The former co-CEO of Salesforce who also happens to be the chairman of the company behind ChatGPT has launched a new startup that has raised $110 million to build customer service agents powered by conversational artificial intelligence that will be able to display genuine empathy and show care.
Bret Taylor is the man behind Sierra, along with Clay Bavor, who was the former head of virtual reality for Google. In announcing the launch of their platform, the pair said that they have already attracted a number of business as customers, including Weight Watchers, Sonos, and OluKai. The chief marketing officer at OluKai cited Sierra’s ability to scale and allow the company to reach more customers while “using our voice, delivering white glove service.”
How It Works: Sierra’s agents integrate with a business’s legacy infrastructure so it can gain access to data and records from customer interactions. That access allows the agents to make informed decisions. It also allows the agents to perform more tasks than conventional conversational AI agents, such as understanding nuance and context to effectively find a solution.
“In the age of conversational AI, the best customer experience is not installing an app or clicking a link, but simply having a conversation,” the pair wrote in an announcement notice. “The concept of an agent has its roots in academia, but for consumer brands, agents represent something simple: an opportunity to create an always-on, delightful, conversational customer experience for everything from support to retail, recommendations, subscription management, and more.”
The platform has guardrails in place to ensure that the agents always following the proper policies and guidelines and enforces strict data governance to protect consumers’ personal information and to ensure that a company’s data remains its own.
