How agentic AI will save customer service, with Bret Taylor

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I think if you surveyed your listeners and say, Do you like chatbots? My guess is zero out of one hundred of your listeners would say yes. Because what they associate with chatbots are these annoying, robotic pieces of friction. You just want to talk to a real person, right? I think if you surveyed those same one hundred people and said, Do you like chat GPT? they'd probably all say yes.

Bret Taylor says that the difference between the chatbots of yesterday and ChatGPT is a qualitative one. How did talking to this chatbot feel? Was it enjoyable, even delightful, or was it scripted, lifeless, and unhelpful? Brett is trying to make the kind of chatbots that fit squarely in the delightful, or at least actually helpful, category. He and his company, Sierra AI, are partnering with brands like Weight Watchers and Sonos to create customer service chatbots that feel human.

It's hard to find a Silicon Valley track record that matches Brett's. He's worked with some of the biggest names in tech, helping develop ubiquitous tools like Google Maps. He was also CTO at Facebook, now Meta, co-CEO at Salesforce, and now serves as chairperson at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Today, our conversation with him is focused on the future of AI customer service agents, AI safety, and, of course, his role at OpenAI. I'm Rana El Kaliouby, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

Well, welcome to the show, Brett. Thank you for being with us today.

Thanks for having me.

So I like to start my conversations just kind of learning about how you're using AI in your everyday life. I use AI almost every day, and my son, who's 15, he loves being at the forefront of all these AI tools. And he, like, asks ChatGPT for recipes about dinner each night and whatnot. So how how do you and your family use AI?

I use ChatGPT 20 plus times a day, so kind of for everything. So I use it at work when I'm writing, I use it, uh, a product called Cursor when I'm coding. At home, I've got three children as well. So my, uh, daughter started reading Shakespeare. She was asking me what a passage meant. I wasn't very good the first time I read Shakespeare, but that into chat GPT, we got some great answers out of it. Um, How old are I

your kids?

they're sort of early teenagers. There is a yeah, Yeah, yeah. So it's been great. I mean, it's sort of a co-pilot to my life. It's like the expert I didn't know I needed in pretty much every domain. So it's almost like saying, like, how do you use Google? It's not like anything, it's everything. Um, I've gotten to the point where I couldn't imagine, uh, working without it.

yeah, yeah, similar. And you go to it for like, just thought partner kind of stuff, right? Like, what should I think about this?

The thing I'm most excited about is I always thought of computers, I think most people did, as uh, kind of these utilities. Looking up facts, you know, processing numbers really quickly, databases, very predictable sort of tools for automation, uh, but now computers are creative foils. You know, my daughter was doing an art project for one of her classes and was, uh, having basically whatever the artist equivalent of writer's block is. And we used ChatGPT to come up with some ideas, you know, and I think that's a really compelling evolution of how we use technology.

That it's not just a source of facts and automation, but actually something that's a source of creativity. And I think that's pretty exciting. And it's very different than how I think most people conceived of computers and software, even like a couple years ago.

Yeah, absolutely. So we're here to talk about AI agents and Sierra, but before we get into that, our listeners are gonna be thinking about your role as chairperson of OpenAI. So I wanna kind of tackle that first. So as chairperson, you don't make the day-to-day operational decisions in the company, but you do have fiduciary responsibility. 200 million people use ChatGPT each week, so that's that's a big responsibility. How do you think about that? How do you think about your role?

Well, OpenAI is a unusual organization compared to most in the AI space because it's a nonprofit. So what that means in practice for the board in particular, but for the company broadly, is it's driven by its mission exclusively. So the mission of OpenAI is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, which is pretty heady. I mean, it's a big mission, it's very broad. Um, that's how I think about it. So, you know, when I think about, uh, recruiting the board, which I played a part in, uh, this past year, you know, you think about all the different areas of expertise you want represented.

When you think about what does it mean for AGI to benefit humanity, how does it impact the economy? We've got Larry Summers, who's one of the world's great economists. It's about cybersecurity. We Paul Nakasone, who ran the National Security Administration, is on the board. It's safety. Zico Kolter is a professor at CMU and an expert in in AI safety, is on the board. Sue Desmond-Hellman, who is the, uh, head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is also on our board.

It's a nonprofit, so we think about, you know, what does it mean to really go beyond building AGI, but distributing those benefits to really trying to, at the board level, have all the different sort of areas of expertise to fully represent that mission. And, you know, I don't want to pretend we're perfect, but I think it's really fun to work at a company that cares so deeply, not just about building a technology, but distributing its benefits, ensuring it's safe.

