I attended Twilio SIGNAL Tokyo 2026 held on October 8th
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Hello, I'm Subaru.
I attended Twilio SIGNAL Tokyo 2026, held on October 8th! This time, I'd like to go over the overview and content of this event.
About the Event
Twilio CX Innovation Night is a special opportunity aimed at builders and digital practitioners who are creating the future of customer experience, where the latest innovations and use cases are shared.
- Time: 16:30～18:30
- Venue: Grand Hyatt Tokyo
About the Sessions
CEO Keynote: The Future of Customer Engagement
Twilio's CEO will unveil "Agentic AI (Autonomous AI)," the most important theme of 2026, along with the latest roadmap.
This session is from Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler.
Recently, AI utilization has been required in various situations, and along with that, the standards for customer experience have also been rising. I also sometimes hear about challenges related to contact centers in my work, and I feel that expectations for AI-driven customer experiences have become higher than before. Additionally, it is predicted that by 2029, approximately 1 billion AI agents will be deployed across many companies, and many of them will be ones that interact with people. In this context, Twilio is positioned to support next-generation customer experience, and this year the next-generation Twilio platform has also been announced.
Special Keynote: Digital Transformation at a National Scale
We welcome Mr. Takuya Hirai, Japan's first Minister for Digital Transformation. In this session, he will discuss the importance of breaking away from legacy systems, building administrative services that are accessible to everyone in an aging society, and the realization of a proactive, safe, and seamless "Society 5.0" leveraging cloud communications, AI, and the My Number Card.
This session is from Mr. Takuya Hirai, Japan's first Minister for Digital Transformation.
While the internet spread worldwide because its convenience far outweighed its risks, there was a discussion about whether AI, if one step goes wrong, could end up with its convenience and risks balancing out. That is precisely why it is important to clearly define "what needs to be protected," "what kind of world we are aiming for," and "what means we will choose to get there," and it was mentioned that Twilio has a clear vision of the world it aims for. Also, the relationship with AI should not be "human-in-the-loop" but "human-in-the-lead." I interpreted this as the image of not just having humans serve as a checkpoint within AI processing, but rather humans holding the reins like a dog leash, deciding what to entrust to AI and who takes responsibility.
Cybersecurity is also an extremely challenging issue at the national level, and going forward, there will be a need to select trustworthy options. There was also discussion about how infrastructure like Twilio will be necessary in order to maintain the open accessibility that makes the internet great while building a framework where it can be used safely. At the end, the idea was introduced of firmly protecting things that must be protected, such as citizens' rights and privacy, while flexibly revisiting other rules through the introduction of AI. It was concluded that while the risks are great, the opportunities are many times greater. I felt that AI adoption is ultimately a matter of trial and error, and that the knack for it becomes apparent as you use it.
UX is something I am particularly conscious of in my work, and thinking from a UX perspective, I think that "this is better with humans," "this is better with AI," and "this is better with both" will become clearer as you use them.
CX Foundation Supporting Growth: Modernization of Customer Experience Pursued by Japanese Companies
This is a panel discussion featuring All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., Excite Co., Ltd., and ITANDI Co., Ltd. While the industries are each different, every company has challenges unique to their industry, and I found it interesting how the highly flexible Twilio fits in well with each of them.
All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd. operates approximately 850 flights per day, with more than 100,000 customers normally using them per day and more than 150,000 during peak periods. They are currently using Twilio to send SMS and emails, sending multiple notifications to each customer, such as reservation confirmation notices and online check-in guidance 24 hours before departure. Before implementation, the challenge was that during irregular flight operations such as cancellations and delays, they were unable to reliably deliver information, and some customers would arrive at the airport without knowing the situation. In addition, since each system—reservations, operations, marketing, and others—was sending communications independently, it used to take months to years to start something new.
Excite Co., Ltd. uses Twilio as the call infrastructure connecting fortune tellers and users for their telephone fortune-telling service. Since building a phone system from scratch is difficult for application developers, using an API was a prerequisite. Their previous system required initial investment and needed to add equipment each time users increased, but by switching to the pay-as-you-go Twilio, they reduced annual costs to approximately 30% of what they were before, leading to approximately 180 million yen in cost savings over the two years following the switch.
ITANDI Co., Ltd. has been using Twilio since around 2014 when it first came to Japan. In the real estate industry, there is a business practice called "property confirmation" in which real estate companies call each other to verify whether a property is still available, and they created a system to automate this as their first product. At peak times, approximately 500,000 property confirmation calls per month were processed by this system, reducing the confirmation work that took one to one and a half minutes per case. It also reduced the burden on real estate company staff who disliked answering calls.
