Cooking with fire without burning down the kitchen: Dominik Kundel
Dec 31, 2024 · 20:35
Dominik Kundel, who leads product and design for Twilio's Emerging Tech & Innovation team, explains how the company balances disruptive AI innovation with its existing communications and customer data platform businesses. He distinguishes sustaining innovation (e.g., Apple's AI features) from disruptive innovation (e.g., agents not yet enterprise-ready due to quality and cost), arguing that ignoring disruptive AI is increasingly dangerous because quality improves daily. Kundel shares three key lessons from Twilio's AI journey: first, ship early and often—even rough prototypes—to gather real feedback, which led to the Twilio Alpha sub-brand for setting expectations; second, build a curious, problem-owning team rather than requiring existing AI expertise; third, share learnings internally and externally to avoid operating in a silo and to help customers be thought leaders. He recounts how an initial AI personalization engine was too disruptive for mainstream R&D, so the team iterated on an AI Assistance agent builder, using internal hackathons and dogfooding with low-risk use cases like IT helpdesk to improve quality before broader release.
