Leading Emerging Tech Innovation at Twilio: Embracing AI Disruption

As the leader of Emerging Tech and Innovation at Twilio, Dominic Kundle shares his team's learnings from the past year, highlighting the importance of being customer-obsessed, shipping early and often, creating a curious and problem-owning team, and sharing as you go to drive innovation in AI-powered customer engagement.

  • 1. The speaker, Dominic Kundle, leads product and design in Twilio's Emerging Tech and Innovation team.
  • 2. This team consists of 16 people focusing on the future of customer engagement using emerging technologies like AI.
  • 3. Twilio sees AI as a feature that enhances their products rather than a standalone product.
  • 4. The team's initial project, an AI-driven demo, faced challenges in getting it into customers' hands for feedback.
  • 5. They learned to quickly prototype and give rough access to customers to gather insights and improve the product.
  • 6. Twilio established an engineering organization to build a strong foundation for taking AI products to market.
  • 7. The team introduced a sub-brand, Twilio Alpha, to set appropriate expectations with customers regarding reliability and availability.
  • 8. They implemented principles to move fast in developing AI products:
  • * Focus on curiosity and creativity in the team
  • * Assume every model will become redundant quickly
  • * Have flexibility in systems and roadmaps
  • 9. Twilio's AI team aims to understand shifting expectations, focusing on trust and safety features that remain constant versus ever-changing trends like multimodality.
  • 10. They recommend being okay with failures while providing value to the company as an Innovation team.
  • 11. The team initially operated in a self-contained manner, sharing information on a need-to-know basis.
  • 12. They learned the importance of sharing their learnings internally and externally to empower others and help customers be thought leaders in their space.
  • 13. Twilio's AI team turned these learnings into base principles for their operations.

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What are the most significant challenges you face in innovating within a large organization, and how do you overcome them? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!