Bret Taylor’s New AI Company: Empowering Customers to Get Quick Answers and Automate Task Completion

We’ve been following the journey of Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, ever since he announced his departure from the CRM powerhouse in November 2022. In February, we learned that he was teaming up with ex-Google employee Clay Bavor to launch an AI startup. Today, they have unveiled their new conversational AI venture, Sierra, and they’re making some ambitious promises about its capabilities.

At its core, Sierra serves as a customer service bot, which may seem commonplace. However, the founders assert that its functionality far exceeds that of a typical FAQ page, as the software is designed to actively engage with customers and perform tasks on their behalf.

“Sierra agents can do much more than just respond to queries. They can initiate actions within your systems, from upgrading subscriptions in your customer database to coordinating the complexities of furniture deliveries in your order management system. These agents are equipped to reason, solve problems, and make decisions,” the company stated in a blog post.

With his extensive experience working with large enterprise clients at Salesforce, Taylor recognizes that issues like hallucination—where a language model generates incorrect answers when it lacks accurate information—pose significant challenges for large organizations concerned about their brand reputation. Sierra claims to address these hallucination issues head-on.

The platform is designed to interface seamlessly with various enterprise systems, allowing it to perform tasks without human intervention. These are substantial assertions, and executing them successfully will undoubtedly prove to be a challenge.

It's no surprise that Taylor, who spent seven years at Salesforce, is focusing on AI solutions for customer challenges. Salesforce acquired his previous venture, Quip, for $750 million in mid-2016. Taylor climbed the ranks to co-CEO before embarking on the journey to create Sierra with Bavor.

Sierra is already seeing traction, with several major consumer brands, including SiriusXM, Sonos, and WeightWatchers, using its initial platform version.

Clay Bavor brings his background from Google, where he spent seven years overseeing AR and VR, to his new collaboration with Taylor, who also has a history with Google from the early 2000s.

In addition to leading Sierra, Taylor serves as the chairman of the board at OpenAI and previously was a board member at Twitter until Elon Musk dissolved the board shortly after acquiring the platform in October 2022.