Building with AI: How Twilio & AWS Are Shaping the Future of Development with Deepak Singh & Inbal Shani

Jul 9, 2025

Deepak Singh, Vice President at AWS, and Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer at Twilio, dive into the transformative power of AI in development. They discuss the critical need for curiosity and adaptability among developers in an AI-driven landscape. The duo emphasizes the importance of building trust while integrating AI for customer engagement. Insightful points include simplifying AI processes and managing risks to enhance customer experiences. Their conversation reveals a vision where AI fosters innovation and personalizes every interaction.

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INSIGHT

Builders' Unique Preferences

Builders have unique working styles, which is why they often have strong tool preferences like VI or Emacs.
Building tools must accommodate diverse workflows to help builders stay productive and in flow.

ADVICE

Customer-Centric AI Focus

Start AI integration by focusing on the customer problem, not the technology.
Use contextual data to build smarter, more personalized AI experiences for customers.

INSIGHT

AI Tools Changing Development

Generative AI tools have evolved rapidly, now enabling senior engineers to integrate AI effectively in software development.
Developers are learning to trust AI agents to write and refactor code, changing traditional workflows.

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In this episode of Builders Wanted, we are joined by Deepak Singh, Vice President of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS, and Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio. They discuss what it means to build with AI, the evolution of developer tools, and how they are assisting customers in leveraging AI for customer engagement and innovation. The conversation covers the importance of curiosity, adaptability, and trust in this new era of AI-powered development.

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Key Takeaways:

Developers need to be curious and adaptable to thrive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Successful AI implementation relies on building trust, simplifying processes, and focusing on customer outcomes.
Enabling experimentation while managing risk helps organizations fully leverage the potential of AI.

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“It is very easy for a dev team or a product team to say, ah, this is the best way of doing something and we are going to follow this through wherever we want to. Instead of working with customers to understand, do you even care? I think with AI it's very important to take constraints away. So if you combine listening to customers and unconstraining your thinking, you can accomplish a lot.” – Deepak Singh

“ When you're using AI, you need to understand that using a model, training a model, having the data, having a feedback loop, all of that is not a magical thing that just happens by itself. It requires investment and you need to be serious about it. When looking to take AI into production, you need to understand what is the complexity of the problem you're trying to solve, and how to deploy the right AI solution to really solve that problem versus swinging by.” – Inbal Shani

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Episode Timestamps:

‍*(02:35) - What it means to be a builder and the hardest part about building tools

‍*(10:50) - The most exciting shift happening in the developer ecosystem

‍*(21:17) - How to manage risk with the pace of innovation

‍*(26:15) - What people underestimate about building AI products at scale

‍*(40:57) - A recent signal that excites Deepak and Inbal about the future

‍*(43:52) - Quick hits

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Links:

Connect with Deepak on LinkedIn

Connect with Inbal on LinkedIn

Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn

Learn more about Caspian Studios

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Sponsor

Builders Wanted is brought to you by Twilio – the Customer Engagement Platform that helps builders turn real-time data into meaningful customer experiences. More than 320,000 businesses trust Twilio to transform signals into connections—and connections into revenue. Ready to build what’s next? Learn more at twilio.com.