Latest news with #AshaSharma
Channel Post MEA
19-05-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Twilio And Microsoft Join Forces To Accelerate Conversational AI Initiatives
Twilio has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers to build the future of conversational AI and helps deliver on Twilio's vision: ensuring that every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing. Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text. Businesses building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have run into a number of challenges — from lack of precision due to incomplete data, to difficulty scaling beyond successful pilot programs due to legacy systems integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio's expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI's safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure uniquely help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise. 'Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI,' said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. 'Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers.' The two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including: capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement; AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers. 'Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance,' said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. 'Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities — the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers.' Conversational AI at Twilio Twilio's Conversational AI solutions provide model flexibility, streamlined options for businesses to augment capabilities at their own speed, and native integrations to the leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions. In addition to the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announced numerous conversational AI enhancements and innovations today at Twilio SIGNAL for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer care and sales. Notable innovations include: ConversationRelay (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and with less overhead. (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and with less overhead. Conversational Intelligence (General Availability for Voice and Private Beta for Messaging): An expansion of Twilio's Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights that improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, at scale. 0 0
Techday NZ
15-05-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Twilio teams with Microsoft to drive enterprise conversational AI
Twilio has announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft aimed at accelerating the adoption of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for customer engagement. The collaboration will leverage Twilio's customer engagement platform in conjunction with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, providing enhanced enterprise-grade infrastructure for conversational AI deployment. This partnership is intended to benefit Twilio's developer community, numbering over 10 million, alongside thousands of Microsoft's managed customers seeking to adopt advanced conversational interfaces. Conversational AI, powered by natural language processing and machine learning, enables machines to interpret and respond to human conversations with increasing sophistication. The technology addresses common business challenges such as limited data precision and integration barriers caused by outdated legacy systems. Twilio's expertise in communications, data, and AI will be paired with Azure's secure and scalable platform to assist enterprises in integrating conversational AI across various business functions. Specific areas of product development will include multi-channel AI agents for customer service automation, AI tools to assist live agents in contact centres, and solutions that enhance digital engagement between businesses and their clients. "Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI," said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. "Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers." The partnership will focus on building solutions using both Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's engagement platform, which merges communications, contextual data, and AI. These solutions aim to enhance how enterprises automate customer interactions and drive more personalised engagement at scale. Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft, commented: "Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organisation with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance. Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities – the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers." Twilio is also introducing new conversational AI features, including ConversationRelay, which is now generally available. This tool allows developers to build sophisticated voice AI agents, integrating the latest in speech recognition, real-time streaming, and human-like responses. Additional updates include Conversational Intelligence, offering insights drawn from voice calls and message transcripts, which are available for voice communications and in private beta for messaging. Khozema Shipchandler, Chief Executive Officer at Twilio, spoke on the future of customer engagement: "We are facing the end of customer experience as we know it, and Twilio's heritage in CPaaS, CDP, and AI-powered capabilities has positioned us well for a new era of customer engagement. To be successful, every business needs the right infrastructure: communications channels to connect with customers, contextual data to understand them, and the ability to accelerate it all with AI in a way that's powerful, flexible, and trustworthy." Twilio has also previewed the next generation of its Customer Engagement Platform, designed to serve as the infrastructure underpinning all customer interactions. The platform will offer modular, interoperable systems that integrate with a range of AI ecosystems and support native large language model (LLM) integrations for greater efficiency. Additional product enhancements announced include the expansion of communications channels, with upcoming general availability of Rich Communication Services (RCS) and WhatsApp Business Calling, as well as the introduction of a Compliance Toolkit to help businesses adhere to global regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Data residency enhancements were shared, with general availability of EU-based email data storage scheduled for July and SMS data residency in private beta later in 2025. Twilio's Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) will receive a rearchitected journeys system for real-time, personalised customer engagement, alongside features such as event-triggered journeys, contextual payloads, strengthened observability, and native integrations with Twilio's messaging solutions. Segment announced two new preferred partnerships with Amplitude and Attribution App, expanding the analytics and marketing attribution options available to users of its CDP. Customer feedback was also highlighted. Dugan Winkie, Vice President and Head of Commercial Strategy at Cedar, stated: "ConversationRelay has been instrumental in helping us bring Kora, our AI voice assistant, to life. Twilio's real-time voice infrastructure, combined with our own data and AI, allows us to simplify the financial experience and meet patients with the same level of care, personalisation, and empathy they'd expect from a live agent—at scale." Bob Summers, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Goodcall AI, said: "Being named a Twilio AI Startup Searchlight honoree has super-charged Goodcall's credibility, turning recognition into real revenue growth and an even faster innovation cadence. Twilio's feature-rich, rock-solid platform is the backbone that lets our Voice AI delight customers at scale while we push the boundaries of what conversational automation can do. I'm excited to join the SIGNAL stage to share our journey and inspire developers to build the next wave of voice-first experiences." Twilio's recent developments reflect ongoing efforts to provide flexible, secure, and intelligent tools to support evolving business needs in customer engagement, personalisation, and compliance.
