Transforming Customer Service through Company Agents, with Sierra’s Bret Taylor

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, we have Bret Taylor, whose legendary career spans from creating Google Maps to serving as the CTO of Facebook and co-CEO of Salesforce, founding two companies along the way, as well as chairing the board of Twitter and now OpenAI. He and Clay Bavor have started Sierra, which is creating company agents for the next generation of customer experience. I'm thrilled to have such an amazing technologist and leader at All Skills with us today, and long-time friend, welcome, Bret.

**Elad** (0:37)
Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Bret.

**Bret Taylor** (0:39)
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

**Sarah** (0:40)
Let's get right into it. Do agents work today?

**Bret Taylor** (0:43)
How do you define agents? Or do you want me to define agents?

**Sarah** (0:46)
You define agent. You're the expert.

**Bret Taylor** (0:47)
Agents means something different in academia than I think they mean in industry right now. I think both definitions are important.
Just starting what I view as the classic academic definition is an agentic system is one where software can reason and take action autonomously, and it comes from the word agency. As a consequence of such a broad academic definition, I think it becomes the proverbial inkblot test for people using the word. In industry right now, there's probably three categories of agent that I think are on the cusp of working. The first, I think, which a lot of people online talk a lot about is personal agents, and I think that's probably the earliest of the three categories that I see, but maybe one of the more exciting ones. This is the agent that will triage your inbox, schedule a vacation, help you prep for a meeting, manage your calendar, all of that. The reason why I think that's earliest, I think it's really interesting to make some demos, but I think the human-computer interaction and even how the agents interact with all the systems we depend on as people is quite complex. You can think of the surface area of both reasoning and systems integrations is almost infinite. So as a consequence, I think it probably a prerequisite for a great personal agent, probably demands more technology than is currently available, though there's lots of interesting startups in this space, and you could imagine some interesting companies carving out meaningful niche use cases that expand as the technology improves. The second category of the agent, I think this one does exist in some categories, is what I call persona-based agents. So they're agents that do a job, a very specific job. There's companies like Harvey that serve a legal function. There's all the coding agents. I think there's some fairly effective ones right now that serve the job of a computer programmer. I think this is really exciting because I think when you narrow, I call those cases narrow but deep.

**Sarah** (2:46)
Both task scope and perhaps integration scope.

**Bret Taylor** (2:49)
That's right. The tools you access and even how you evaluate the effectiveness is if you're building a coding agent, there's actually really good benchmarks already. Similarly, compilers emit error messages and you might have integration tests. You end up with this scaffolding that actually practically speaking, limits the scope of the true research that you have to do to accomplish it. I think broadly speaking with the advent of foundation models, a lot of effective AI right now is where you've taken areas of research and you made them areas of engineering. And I think you can engineer very effective persona based agents for certain domains where the technology applies like the law, like areas of software engineering and things like that. My take is the domain of personal agents is probably of the very large consumer companies like Apple and Google and OpenAI and others that have big consumer brands. For the persona based agents, I think there's probably meaningful companies in each of those spaces because I think to do those effectively, it involves the confluence of AI expertise and expertise in that domain. The other category, which is the area that my company, Sierra Works in, is what I call company agents. And it's really less simply about automation or autonomy, but in this world of conversational AI, how does your company exist digitally? I always use the metaphor of it, we're in 1995
If you existed digitally, it meant having a website and being in Yahoo directory. In 2025, existing digitally will probably mean having a branded AI agent that your customers can interact with to do everything that they can do on your website. Whether it's asking about your products and services, doing commerce, doing customer service. That domain, I think, is shovel ready right now with current technology, because again, like the persona-based agents, it's not boiling the proverbial ocean technically. You have well-defined processes for your customer experience, well-defined systems that are your systems of record. It's really about saying in this world where we've gone from websites to apps to now conversational experiences, what is the conversational experience you want around your brand? It doesn't mean it's perfect or it's easy, otherwise we wouldn't have started a company around it, but it's least well-defined. I think that right now in AI, if you're working on artificial general intelligence, your version of agent probably means something different, and that's okay. That's just a different problem to be solved. But I think particularly in the areas that Sierra works, and a lot of the companies that you all have invested in, is it's saying, are there some shovel-ready opportunities right now with existing technology? I absolutely think there are.