Twilio Inc (NYSE:TWLO) stock rose 0.44% (As on April 7, 11:25:22 AM UTC-4, Source: Google Finance) after Jefferies analysts Samad Samana and Jeremy Sahler upgraded the company to Buy from Hold with a price target of $160, up from $125. Jefferies cites its greater conviction in the role Twilio will play in the voice AI tech stack for the upgrade. This move underscores how Twilio is embedding AI into its platform, enabling smarter voice interactions for apps. You can see why this matters: as AI voice tech proliferates, Twilio’s tools become essential for developers building the next wave of intelligent assistants. The upgrade reflects confidence in Twilio’s ability to capitalize on AI trends without overhauling its core platform. Banks like Jefferies point to Twilio’s established developer ecosystem as a moat, allowing quick integration of advanced features. For global investors, this positions Twilio as a play on AI’s practical applications in everyday business communications.

The analysts said Twilio was the market leader in the growing CPaaS market, which should drive mid- to high-single-digit growth over the medium-to-long term for the company. Twilio’s new product introductions and continued expansion with existing customers should drive improvements in its net retention. “Voice AI represents the convergence of cloud telephony, real-time media streaming, speech-to-text (STT), LLM inference, and text-to-speech (TTS) to enable fully automated, conversational call interactions. We view Voice AI adoption as a structural volume tailwind for TWLO, with value creation occurring across the stack, but monetization concentrated at the orchestration layer,” Samana and Sahler said. They noted that in traditional voice calls, Twilio “primarily monetizes the lowest layer of the stack.” However, with products such as ConversationRelay, the firm is shifting its strategy to move “up the stack,” offering bundled solutions that integrate speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and orchestration tools.

Jefferies said it expects Twilio to notch total voice revenue of $1.15 billion by 2028, consisting of $769 million of traditional Voice revenue and $383 million of Voice AI revenue. The incremental Voice AI is not currently in Jefferies’ forecasted estimates. “The forecast represents about 40% uplift compared to total Voice revenue if Voice AI were to remain flat as a percentage of the mix from 2025 and a 5% uplift to 2028 total revenue. Furthermore, Voice would climb to ~18% of total revenue by 2028 vs. 12% in 2025,” the analysts said. The brokerage also estimated that the higher-margin AI platform economics will drive about 115bps of gross margin upside in 2028 for Twilio.