Ever since former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor announced he would be leaving the CRM giant in November 2022, we've been hearing about his latest work. Last February, I heard he was launching an AI startup he built with former Google employee Clay Baber. Today, they're launching a new conversational AI company called Sierra, making bold claims about what it can do.
At the heart of the new company is a customer service bot. In fact, this is not the only surprising thing, but the company claims that its software goes beyond extending his FAQ page and is much more than that, as it actually performs actions on behalf of customers. There is.
“Sierra agents can do more than just answer questions. “The agent can reason, solve problems, and make decisions,” the company claimed in a blog post.
Taylor, who has worked with large enterprise customers at Salesforce, finds the illusory problem in which large language models can create answers when there isn't enough information to answer them accurately to be a serious problem. I certainly understand that. This is especially true for large companies whose brand reputation is at stake. The company claims to be solving the problem of hallucinations.
Image credits: sierra
At the same time, it connects to other enterprise systems to perform tasks on behalf of customers without human involvement. These are both big, bold claims that will be difficult to realize.
Other startups tackling this problem include Forethought, a former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield winner that has been working on this problem since long before ChatGPT, and Ada, which launched an AI customer service suite last spring. there is.
After seven years at Salesforce, it's no surprise that Taylor turned to AI to solve customer problems. Salesforce acquired his last company, Quip, for his $750 million in the summer of 2016. He was promoted to co-CEO and when he left he started building Sierra with Bavor.
They already own several large consumer brands using early versions of the platform, including SiriusXM, Sonos, and WeightWatchers.
Bavor spent seven years at Google working on AR and VR before collaborating with Taylor, who also worked at Google, in the early 2000s.
In addition to his day job running Sierra, Taylor previously served on the board of Twitter and is chairman of the board at OpenAI. He was removed from his role after Elon Musk dissolved the board shortly after taking over the company in October 2022.