And I'm really grateful to be a part of it.

Yeah, recently, Nobel Prize winner and computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton raised some concerns that OpenAI is, um, focused less on safety and perhaps more on profit. How do you balance profit and purpose for OpenAI?

Uh, I think OpenAI is about purpose. Um, so I'm, I'm not sure. For for me, that's a a question. There's a lot of nuance, though, about what does it mean to develop artificial general intelligence responsibly. Um, and I think there's some real substantive disagreement in the world about what that means. And and I think it's important, especially as a board member, that I listen to all those viewpoints. Just because I think we need to have the humility to understand not every decision we make might be right.

And so it's very important, and I welcome, uh, feedback from experts like Jeffrey Hinton, who's a remarkable researcher. We would not be here if not for his achievements in AI, but also stakeholders in government and elsewhere. Um, broadly speaking, I would characterize OpenAI's AP approach as responsible iterative deployment. Uh, the idea that there's actually lots of elements of benefiting humanity beyond safety in an ivory tower. It's unlikely we can contemplate all the first and second and third order effects of technology as nuanced and powerful as AGI.

It's unlikely we'll be able to contemplate all the different ways one could jailbreak a model. It's unlikely we could predict the impact on jobs without sort of having the technology available in some form. Similarly, you know, I think if I look at the products that OpenAI makes, I think they're probably some of the most powerful ways to ensure that AGI benefits humanity. We were talking about ChatGPT. That is probably the most concrete manifestation of AI in people's lives right now, and it's probably doing more to benefit humanity than any product as it relates to AI that I can think of.

So I don't want to, um, dismiss such a a renowned scientist's concerns at all, and I listen deeply. But I do think that for OpenAI, it is is about purpose and recognizing that, you know, we want to build this remarkable technology in a responsible way and, uh, have really critical and thoughtful conversations about what it means, uh, to pursue our mission.

Yeah, absolutely. So, last question on OpenAI. Recently, a few executives have left, and I can see how that could be concerning for the company, but I actually have a different perspective. I think it's pretty awesome that this core set of founders of this organization are now potentially off doing their own flavors of AI companies. So I don't know, how do you think about that?

Silicon Valley has been defined by the fluidity of talent. If you look at the role of Fairchild Semiconductor and the folks who started some of the seminal companies that gave Silicon Valley its name. If you look at the authors of the Transformers paper, most of whom, you know, went off to create other things.

Fairchild Semiconductor was a seminal company creating microchips, among other things, and their work led to Silicon Valley's name. In fact, some of the company's founders went on to start household companies like Intel and AMD. The Transformers paper Brett is talking about was written by researchers at Google, and it kickstarted the rise of generative AI. The PayPal Mafia is another example that comes to mind. These former founders and employees of PayPal went off to start companies like Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the list goes on and on.

I guess the point is, there's no monopoly on talent.

I actually just start with gratitude. OpenAI would not be here if not for all those people who are currently there and left. And I think, you know, I wouldn't be in this chair if not for the creation of GPT three, GPT four, ChatGPT, and it's transformed society. So I'm just grateful for everyone who helped build OpenA OpenAI into what it is, and also grateful for all the new amazing folks coming into the organization as well. So this is for those folks outside of Silicon Valley.

My sense is it's hard to understand how much this is just the way the the col- the culture works there, and I think it's really exciting. I think that when a technology is so meaningfully different than what preceded it, I think that you really do need a large number of entrepreneurs, um, exploring the impact of that technology. Not everyone's theories will be right, and I'm just grateful to be here and be a part of it.

Culture is. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we dig into the future of agentic AI and hear about a particularly charming AI customer service agent who goes by the name Duncan Smothers. Stay with us. The companies winning right now aren't just building great AI, they're building the infrastructure to actually run a business on top of it, which is where Stripe comes in. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, with planetary scale financial infrastructure to help you power any business model.

As a matter of fact, 86% of the Forbes AI 50 run on Stripe, along with industry leaders like Salesforce and Pepsi. Last year, Stripe users processed $1.9 1 trillion combined. See how Stripe can power what's next for your business at stripe dot com. So now that we've covered OpenAI, let's, uh, dig into Agentic AI and Sierra AI, your new company. You've done so many things over the course of your career. You were the co-creator of Google Maps.