As advice to the audience at the end, All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd. shared that it is important to incorporate global best practices, leverage trustworthy services, and start small with what you can do. Excite Co., Ltd. mentioned that Twilio has highly extensible APIs and comprehensive documentation, so you can start development right away even without any prior knowledge, and when they rebuilt from their old platform, a single engineer was able to create a prototype in about two months. ITANDI Co., Ltd. shared that they talk internally about "eliminating the UI." Rather than forcing users to download an app and learn how to use it, they aim for a form where users can do what they want through channels they already use, such as phone or email, with AI handling the back end.
I strongly agreed with the comment that the most unpleasant thing in UX is being forced to do something. Having to learn how to use something already puts a burden on the user, so I think it is best if everything can be completed through the phone or email they already use.
Voice AI and Telephony DX: Realizing Next-Generation Customer Engagement
This is a panel discussion featuring AI Shift, Inc., Mobilus Inc., and IVRy, Inc. All three companies offer voice AI as their own products. AI Shift, Inc. mentioned that while the shortage of call center staff has been talked about for a long time, replacing them with AI has not been progressing easily. Since Japan is a super-aging society and Japan is the only country that uses Japanese, it is important to localize for the Japanese market rather than simply bringing in overseas AI as-is.
Regarding the outlook for AI adoption, Mobilus Inc. aims for 80% of call volume within about four years, IVRy, Inc. aims for 50% to 70% within 10 years, and AI Shift, Inc. wants to first achieve about 40% of the total within three years. Also, Mobilus Inc. and IVRy, Inc. believe that a human element will remain, while AI Shift, Inc. is aiming for a hybrid approach for the time being while working toward a future where AI handles everything with voice alone.
Regarding Twilio, Mobilus Inc. entrusts the entire communications side—such as phone lines—to Twilio, and focuses its own development on the application side such as AI and management screens. Since voice must never go down no matter what, they greatly appreciate that it operates stably and scales reliably even as usage increases. IVRy, Inc. also mentioned that being able to entrust the telephony side to Twilio allowed them to focus on app and AI development, enabling them to grow to a cumulative total of approximately 70,000 accounts.
I often feel the difficulties unique to the Japanese language in my own work as well. Depending on the product, there are still parts that feel challenging, such as Japanese transcription and, going slightly off-topic, sentiment analysis.
Product Session: Voice AI Realized with Twilio Conversation Relay
Twilio's engineering team will build a solution combining the latest AI features right before your eyes in an overwhelming live demo. Witness firsthand the "speed of development" that turns complex workflows into reality in minutes, and the moment of "tangible innovation" that you can start applying in your own organization tomorrow.
In the demo, set against the scenario of a water leak occurring in the middle of the night, a situation was shown where AI responds using a combination of phone and LINE. This demo was built using Twilio Conversations and ConversationRelay. Twilio Conversations consists of four features: Conversation Orchestrator, Conversation Memory, Conversation Intelligence, and Agent Connect. Conversation Orchestrator is a feature that treats interactions across phone, LINE, and other channels as a single conversation. Conversation Memory retains customer information and the state of conversations, while Conversation Intelligence analyzes conversation content in real time. Agent Connect is a mechanism for connecting your own AI agents to Twilio.
And the main focus of this session is ConversationRelay. ConversationRelay is a feature that handles everything from transcribing the audio of a call, to generating a response with an LLM, to reading out the generated response. Since you don't need to build the voice processing yourself, you can focus on developing the interaction with AI.
Next is a case study introduction from Uluru Co., Ltd. They provide the phone answering service fondeskand the cloud-based IVR fondeskIVR, and starting from four part-time members, they are now used by more than 7,500 companies. Even without members who have specialized knowledge in telephone lines, by building on Twilio they were able to develop without initial investment. This spring, they added an "AI Operator" to fondeskIVR that handles AI responses, and it was developed by one person in about two weeks using ConversationRelay. Building voice transcription, LLM interaction, speech synthesis, and other components from scratch would apparently require considerable cost and time. Going forward, they want to use Conversation Intelligence and Conversation Memory to work toward responses that take past incoming call history into account as well.
I thought that with ConversationRelay, the possibilities for what can be done and what you might want to try with voice AI would expand even further.
Summary
This time, I looked at Twilio SIGNAL Tokyo 2026, which I attended on October 8th. I would like to continue attending future Twilio events and keep up with updates on an ongoing basis.
Supplementary Information
Past Event Summaries
- I attended Twilio CX Innovation Night
https://dev.classmethod.jp/articles/twilio-cx-innovation-night/ - I attended Twilio CX Innovation Night Part 2
https://dev.classmethod.jp/articles/twilio-cx-innovation-night-part-2/ - I attended the Twilio CX Innovation Night held on November 28th
https://dev.classmethod.jp/articles/twilio-cx-innovation-night-20251128/
