We’ve been hearing about former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s latest role since he announced he was leaving the CRM giant in November 2022. Last February, we learned he was launching a AI startup built with former Google employee Clay Bavor. Today, the two have emerged with a new conversational AI company called Sierra with bold claims about what it can do.
At its core, the new company is a customer service robot. It’s not exactly earth-shattering, but the company says it’s much more than that, with its software going beyond an extension of an FAQ page and actually taking action on the customer’s behalf.
“Sierra agents can do much more than just answer questions. They take action using your systems, from upgrading a subscription in your customer database to managing the complexities of a furniture delivery in your order management system. Agents can reason, solve problems and make decisions,” the company said in a blog post.
Having worked with large enterprise clients at Salesforce, Taylor certainly understands that issues like hallucinations, where a large language model sometimes makes up a response when it lacks the information to respond accurately, are a serious problem. This is especially true for large companies, whose brand reputation is at stake. The company claims to solve hallucination problems.
Image credits: Sierra
At the same time, it connects to other business systems to undertake tasks on behalf of the client without involving humans. These are two bold and difficult claims to make.
Other startups working on this problem include former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield winner Forethought, which was working on this problem long before ChatGPT came along, and Ada, which launched an AI customer service suite last spring.
It makes sense that Taylor, who spent seven years at Salesforce, would turn to AI to solve customer problems. Salesforce bought his last company, Quip, for $750 million in the summer of 2016. He worked his way up to co-CEO before leaving to start building Sierra with Bavor.
Several major consumer brands are already using the initial version of the platform, including SiriusXM, Sonos and WeightWatchers.
Bavor worked for seven years at Google, where he was in charge of AR and VR, before partnering with Taylor, who also worked at Google in the early 2000s.
In addition to his day job running Sierra, Taylor serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of OpenAI after serving on the Board of Directors of Twitter. He was removed from his position when Elon Musk dissolved the board shortly after taking over the company in October 2022.
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