You started and sold a company to Facebook, so you spent some time there. You started another company and sold that to Salesforce and became the co-CEO. And you were on Twitter's board and now the chairperson of OpenAI. So when you decide to start something new, it's no small thing. I would love to hear the origin story of Sierra. And what was that tipping point where you were like, you know what? That's gonna be my next thing.

Yeah, I'll start with just how I view the AI market and then tell you why, uh, we focused on Sierra. I think that the right now we're being driven by changes in technology, and a lot of the applications of those technology probably are obvious, but they don't exist yet. And it reminds me of the early days of the web browser. I think, you know, when the web browser first came out and the internet was new, the idea that, you know, one could purchase things online was not conceptually complex.

Getting to the point where that was possible. How do you actually use a credit card? You know, how does that work? How do you actually sort of fulfill the order? What are the last mile logistics? Similarly, the idea that with all this information online, you'd want to search over it wasn't particularly novel. Google was not the first search engine I used. It just turned out to be the best and and earned this market. And I think the same is true of a lot of the defining companies of the the web era.

So now move forward to artificial intelligence. I think there's a lot of areas that intellectually, you know, are going to be impacted education, the law, marketing, customer service, customer experience. So Clay Bavor, my co-founder, and I spend a lot of time thinking about what are the areas that will be impacted first. Um, what are areas that need scientific advances to really work, and what are areas that can work with current technology? And we really settled on Sierra, and I'll I'll tell you in a short sort of short version what we do.

So we help companies build customer-facing AI agents. So if you have a problem with your Sonos speaker, you'll chat with an AI now powered by our platform to help you fix it. Or if you have a Sirius XM subscription and you want to upgrade or downgrade your your subscription, you'll chat with Harmony, their AI agent. If you buy a pair of OluKai shoes, which is one of my favorite flip-flop brands, and, heaven forbid, you want to exchange it for another pair, you'll chat with their AI agent.

If you're a Weight Watchers member, there's a tab in their app called 24/7 Live Coaching, and it's now powered by AI and built on our platform. And so, broadly speaking, we're helping companies build that sort of frontline customer experience that's now conversational. And in the short term, it's helping a lot of people improve customer service, which is often a sore point for many brands. And often it's very expensive to operate and hard to provide the quality that I think brands want to, but it's also a new form of customer experience.

I think that, uh, I imagine in 2007, when Steve Jobs, uh, introduced the iPhone, few of us would have contemplated that we'd send nearly 100 of our email by thumb typing on a touch screen. But we do, and we do not because it's better than a keyboard, we do because it's the most convenient way to do it. It's in our pocket. Our thesis is the same thing will happen with conversational experiences. Uh, that in five or ten years, the main way we will interact digitally is by having a conversation with AI.

And, you know, I think your AI agent will become just as important as your website, just as important as your mobile app, perhaps more important because of the convenience of it. So we're really trying to help brands embrace that future, uh, help them in the short term with things like customer service, but long term, how do they build their AI agent that will help their customers do everything?

Everything, yeah, I I can imagine, you know, harmony, you mentioned Harmony, Sirius XM's, um, AI agent. That could be your interface to the company, right? It can help you with debugging questions, but maybe, like, advice on what products you need you you could buy, or, right, Well, it could be just think about a personalized

the think about the services you use, not daily, but maybe monthly or yearly. Uh, maybe you are filing an insurance claim because you got in a fender bender. You know, maybe you want to

it's oof. move. It's like, it's right now, it's painful to do that, right?

It it can be, and it's particular, you know, no matter how great you make those digital experiences, you have to maybe install the app that you didn't have installed. You have to sign in and figure out what your password is. Then you have to figure out how to navigate it, and you're in a moment of distress. You don't necessarily know how the UI designer designed those buttons, and you're figuring it out for the first time. And hopefully they did a great job designing it.

Imagining just be able to say, Hey, I I just, uh, got into a little fender bender in a parking lot. I need to file a claim. And a helpful, multilingual, empathetic AI agent could just guide you through that process. Maybe you actually, uh, don't want to chat because you know you're standing on the side of a highway. You can do it over the phone, and you don't need to wait on hold, uh, because AI answers instantly.

I think the idea in those moments that matter that you have to wait on hold, um, that you know, you have to be transferred to the right person who has that expertise. It can be such a inhumane experience for for people who do it. So I'm just so excited for companies being able to provide this white glove, incredibly empathetic experience 24/7, and also at a fraction of a cost of, uh, existing options.

