SIGNAL Sydney 2025: A Sold‑out Debut on the Harbour

SIGNAL Sydney 2025: A Sold‑out Debut on the Harbour

A first for Sydney and a full house for builders

For the first time, on October 16, 2025 Twilio brought SIGNAL to Sydney, and the city answered. We welcomed a sold‑out audience of 283 customer attendees alongside Twilio leaders and developers for a day of vision, hands‑on learning, and community. Doltone House Jones Bay Wharf, with panoramic views of the Harbour Bridge and skyline, set the stage for conversations that turned ideas into buildable blueprints. The Wharf was more than a scenic backdrop. Its flexible spaces and sweeping views mirrored what SIGNAL set out to deliver, a change in perspective, room to build, and momentum that carries forward.

Attendees start the day with a vision keynote from Twilio leaders and top customers.

Strategic customers from across APJ, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and other Asian markets, came together with developers, architects, and CX leaders. Twilio executives and product owners met customers in one to one sessions to align on roadmaps and outcomes. The result was a distinctly regional SIGNAL that kept latency, compliance, and localization front and center while focusing on trusted, data‑driven customer engagement.

Leadership Keynote: vision, launches, and customer outcomes

Twilions Khozema Shipchandler, Chris Koehler, Robin Grochol, Vanessa Thompson, and Chris Connolly opened the day with a look at how Twilio helps builders create better solutions across industries. The keynote highlighted the newest product launches and our partnership with Microsoft, then moved from slides to stories with two customer spotlights.

Lendi Group, represented by David Hyman, walked through how financial services teams orchestrate compliant, personalized journeys that keep agents productive and customers confident at key decision points.

Crypto.com, represented by Winson Cheng, showed how a digital‑first brand earns and keeps trust at global scale through reliable communications, strong identity, and clear notifications.

Opening guest speaker: The Hon Victor Dominello on digital leadership

The Hon Victor Dominello

The Hon Victor Dominello drew on the transformation of Service NSW as a living case study. His message was straightforward. Use data to make decisions that matter. Empower teams to deliver value quickly. Keep customers at the center of every design choice. Lead with clarity so modernization does not stall. Attendees left with a public sector playbook that translates well to any organization that serves people at scale.

Breakouts: six sessions that moved from theory to practice

Our afternoon program was designed to help teams build trust and connect everywhere. Six breakouts brought together Twilions and customers from Datacom, Lendi Group, Metcash, Origin Energy, and Philippine Airlines Inc., pairing technical depth with operational guidance.

Breakout sessions

• Building Seamless, Scalable Customer Experiences with Twilio and Segment, presented by Michelle Duke
  
  This session showed how to unify conversations across messaging, voice, and email inside Segment, then power intent detection and next‑best‑action at scale. The theme was simple. Personalization improves when context is centralized, secured, and activated.

• How to increase customer engagement with rich messaging, presented by Daniel Wong
  
  Attendees took a technical tour of Twilio Messaging with a focused look at the RCS channel. The session covered building with Messaging APIs, shipping journeys that use cards, carousels, images, suggested replies, and verified branding, and falling back automatically to SMS or WhatsApp for coverage. A live demo tied it together with end to end measurement.

• ConversationRelay: AI Voice Agents with minimal code, presented by Leroy Chan
  
  This demo turned an organization’s own large language model into a natural phone agent using Twilio ConversationRelay. Twilio handled telephony, low latency speech to text and text to speech, barge‑in, DTMF, and premium voices. A lightweight WebSocket service handled intent, tools, and business logic. The team showed verification, summaries, and topic changes inside a single conversation, plus how to deploy safely in-region with full observability in Insights.

Breakout sessions

• Twilio Conversational AI: personalized conversations at scale, presented by Courtney Harland
  
  This session detailed how to combine three primitives, communications, contextual data, and AI, to operationalize omni‑channel self‑service. Builders saw a practical blueprint for quality conversations that respect regional constraints while improving continuously.

• Making every touchpoint count: communications across channels
  
  Trust compounds at every interaction. This talk connected voice, messaging, and digital channels into a unified experience, then outlined ways to safeguard identity, maintain reliability, and deliver relevance at moments that matter.

• Smarter CX at scale: from live agents to AI‑first conversations
  
  Leaders shared how large human-led, AI assisted contact centers blend AI with human expertise, roll out conversational AI responsibly, and scale from webchat pilots to enterprise deployment. Best practices in agent handoff, governance, and real‑time insights rounded out the discussion.

Attendees try out Owlvin AI in the Builder’s Arcade

The Builder’s Arcade and Community Hall

Community Hall buzzed all day. Attendees swapped code snippets, compared roadmaps, and visited sponsor booths from Amplitude, CloudWave, and VoiceraCX.AI. The mix of peer conversations and hands‑on demos helped teams leave with ideas they could pilot immediately.

At the center of the event action was the Builder’s Arcade, a set of open source experiences that turned Twilio’s platform into something you could touch and try. Attendees built and called their own AI agents, played through mission scenarios on a retro console, created AI‑generated keepsakes, and skipped the coffee line with Twilio Barista. The point was simple. Show how messaging, voice, data, and AI come together to create useful, delightful moments that anyone can recreate.

Networking in the Community Hall

Want the technical details and links to the repos? Read the full Builder’s Arcade deep dive on the Twilio blog.

Closing guest speaker: Amanda Stevens on the consumer of tomorrow

Amanda Stevens closed the program with a clear framework for winning modern consumers who hold high expectations for themselves and their brands.

The three C’s anchored her talk: Collaborate with customers, do not just build for them. Customize journeys so they feel personal, not generic. Celebrate milestones to create emotional resonance.

Her tailored case studies made the ideas practical for product and CX leaders.

Guest Speaker Amanda Stevens

What attendees took away

• Practical blueprints to upgrade messaging with rich media and automatic fallback.
• A path to safe, human‑like voice experiences using ConversationRelay and observability in Insights.
• An operating model for omni‑channel self‑service that combines communications, contextual data, and AI.
• Renewed focus on trust, identity, and reliability at every touchpoint, supported by customer-built governance and smart agent handoffs.

Making connections at SIGNAL Sydney

Keep building at SIGNAL!

Don’t let the momentum end now. If you attended, reconnect with your Twilio team to pilot one of the blueprints you saw, rich messaging, ConversationRelay, or Conversational AI. If you explored the Builder’s Arcade, clone an open source repo and try it with your own data. If you want updates on future SIGNAL events and local developer meetups, let your account team know so we can keep you in the loop.

SIGNAL will return to the region next year, so be sure to sign up for the latest updates and join us again, wherever you may be.

Robin Elrod is a Senior Manager for Global Events at Twilio. She runs audience acquisition and communications across events of all shapes and sizes, bringing the magic of Twilio to customers and prospects live and in-person.