Our new Databricks partnership: What it is and why it matters

Twilio Segment is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Databricks, the Data and AI company. This new partnership will help thousands of businesses bring their customer data from Twilio Segment into the Databricks Lakehouse, enabling new AI use cases that offer actionable insights and deliver personalized experiences at scale. 

Why now?

Companies are eagerly embracing the transformative impact AI can have on their growth and customer engagement strategies. In fact, 92% of businesses are now leveraging AI or machine learning to support their personalization strategies. 

But, in order for these AI-based tactics to deliver full potential, businesses need reliable customer data as the foundation of the models. If your customer data is siloed, inconsistent, stale, or incomplete, even the most innovative AI applications will have less impact. Being able to rely on a trusted data infrastructure with unified, consistent, real-time, and consented data is critical to any AI strategy. 

Databricks is already trusted by thousands of data scientists and engineers to develop and deploy advanced AI solutions - and now those solutions can be powered by reliable customer data from Segment.

What the partnership will offer

The first phase of the partnership will focus on a bi-directional integration, as a part of the Segment Connections offering, which includes: 

• Sending trusted and ready-to-use customer event data, captured by Twilio Segment, directly into their Databricks Lakehouse. 

• The ability to pull data out via Reverse ETL and activate in any of our 450+ destinations and across unlimited custom integrations.

Additionally, we plan to provide Profiles Sync support in the future, which will allow companies to easily send unified customer profiles from Twilio Segment, so they can create golden records within their Lakehouse. In addition, Twilio Segment’s future roadmap will extend these capabilities to take advantage of real-time zero copy data sharing capabilities for activating data into and out of Databricks.

With the partnership between Twilio Segment and Databricks, customers get the flexibility they need to seamlessly:

• Generate high quality and trusted first-party data from Twilio Segment into the Databricks’ Lakehouse.

• Activate data from Databricks Lakehouse into any of Twilio Segment’s 450+ supported destinations and custom integrations for further enrichment and downstream activation.

• Manage the entire data lifecycle from collecting trusted customer event data,  building powerful AI models on rich golden customer profiles, and activating in downstream applications  to unlock a wide array of customer engagement use cases. All with fewer tools and custom pipeline and orchestration processes to manage.

Databricks' AI/ML Capabilities with Twilio Segment: 

By leveraging Databricks together with Twilio Segment, customers will be able to fully activate and leverage first-party customer data directly in Databricks to:

• Unlock targeted, personalized marketing campaigns at scale by leveraging Twilio Segment’s unified profiles combined with Databricks Advanced Machine Learning capabilities.

• Provide real-time communication capabilities to companies looking to interact with their audience at the right time, at the right place, with the right message, based on their audiences interests and preferences.

• Increase customer upsell opportunities and reduce customer churn by standardizing customer data in Databricks via Twilio Segment, then leveraging that data to power personalized marketing journeys. 

• Reduce costs and increase engineering efficiency by using Twilio Segment and Databricks together to enrich source data for profile unification, audience generation, and multi-channel journey orchestration.

"We're thrilled about the partnership between Twilio Segment and Databricks to enable businesses to derive actionable insights and deliver personalized experiences at scale with Delta sharing. As the delivery of personalization and next generation customer experiences continues to be a top priority for every enterprise, the combination of the Databricks Lakehouse architecture and Twilio Segment will be a game changer for our joint customers looking to deliver the very best in real time, one to one experiences."

- Chris Hecht, SVP Corp Dev and Partnerships at Databricks

“Nextdoor is excited to see the Databricks and Segment partnership. Together, they are paving the way for smarter insights and a deeper understanding of data. Real time data and historic data are key to helping Nextdoor create effective marketing programs for both neighbors and businesses with a high level of personalization.”

- Craig Lisowski, Head of Data, Information Systems & Trust, Nextdoor

If you’d like to learn more about the partnership, request a demo here or visit us at the Databricks Data & AI Summit in San Francisco this week! To learn more about how Twilio is leveraging generative and predictive AI to help businesses access and activate their customer data and better understand their customers, visit https://www.twilio.com/en-us/customer-ai.