American startup that builds customer-service AI agents—tools which act autonomously on behalf of businesses. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who also serves as chairman of OpenAI.
Sierra uses outcomes-based pricing: clients are charged only when the AI agent actually solves a customer's problem. If a human has to get involved, it is free. Taylor argues that tasks become much more tractable when given to agents in narrow domains. Retailers, for example, have standard criteria for returning items, which means a customer-service agent can ask specific questions about when an item was bought and whether it has been used, before working out what to do.
Sierra uses a "supervisor model" to monitor real-time interactions between customers and its AI agents, with humans on hand to step in if needed. A second model evaluates conversations after the fact and pushes tricky cases towards human reviewers.
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.