Sierra co-founder Clay Bavor on Making Customer-Facing AI Agents Delightful

Customer service is hands down the first killer app of generative AI for businesses. The reasons are simple: the costs of existing solutions are so high, the satisfaction so low and the margin for ROI so wide. But trusting your interactions with customers to hallucination-prone LLMs is a big problem. Enter Sierra. Co-founder Clay Bavor walks us through the sophisticated engineering challenges and tremendous improvement in capabilities that his team has experienced in the past 18 months. The company’s AgentOS enables businesses to create branded AI agents to interact with customers, follow nuanced policies and even handle customer retention. Clay describes how companies can capture their brand voice, values and internal processes to create AI agents that truly represent the business. Hosted by: Ravi Gupta and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:01:21 - Clay’s background 00:03:20 - Google before the ChatGPT moment 00:07:31 - What is Sierra? 00:12:03 - What’s possible now that wasn’t possible 18 months ago? 00:17:11 - AgentOS 00:23:45 - The solution to many problems with AI is more AI 00:28:37 - 𝛕-bench 00:33:19 - Engineering task vs research task 00:37:27 - What tasks can you trust an agent with now? 00:43:21 - What metrics will move? 00:46:22 - The reality of deploying AI to customers today 00:53:33 - The experience manager 00:58:09 Engineering-led or ops led? 01:03:54 - Outcome-based pricing 01:05:55 - Lightning Round