Business Wire
14-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Twilio Announces Multi-Year Strategic Partnership With Microsoft to Accelerate Conversational AI Initiatives
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today's leading brands, today announced at Twilio SIGNAL a multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to accelerate adoption of conversational AI solutions for customer engagement. The collaboration unlocks potential for more than 10 million Twilio developers and thousands of Microsoft managed customers to build the future of conversational AI and helps deliver on Twilio's vision: ensuring that every digital interaction between businesses and consumers is amazing. Conversational AI enables computer systems to understand and respond to human conversations in a way that mimics natural dialogue. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyze and interpret human voice and text input, delivering appropriate responses through AI-generated voice or text. Businesses building conversational AI experiences for customer engagement have run into a number of challenges — from lack of precision due to incomplete data, to difficulty scaling beyond successful pilot programs due to legacy systems integration challenges and lack of robust data infrastructure. Twilio's expertise and leadership across communications, data, and AI, combined with Microsoft Azure AI's safe, secure, enterprise-grade, and global infrastructure uniquely help accelerate conversational AI adoption across the enterprise. 'Every interaction between a business and their customers is an opportunity to build loyalty and trust, and those interactions have been drastically improved by AI,' said Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio. 'Conversational AI enhances customer engagement by delivering precision for our customers, and rich and dynamic experiences for their consumers.' The two companies will collaborate on developing conversational AI customer engagement solutions built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's comprehensive customer engagement platform that combines communications, contextual data, and AI. Product innovation areas of focus for the strategic partnership will consist of a broad range of conversational AI services, including: capabilities for building multi-channel AI agents for automating and dramatically improving every customer engagement; AI agents that assist live agents in the contact center via enhanced Twilio Agent Copilot capabilities; and multi-modal solutions for enhancing and improving digital interactions between businesses and customers. 'Azure AI Foundry enables customers to confidently scale AI including AI agents across their organization with our enterprise-grade technologies and best practices that help manage risk, improve accuracy, protect privacy, reinforce transparency, and simplify compliance,' said Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft. 'Customers will see strong business value with the combination of Azure AI Foundry and Twilio's communications and data capabilities — the critical last mile connection between businesses and customers.' Conversational AI at Twilio Twilio's Conversational AI solutions provide model flexibility, streamlined options for businesses to augment capabilities at their own speed, and native integrations to the leading Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive more efficient and engaging customer interactions. In addition to the strategic partnership with Microsoft, Twilio announced numerous conversational AI enhancements and innovations today at Twilio SIGNAL for businesses exploring conversational AI solutions for customer care and sales. Notable innovations include: ConversationRelay (General Availability): A conversational AI capability that enables developers to create robust natural voice AI agents using their choice of LLM. Twilio seamlessly integrates real-time streaming, the latest speech recognition technology, interruption handling, and expressive, human-like voices, allowing developers to create advanced agentic applications more quickly, and with less overhead. Conversational Intelligence (General Availability for Voice and Private Beta for Messaging): An expansion of Twilio's Voice Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence analyzes voice calls and text-based conversations, converting them into structured data and insights that improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, at scale. Innovation at Twilio SIGNAL San Francisco 2025 Twilio SIGNAL, held May 14-15 in San Francisco, brings together developers, business leaders, innovators, and builders of all types from industry-leading companies for two days of networking and hands-on learning across a variety of customer engagement topics. This year's speakers include executives from leading brands such as Clear, Best Buy, Rocket, Vineyard Vines, and more. The conference will also feature a pre-recorded, virtual fireside chat with Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella. Twilio SIGNAL keynotes will be available on-demand following the event at Additionally, Twilio will present and demo conversational AI solutions running on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry at the Microsoft Build Conference in Seattle, May 19-22. About Twilio Today's leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. For more information about Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), visit: Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Twilio's expectations regarding the capabilities of our platform and solutions, and expectations regarding our partnership with Microsoft. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events, the outcome of which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including those more fully described in our most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
Associated Press
07-04-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
The Home Depot Announces the Nomination of Asha Sharma for Election to its Board of Directors at 2025 Annual Meeting
ATLANTA, April 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Home Depot®, the world's largest home improvement retailer, today announced that Asha Sharma, Microsoft corporate vice president and head of product, AI platform, has been nominated for election to its Board of Directors at its 2025 annual meeting of shareholders, which will be held virtually on May 22, 2025. Sharma leads product development and computational design for the artificial intelligence platform which includes models, tools and services for Microsoft's enterprise, developer and data science customers. Prior to joining Microsoft, she held various leadership roles at Instacart, Facebook (now known as Meta), and home service software provider Porch Group, bringing a blend of leadership experience in technology, data protection and cybersecurity, e-commerce, supply chain, finance, operations and marketing. 'We are continuing to enhance our capabilities to provide our customers with an interconnected, frictionless shopping experience that enables them to seamlessly blend the digital and physical worlds,' said Ted Decker, chair, president and CEO of The Home Depot. 'As we continue to evolve the interconnected experience for our associates and customers, including through the use of generative AI tools, Asha's extensive technology and operational experience will be a tremendous asset.' ABOUT THE HOME DEPOT The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement specialty retailer. At the end of the fourth quarter, the company operated a total of 2,347 retail stores and over 780 branches across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The Company employs over 470,000 associates. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index.
