Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees

in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language

The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months

There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)

I supervised a Sierra rollout a while back. Their performance was impressive and the price was great. I suspect both will not be true in time.

Their implementation is rather cumbersome, requiring implementation fees and AI configuration that is rather bespoke to Sierra. Anyone rolling off of Sierra will find there is nothing they can take with them.

In general, I think CX ought to disappear as a vertical in an AI world. If I'm talking to a product AI and need support, why should I switch to another AI to do that? Even if that second AI is invoked by the first as a tool, how much am I gaining?

Interestingly, the first and best implementers of AI support so far have been at companies that roll their own.

There is nothing unique to CX about AI, as far as I can tell. Sierra is still just the same AI infra people are putting in products. Granted, you can make good money positioning yourself this way, but I expect on some time horizon they will need to reposition.

I don't get this for several reasons:

1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human.

2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of them, but we've already seen that brand loyalty erodes quickly when you remove the human touch. United/Spirit airlines offer opposing views on the cut your way to profitability perspective.

3. "Pay only for good outcomes" isn't going to last.

4. Are agents good enough to even do this? Yes, the cherrypicked examples sound good, but... I just know how well coding agents really work and my only experiences with voice agents in the wild have been very poor so far.

If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.

> Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.

I can't speak to the business itself but they recently published a refreshing take on improving the product engineering interview experience in the age of AI https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview

Well worth a read even if you are generally anti-AI.

I remember waiting for uber next to him in SF one night 10+ years ago. This dude must be the son of some mafia boss or some shit and have some crazy blackmail to raise billions for companies that are copies of products where he’s the 12th company doing the same thing.. never turning a profit or anything and yet raising ever more money. doesn’t make sense otherwise

So we're supposed to believe that removing humans from customer support will lead to better outcomes?

> Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing.

Yeah... that won't last.

I think this is generally a good product because businesses that previously had zero phone support can now afford to have something. However, the hard work of actually building out the various workflows and decision trees is not automatic. Previously, a call center employee would receive abuse from a caller for being unempowered to make a decision. Instead, an LLM will perform the same role.

Ideally, businesses will escalate to an empowered human for all undefined parts of the flowchart. In practice, I truly hope it will be better than the current pre-recorded phone tree system that leads to a human following a script.

I personally only call support because a fix is not available through an organization's website.

at first I thought Sierra games was making a comeback...

Voice agents in customer support is an extremely crowded market. Seems like Sierra is taking a considerable lead.

I don't know much about their product offerings, but I was doing some speech-to-text work and came across https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ for comparing current models. It felt fairly thoughtful, particularly in regards to coming up with better benchmarking metrics than word error rate.

I’ve heard much about Sierra but haven’t ever tried their product. What do I need to pretend to buy and then complain about to get on a call with their agents?

Wonder how much compute is essentially spent on conversations that end up with the human asking "Let me speak with a human"

Is their tech unique or do they just have the F500 relationships?

I don’t get it. Isn’t this relatively simple for companies to build themselves.

This is sad. These jobs should go to someone in a poor town in the Midwest.

Yet another AI company where the logo follows the butthole convergence rule [0] ?

As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today.

[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

[1] https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/

Damn, for just a moment I thought the Sierra Online company was coming back. I want a new official Quest for Glory game.

It’s interesting that the example interaction they use on their homepage is a no-friction example that can be handled without an AI chatbot. Why not something more complex that properly demonstrates the value?