Twilio CRO Thomas Wyatt on the company’s $5 billion revenue milestone

After 18 years in business, cloud-based communications platform Twilio hit a substantial milestone last year of $5 billion in annual revenue. CRO Thomas Wyatt, who took on the role in October 2024, credits the growth to the company’s self-service offering, which has grown over 20% YoY and includes customer chatbots and interactive voice responses.

“We provide the communication infrastructure for companies that want to communicate with their consumers, and that’s increasingly important now because it’s not just applications like [voice or messaging services], but all these modern AI agents that are being built require the ability for the agent to communicate with humans as well,” he said.

Prior to taking on the CRO role at Twilio, Wyatt spent time in the product space at companies like Cisco and People.ai. Revenue Brew sat down with Wyatt to discuss Twilio’s self-service offering, customer retention, and its evolving go-to-market strategy.

How are you leveraging your prior roles for the CRO position?

A lot of the platform transitions we’re making as a company, like integrating a lot of new services on the Twilio platform, requires us to have sort of a general manager’s type of mindset in the way we think about what it means for our business model…That requires us to think more about multiproduct selling and the ability to deliver a more integrated set of solutions for customers.

What do you think contributed to Twilio’s $5 billion in annual revenue last year?

The customers are embracing the Twilio platform to deliver their communications for their next-generation apps and agents. In order for customers to really, truly get the benefit whatever use case they might be building toward, Twilio is providing the way to effectively personalize those experiences.

Let’s say you’re a retail customer and you’re in the process of purchasing and you decide to click a virtual agent on someone’s website. What Twilio provides is the virtual agent capability that allows the consumer to have personalization delivered to them as they’re communicating with the brand. The way we do that is we connect to all of the different systems of records—whether it’s product analytics, CRM data, or the data warehouse, etc.—and then that is connected to a large language model and AI services that we enable. That connects back to the communication platform, whether it’s voice or a chat experience, and that allows that personalized interaction to happen in a way that was not possible two or three years ago.

What is Twilio’s go-to-market strategy and how has it evolved?

We have five key growth levers that are driving our go-to-market transformation. The first is a self-service business, which is our fastest growing line of business, and it’s the easiest way for customers to get started with Twilio. We’ve dramatically simplified the onboarding experience, which has helped us reaccelerate that business.

The second area is driving more cross-sell and upsell of our solutions. If a customer may have started with our voice services, they’re seeing the benefit of adding our messaging services or our email or personalization services…We’re seeing a significant increase in our customer count that are adopting multiple Twilio products. In fact, in Q1 that was up 29% YoY.

The next big area is our international business is doing really well. It’s outgrowing the overall company average. We’re taking market share and the key markets that we compete in. Customers are getting more familiar with Twilio as a brand internationally, and that’s helped us.

[Partners are] the fourth growth lever: the combination of system integrators integrating Twilio into other software infrastructure that customers have to deliver these more expansive use cases.

The last thing is more of the way we’ve embraced AI and the way we service our customers. For example, we use AI as part of our presales motion. Ninety-three percent of Twilio inbound leads are serviced by AI before a human gets involved. That really powers our self-service business.

What kind of growth do you see coming from the self-service offering?

Sixty-three percent of our enterprise customers originated through the self-service channel, so usually that’s the onboarding and then once a customer gets a certain threshold of volume and spend with us, they’re generally ready to upgrade and have more of a direct relationship with us.

Why do you think self-service is such an appealing offering to customers?

A lot of it starts with the primary users of our product, which are builders. These are developers or operating type people that are trying to build an application, and they don’t necessarily want to be sold to directly; they just want to build and get started. If they’re using Claude code and they want to be able to create an application and it needs to communicate to somebody, they just want to connect to Twilio services and just get started. We have connectors build into these systems. That’s a great example of what the inbound comes in with—self-service. Other times, it can be a small business that just wants to set up a booking appointment system.

How are you using AI to facilitate those inbound leads? Has inbound marketing become a crucial part of your sales strategy?

Self-service is primarily driven by inbound. We have a qualification engine that looks at a lot of different signals, intent signals, and activity around an account to suggest who’s likely to be a good Twilio customer. We look at some of the inbound signals of who’s on our website: What are they activating? How fast did it take them to get started? How fast can we convert them from a free customer to a paid customer, to a customer that spends $50 a month, for example? What we’re seeing is a really steep acceleration of customers upgrading from free to paid, particularly in the last few quarters. We think this is largely because customers who are experimenting with AI agents and applications are now moving those into production and they’re consuming more Twilio services.