Tahawul Tech
13-03-2025
- Business
- Tahawul Tech
Snowflake expands Microsoft partnership, integrating Azure OpenAI
Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, recently announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will empower enterprises to build easy, efficient, and trusted AI-powered apps and data agents with OpenAI's models directly in Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake's fully managed AI service. Snowflake Cortex AI will integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry, making OpenAI's state-of-the-art models available for use on Microsoft Azure regions within Snowflake, and optimised to reason across audio, video, and text in real-time. Snowflake Cortex AI will integrate Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry, enabling businesses to access OpenAI's advanced models within Snowflake on Microsoft Azure regions. Optimised for real-time analysis across text, audio, and video, this integration allows enterprises to create secure, AI-powered data agents within Snowflake's AI Data Cloud By bringing OpenAI's models to Cortex AI through an integration with Azure OpenAI Service, Snowflake further solidifies its leadership in providing users with frontier AI models within the same unified governance framework as their data— ultimately saving businesses time and money. 'We're expanding our long-standing partnership with Microsoft to deliver the best of OpenAI's innovations directly to our customers, further advancing our promise to bring easy, efficient, and trusted AI to enterprises around the world,' said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake. 'There's enormous power in our customers being able to use OpenAI models directly in Snowflake's secure platform, unlocking multimodal, agentic, and conversational AI use cases that drive high impact.' . Snowflake's cross-region and cross-cloud AI inference also enables global customers to seamlessly access OpenAI's models from any cloud or region, without needing complex integrations or manual setup. Access to these models is secured with Snowflake's strong security guarantees through deep integrations with Microsoft Azure, providing protected connections for customers on any cloud provider. OpenAI's models provide advanced reasoning and instruct capabilities, allowing users to quickly build scalable AI apps and data agents that deliver accurate, grounded insights using their enterprise data. Snowflake customers achieve this because OpenAI's models run within the security boundary of Snowflake's AI Data Cloud. Snowflake Horizon Catalogue's strong enterprise-grade compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities natively integrated into Cortex AI allows users to focus on driving impact with OpenAI's models. 'Enterprises are looking to leverage their proprietary data to create AI differentiation in ways that bring the richest experiences to the world, and the Snowflake partnership with Azure OpenAI Service through Azure AI Foundry will empower our joint customers to deliver intuitive and trustworthy app experiences even faster,' said Asha Sharma, CVP, Head of Product, Microsoft AI Platform. 'It's our shared data-centric approach to AI that helps break down barriers to production for businesses of all sizes'. Bringing OpenAI to the AI Data Cloud with Azure OpenAI Service A recent MIT Technology Review Insights report, Data Strategies for AI Leaders, found that 59% of respondents see data governance, security, or privacy as key challenges in deploying generative AI. For businesses, trust and security are critical to AI success. By integrating OpenAI's models into Cortex AI via Azure OpenAI Service, Snowflake ensures strong data governance, access controls, and monitoring—helping enterprises protect their most sensitive information. With OpenAI's models in the AI Data Cloud, joint customers of Snowflake and Microsoft can now seamlessly combine structured and unstructured data to deliver a richer, more engaging user experience. OpenAI's models will be available on select Microsoft Azure regions in the United States, with plans to expand globally. In addition to OpenAI's models, Snowflake offers various models from leading providers including Anthropic, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, and more, alongside Snowflake's Arctic open source language and embedding models. Snowflake is committed to making the top-performing models seamlessly accessible to users within Cortex AI, allowing customers the choice and flexibility to select the best model for their specific use case. Snowflake Brings Data Agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams With this expanded partnership, Snowflake is working with Microsoft to bring users Snowflake Cortex Agents to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams (anticipated general availability in June 2025). Powered by Cortex AI, these agents will allow Microsoft's enterprise customers to interact with their structured and unstructured Snowflake data using natural language directly within Microsoft apps—making it easier to ask questions and gain insights from tools they use every day. This integration helps users of all skill levels access AI-driven insights, boosting productivity and smarter decision-making. Developers can also use REST APIs to build secure, customised interfaces between Microsoft 365 apps and their data in Snowflake, while data and engineering teams can leverage Cortex AI in Microsoft Copilot to accelerate business insights. Image Credit: Snowflake
