Why agentic AI needs a new category of customer data

Presented by Twilio

The customer data infrastructure powering most enterprises was architected for a world that no longer exists: one where marketing interactions could be captured and processed in batches, where campaign timing was measured in days (not milliseconds), and where "personalization" meant inserting a first name into an email template.

Conversational AI has shattered those assumptions.

AI agents need to know what a customer just said, the tone they used, their emotional state, and their complete history with a brand instantly to provide relevant guidance and effective resolution. This fast-moving stream of conversational signals (tone, urgency, intent, sentiment) represents a fundamentally different category of customer data. Yet the systems most enterprises rely on today were never designed to capture or deliver it at the speed modern customer experiences demand.

The conversational AI context gap

The consequences of this architectural mismatch are already visible in customer satisfaction data. Twilio’s ...