Robert Vis, founder and CEO of Bird, has been on the TADSummit podcast a few times. Sharing his insights on the SMS industry, and the transformation he’s leading at Bird. Check out:

• Podcast 30: Truth in Telecoms: Flipping the Bird with Robert Vis. Where Robert shared Bird was dropping SMS margins by 90%. The channel is almost irrelevant, use what’s appropriate to the customer and workflow, It’s all about the customer experience. Yet, the CPaaS industry obsesses over channels, see the current RCS hype, which lacks encryption that US lawmakers see as essential. Most messaging platform, e.g. WhatsApp, have encryption for many years.
• Podcast 87: Truth in Telecoms, The Vis Part 1. Here Robert laid the industry bare, backing up the work we’ve been doing at TADSummit. He explains how industry trends have driven Bird’s strategy.  Software trend (applications not APIs); and migration away from SMS, for example to passkey, given the lack of action by the industry on AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic).

Last week Robert shared in a letter to shareholders on the progress they’ve made.  Bird is creating a world where businesses can focus on their core purpose, free from the friction of disparate systems and processes. The chaos of a hundred apps will give way to the simplicity of one intelligent platform.

Specifically, Bird has built a platform that supports revenue generation, customer engagement, operations, and automates intelligence. Bird runs on that platform, that is, eat their own dog food. This is a tough transition, BUT they are meeting and exceeding their targets.

Paul Sweeney from Webio shared his perspective on what Bird is doing, an edited version is shown below. We will review this on Monday with Paul. Robert, you’re welcome to join us!

Here is the full video with Robert Vis, Paul Sweeney, Johnny, and myself. It’s a great review of the shift Bird is leading in the industry with ‘business in a box’. SaaS plus LLM delivers autonomous enterprises. As you’ll see, Robert is pumped about the change he is leading, and what it will mean to enterprises large and small.

Paul Sweeney’s Thoughts

1. Bird’s Transformation: From CPaaS to AI-First Business Platform

Bird is no longer just a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider; it’s repositioning itself as an AI-first Business Platform (Business Operating System?). This isn’t just a rebranding exercise; it’s a fundamental shift in purpose and capability. Traditionally, CPaaS companies have struggled to move into enterprise software because they lack:

• The ability to sell full-stack enterprise products
• Vertical-specific workflows tailored to industries
• Customisation capabilities required from large enterprise customers
• Customer success services that deliver outcomes.

Bird is betting that there is a fundamental shift occurring in the market driven by the new LLM based models. Competitors like Infobip and Sinch appear to be stuck with outdated AI services that haven’t gained traction in the last twelve months, while Bird has moved decisively into AI-driven solutions that integrate communications, workflows, and customer success. 

Early success with customer service and customer facing solutions is evidence that their technology works (no small thing in itself), but it is also clear that Bird will seek out vertical by vertical “killer apps/ processes” that give them wider scope for adoption. 

2. The Power of Customer Data

Bird has taken Twilio’s insight about the importance of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and run with it to its logical conclusion. Twilio recognised that CDPs are critical for enabling multi-channel communication and personalization. Bird has gone further by building an ecosystem where businesses can adopt one app and seamlessly expand across multiple solutions without a bunch of new integrations.

What this means is that controlling all communication (email, SMS, WhatsApp, voice, etc.) gives Bird access to the data needed to power AI-driven services. 

Conversations are rich data sources, and they’re often the first point of adoption for disruptive technologies. Think back to SaaS in the early 2000s, Salesforce dominated CRM because it focused on customer conversations, while ERP players like SAP lagged behind in cloud adoption.

3. Beyond SaaS: The Rise of the Digital Business Platform

Bird is signalling that SaaS alone isn’t enough. Instead, it’s building a Digital Business Platform, a unified system that breaks down silos and democratizes access to advanced tools. This is similar to how cloud computing once abstracted away the complexity of managing individual applications.

Bird’s bet is on data: by capturing and analysing data from customer interactions across multiple channels, its AI will become smarter and more effective than competitors’. The vision is for businesses to interact with Bird’s platform as if it were an autonomous assistant. Example: “Create a workflow where customers can register, book appointments, and pay seamlessly using best practices.” Bird handles everything autonomously, designing, testing, and deploying workflows without human intervention.

4. The Age of Autonomous Organizations

Bird sees itself at the forefront of a shift toward autonomous organizations, starting with communications but extending into payments and beyond. The idea is simple: businesses want systems that can define and deliver services without human involvement. 

5. Payments as a Strategic Gateway

Payments aren’t just an initial revenue stream for Bird, they’re also a gateway to bigger opportunities. By facilitating transactions through innovative technologies like Open Banking or blockchain; Bird can disrupt traditional payment gateways, which are often clunky and hard to integrate.

Here’s why this matters:

• Payments provide valuable data that can feed into Bird’s AI models, enhancing personalization and customer insights.
• Payments sit at the intersection of all business transactions, making them critical for capturing value across industries.
• While Open Banking adoption in Europe has been slower than expected, it remains an untapped opportunity for Bird to lead with data-powered financial services.

Bird’s Playbook

Here’s how Bird plans to redefine its market:

• Capture communication channels to own customer conversations.
• Build out AI-powered services (starting with customer service) that fulfil those conversations’ needs.
• Integrate payments into these channels using disruptive technologies like Open Banking.
• Leverage AI to design highly personalized services that are created and delivered through customer interactions.

Why This Matters

Bird isn’t just evolving, it’s setting the stage for what could be a new standard in enterprise software: autonomous platforms that integrate communications, payments, and AI into one seamless ecosystem. If successful, this strategy could disrupt not only CPaaS but also traditional SaaS players by offering businesses something far more powerful, a platform that doesn’t just enable workflows but creates them autonomously based on real-time data from customer interactions.

The implications are massive: from transforming customer service (a $200 billion market) to capturing financial services profit pools tied to every transaction. Bird is betting big on becoming the operating system for autonomous organizations. If they pull it off, they’ll redefine what enterprise software looks like in the AI age.

Now the hard Notes:

Bird forcing the future on competitors that are not ready for it. They have signalled a big cut in the cost of payment processing and already delivered on the costs of SMS because they want enterprises to bring it to their platform. 

They have signalled that they don’t care if you are using Stripe today, Stripe will be part of a future payment service provider marketplace 

This is all cost reduction to drive scale. They want Twilio, Infobip and Sinch customers to come for the costs, buy, and stay for the extra services. 

My feeling is that they would give you all of what you get from their competitors today, for free, if they can find a way to charge you for AI Driven services. A company making $100M on AI services with 83% margin could be worth more than a CPaaS company making $800M.