I love that you brought up empathy. I spent 20 plus years of my life building emotion recognition and empathy into machines. And I think it's really important that these AI agents have that empathy because that's gonna be the thing that builds trust with these agents. Do you agree?

Absolutely. And, you know, the way, you know, the earlier chat models were developed was with this technique called instruction tuning.

Instruction tuning? It's a technique used to fine-tune large language models to make them more accurate.

It's remarkable how empathetic most conversational models are just out of the box, and they're sort of designed to reflect the sentiment of the the person, uh, having a conversation with them. And, you know, I think that there's a lot of things that actually are afforded by technology that are counterintuitive. So I brought up, you know, maybe you're having trouble with your Sonos speaker. Not everyone's as geeky as you or I are, right? So, like, for some people, they might want to be on the phone for 30 or 40 minutes.

If you're perhaps maybe in a contact center doing that, maybe your manager wouldn't be so excited about you spending 40 minutes on the phone. Maybe you need to not in a rude way, but you need to sort of move it along. Well, then AI, take your time, you know, no big deal. And I think for all these conversations, I think that you can have not only the AI be empathetic in terms of tone and substance, but there's more subtle forms of empathy, like being able to answer the phone instantly, being able to, uh, operate at your cadence and your pace, not necessarily the pace, uh, that's oriented by sort of other business interests.

And I think that's incredibly exciting, and I think there's also a more subtle thing. There's a website, I can't remember the name of it, where you can find the phone numbers for consumer brands because it's so hard to actually call on those consumer brands. I think it's based on a real simple business truth, which is it's very expensive to have a conversation with your customers. And as a consequence, most particularly consumer brands, you know, make it as sort of the last line of defense.

Not because they don't want to talk to you. I think every brand would love to have conversations with every individual customer. They just can't afford it. It's just not cost effective. With AI, conversational AI, if you can bring down the cost of a customer conversation by one or even two orders of magnitude, how many more conversations can you have with your customers? And that's really exciting in my mind because you can actually have the experience of, say, going into a retail store and talking to the best associate to help you guide you to your purchase.

A in those moments that matter, like we talked about, you can have someone that's incredibly empathetic with instant access to information to solve your problem instantly. So I think the going back to the second and third order effects, I think it will really change the way companies design their customer experience, and I think we will orient around personalized conversations, and I think that's really exciting.

So brand identity super crucial in these cases, right? You're not gonna give, you know, Sirius XM the same AI agent you're gonna build for Weight Watchers. So how do you approach that? How do you get the right brand voice?

We believe that AI agents should be brand ambassadors. So we spend a lot of time training our AI agents, not just on the standard operating procedures of your company, but what does it mean to represent your brand? One of the ones that I find really delightful, you know, Chubby's the shorts brand. Their AI agent is named Duncan Smothers, and he's got a little sarcasm, he's a little fun, you know, like, it's really fun. I love the Chubby's brand.

They've just invested a lot in their brand, and you can feel it. When you're chatting with Duncan, and if you chat with Olukai's agent, the Hawaiian inspired brand, you'll see it and feel it in those conversations. And I think that's great. And I actually think that just like you spend a lot of time when you're designing, say, a website, it's not just about the functionality of the website. What do you feel when you see it? What's the color scheme?

And that is a big part of design. Your conversational AI is a brand ambassador, so whatever your brand's values are, it should emanate from those conversations. And that's really, really exciting, and it's probably one of the most fun parts of designing these AI agents with our customers.

Yeah, can we geek out for a moment? What what is the sort of training data you, you know, this brand kind of brand-specific training data that you use to customize these agents? Like, how would you customize these agents?

So a lot of the companies we work with actually have brand books and voice guidelines already. So, uh, particularly in retail, a lot of companies do that. And if you're trying to train your associates on how to represent your brands, you know, we work with one luxury furniture retailer, and they have a guidelines on sort of the language of luxury and what that means. I learned so much through that process. So fundamentally, we take all the training materials you provide your best associates on it.

And then the other thing that we do is we help companies tune it over time. Um, so for those people who are listening right now who've ever made a mobile app or a website, you have all your ideas and then it meets reality, right? And you spend a lot of time. Maybe you had a great idea for one screen in your app, and then you did a usability study and you found out no one can figure out what to do.

The same can happen with conversation design, too. So we spend a lot of time tuning tone, flow, and we've built a lot of tools for customer experience leaders to actually iteratively improve and evolve their agent over time. One of the interesting, I would say, almost philosophical points about building a customer experience with AI versus building, say, a website or a mobile app, is it's not really bounded. So just think of a typical website, let's just say a typical retail website.

