the next chapter of this company.”