Twilio Segment teams with Amazon SageMaker on new customer predictions product

The customer data platform provides a central place to collect first-party information about customers, but simply having a pile of data is not the point. Companies want to put it to work to improve customer experience and more precisely target certain groups, based on this information they have stockpiled.

More and more companies are providing tooling to help build applications on top of the data, and today at the Signal customer and developers conference, Twilio Segment announced the launch of CustomerAI Predictions, a tool to help marketers make predictions about how a certain group of customers, meeting a certain set of criteria, will behave.

“We’ve seen marketers struggle with getting access to great-quality data for a long time. More recently, we’ve realized that we can help marketers, not just execute their own hypotheses that they already have, but help them actually predict who are the most valuable types of customers to target with different types of campaigns,” Alex Millet, senior director of product at Twilio Segment, told TechCrunch. That’s where CustomerAI Predictions comes in.

“There’s huge value that we can get out of that data that’s already being collected by those customers that’s flowing into the CDP.” For example, CustomerAI Predictions could come up with a group of customers most likely to buy a new product, based on a previous contributing event like a product viewed or a product added to a cart.

Segment collects information like clickstream data from a website or mobile app, while Twilio brings the communications data to help companies better understand which customers are most engaged, and which could need a push.

To build CustomerAI Predictions, the company teamed with Amazon SageMaker. “When we were looking at how to quickly bring this first predictions product to market, AWS and SageMaker were one of the leaders in terms of the ML backbone infrastructure that allowed us to build those products,” Millet said.

Millet also indicated that the company has a generative AI-based email tool on the roadmap, so marketers could potentially combine the data from CustomerAI Predictions, and then use the upcoming CustomerAI Generative Email to generate a custom email based on the dataset in the predictions product.

Twilio, whose core business involves communications APIs, purchased Segment in October 2020 for $3.2 billion, as part of a strategy to expand into other parts of the marketing stack. The company introduced Flex, a fully programmable contact center product, in 2018, and acquired SendGrid, an email API platform in the same year for $2 billion.

CustomerAI Predictions is generally available starting today.

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