Customer Engagement 2.0: Textdrip’s CTO Dhaval Gajjar on What’s Next

As businesses race toward hyper-personalized engagement, the future of customer engagement lies in platforms that are intelligent, automated, and built for real-time interaction. Traditional marketing methods, blunt, slow, and generic, are giving way to dynamic, AI-powered conversations that know your customer better than ever before.

At the center of this shift is Textdrip, an AI-driven SMS marketing platform redefining how brands connect with people. Leading its tech vision is Dhaval Gajjar, CTO of Textdrip, whose work blends automation, personalization, and mobile-first strategy.

“What was once a static, generic SMS campaign will evolve into a dynamic, real-time conversation,” says Gajjar, emphasizing the significance of AI in transforming customer-business interactions.

In this conversation, he offers a window into 2025, when 5G, ethical AI, and smart messaging will drive the future of customer engagement.

Q: Looking ahead to 2025, what technological advancements do you think will have the most significant impact on your industry, and why?

Gajjar: The biggest changes for 2025 will probably be AI-driven marketing automation and 5G technology. With AI, customer-business interactions will no longer only be about automating processes but also high-context, hyper-personalized messaging at scale.

What has traditionally been a static, generalist SMS campaign will become a dynamic, real-time conversation. The power of AI unlocks predictive messaging that adjusts to each customer’s behavior, preferences, and even mood. This will increase customer satisfaction as well as conversion rates. 

For instance, a customer interacts with the brand’s chatbot on a product. Next, in the form of an SMS, the same customer receives a follow-up message instead of a generic one because AI has used the data about the interaction to send a personalized message. If the customer’s history reveals an affinity to buy more products through discounts, this message might quote a special deal on items ordered by them, plus the deals coming up at that time. Hyper-personalization on this scale is going to remake customer engagement by 2025. 

Together with AI, another significant force, 5G technology, will dominate. With lightning-fast speeds and low latency, businesses can send SMS rich media such as videos, interactive buttons, and real-time updates. Think about a doctor’s office sending an appointment reminder over RCS that is not only to remind the patient but also link them to reschedule, contains a video message from the doctor, and perhaps even a map to the office, all in a single SMS. That will be the sort of real-time, dynamic communication 5G will enable. 

Q: You’ve mentioned AI and 5G as major forces—do you think future tech professionals will need to adjust their skill sets to keep up with these advances? What do you think will be the most crucial skills?

Gajjar: Absolutely, the shift toward AI and emerging technologies like 5G will require tech professionals to broaden their skill sets. By 2025, it won’t be enough to just have coding skills—you’ll need to pair those with a strong understanding of business goals. Developers will need to know how their work impacts the bigger picture—how their code drives business results, enhances user experience, and integrates with new technologies.

Let’s say you’re building a short message marketing platform. Okay, sure, you have to know how to write clean, efficient code. However, you also have to understand data analytics to interpret customer insights and make campaign adjustments based on their performance. An example is if an SMS campaign is underperforming. A tech professional needs to use data to figure out why: Is the message timing wrong? Are the offers irrelevant to the customer? It’s no longer enough to simply execute the technical side of things—you have to tie those efforts back to improving customer experiences and business results. 

And skills in cloud-native architectures, DevOps practices, and AI will be the biggest advantage. The perception of cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and GCP leading will continue to dominate and those who can efficiently leverage it for building scalable, efficient systems will be largely in demand. 

Q: With that in mind, do you foresee AI and automation having a more immediate impact? How do you think these technologies will evolve in the next few years?

Gajjar:  The next few years will completely reshape how teams work. Automation will ease repetitive tasks, and AI will allow businesses to work with greater efficiency; meanwhile, it will drive innovation and free up more creative time on real, inventive efforts. 

For example, consider a marketing team that will be running an SMS campaign. Instead of doing all the hard work manually in terms of customer list segmentation, past behavior analysis, and writing personalized messages, AI will automatically do it. It will scan data, analyze audiences, and generate tailored content for SMS messages in real time, even making adjustments based on customer responses. This means no more waiting for manual processes—everything will be automated, and teams can fine-tune their strategies rather than doing grunt work. 

The efficiency of the campaign will surely be noticed. AI dynamically personalizes the message to each customer, instead of sending the same message to each one, taking into account his or her past interactions. A customer who frequently buys items when they are discounted will likely get an exclusive offer from the company via an SMS, with higher conversion and loyalty rates for that customer. 

Besides this, with automation comes flexibility for firms to operate. Conventional fraud prevention tools and compliance tools, with automated processes, coupled with AI-empowered, would reduce the company’s risks of having fraud as well as non-compliance concerns and make it work fluidly. 

Q: Speaking of privacy and security, we’re seeing increasing concerns about the ethical use of technology, especially with AI. What role do you think ethical considerations will play in shaping technology development in the coming years?

Gajjar:  Ethical considerations shall mark the helm of these developments as technology advances along increasingly complex variants of artificial intelligence. Strong consideration regarding privacy, especially in relation to data security and customer consent, will drive the considerations in 2025. With AI and automation processing increasingly sensitive customer data, businesses need to ensure their compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and TCPA, while also maintaining transparency about what they do and with whom. 

For example, a firm may employ AI-based SMS marketing to reach out to the target customers. If they are not transparent about data collection and usage, or if the AI model is biased in its approach, they risk losing customer trust and facing legal repercussions. Future tech professionals must focus on data ethics, ensuring that AI algorithms do not propagate biases or misuse personal data. 

Ensuring ethical AI will involve making transparent models so that the users can understand what the AI decision-making process entails. It’s not just the right product at the right time; it is about ensuring customers feel their data is safe and that the AI is being used responsibly. 

Q: It sounds like there’s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of tech professionals. How do you personally approach balancing innovation with risk management when it comes to rolling out new technologies?

Gajjar: It’s all about finding that sweet spot between pushing for innovation and protecting the business from unnecessary risks. In an industry as fast-moving as SMS marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. But you can’t just leap without looking. Risk management is key.

When we consider implementing something like a new AI tool, we don’t just roll it out to everyone at once. We start with a smaller, controlled test group to see how it performs. Monitoring and feedback are crucial in this phase. If things go well, we expand it, but only after we’ve ironed out any potential issues. This iterative approach minimizes the chances of failure while allowing us to innovate.

At the same time, we’re able to use automation and data-driven decision-making to reduce human error. For instance, AI can help optimize campaigns and catch fraudulent activity in real time, which reduces risks and keeps everything compliant with regulations.

Q: Could you give an example of a time when your team had to adapt to disruptive technology? How did you handle the transition?

Gajjar: One of the biggest disruptions we faced was the introduction of AI in our marketing automation processes. Before, everything was done manually—customer segmentation, data analysis, and content creation. But we realized that this wasn’t sustainable in the long run. AI was the obvious next step if we wanted to stay competitive.

The transition wasn’t easy, but we took it in stages to minimize disruption. We started small, introducing AI for personalized message recommendations in our campaigns. Once we saw success, we expanded its use to campaign optimization and even fraud detection.

Training, open discussions, and pilot projects were crucial in getting everyone on board. We empowered the team to experiment with AI-driven solutions and created a feedback loop where everyone could share insights. This wasn’t a top-down directive; it was a collaborative effort. By taking a gradual approach, we were able to innovate while maintaining stability in our operations.