Uh, you could probably click and go to every single page on the site if you had enough time. With a conversational agent, whether it's over the phone or over chat, it's just a freeform text box. Your customers will say whatever is on their mind. So I would say consumers and customers have a little bit more say in your customer experience with conversational AI, and they'll take it in directions that you didn't foresee. And so I think as you're thinking about brand, but also as you're thinking about tone and substance, like what is this AI capable of doing?

One of the most fun parts of developing these agents with particularly large brands is they'll find things their customers want to talk to them about that they didn't foresee, and actually it changes what they develop with their AI.

Hm, and you take all that data and you basically iteratively improve or tweak the the agent That's right, over time.

yeah, and it's very organic, and I think that it's impossible to predict everything your customers will want to talk to you about. So it's not just getting it right from day one, it's actually building a a feedback loop. And, you know, a lot of our customers call their customer experience leaders who work on their AI agent, the AI architects, and I think it's a new role. Um, conversation design is the new UI design. AI architect is like application, um, sort of a product manager for the AI agent.

And, you know, I'm really excited for these new roles to emerge and excited to build the tools for those new roles as well that are evolving over time. And, you know, I think we have a fuzzy glimpse of what all those roles will be. And I think, just like the emergence of the web, where you know what a web designer is, what a web developer is, front end, back end. I think right now we sort of know what the roles are to make a website.

So we're really trying to not only build these agents for some of the largest brands in the world, but help all the customer experience leaders around the world sort of say, hey, what is my role in this new world? And help them be successful as well.

That that is really interesting because on the one hand, you are taking jobs, right? You're displacing jobs with these agents because this was ordinarily done by human customer service representatives. But what I'm hearing you say is you're also creating a whole new slew of jobs that didn't exist before this agentic AI world. In the same way that maybe, like, you know, with web design and even like the creator economy with social media platforms, right? These were all jobs that didn't exist before.

Yeah, I think I, I actually have a my opinions on this are quite nuanced. Uh, certainly, simplistically, uh, all forms of AI may displace some jobs, just like the automated teller machine, you know, displaced the role of a bank teller. But my understanding, which which may not be correct, but from the articles I've read, is there's not fewer bank branches or even fewer people in those bank branches, but they're doing different things than they were doing before.

So one of the things that I'm interested in seeing is when you introduce, say, AI to answer customer service inquiries, do you reduce the number of people in customer service, or do you just have more conversations with your customers? I don't know the answer, and it's not rhetorical because actually, you know, if you talk to most CEOs of most companies, um, they do care about cost, but they probably care more about growth. Uh, and you know, if you have a technology that is a lower cost way to scale having conversations with your customers, and you can develop deeper relationships, higher net promoter score, more customer loyalty.

Uh, you could choose, instead of just recouping those as cost savings, you could choose to reinvest those to actually make conversational experiences a more prominent form of your customer experience. And it may lead to just a higher volume of conversations overall than what you had before. So I would say it's a it's an important conversation to have because with any technology change, I think it's every technology company should play a part in creating these new job roles, which certainly will exist.

I've always been surprised that it's very hard to predict how the technologies will actually impact the way companies operate, and it's clearly not zero sum to me. I'm certainly not at the point of of being able to predict it myself.

You know, every company's trying to figure out their AI strategy. I hope so, at least. Let's put our kind of like, we're executives at these companies, and we're trying to figure out where's the value add with AI. How do you, you know, and it's not an AI, you know, it's not an AI-first company. It's not like they are immersed in AI. But how do you help these organizations navigate the question of, okay, where do I get started?

How do I vet all these different tools that are out there? Where's the low-hanging opportunity? I'm sure you you have to deal with that in a lot of the organizations you work with. So how would you help an executive navigate that question?

I always like to start with a business problem. I think that, especially in the face of a a technology as exciting as AI, it's sort of catnip for technology teams. And I think, like, they're just like, there's not an internet department at most companies. I I don't think there should necessarily be an AI department at most companies. And more than that, I think that starting with a business problem can really, uh, narrow the scope of technology vendors that you might choose to speak with, but also just narrow the scope of the risks associated with AI.

So just as, like an intellectual point, if you wanted to make a general purpose AI agent that could do anything, that's a science problem, that's a research problem. Like it doesn't exist yet, or if it does, it would be both not robust and unsafe, right? So you would never deploy a technology like that. But if you wanted an AI agent to help your software engineers code, technologies like that exist today. Uh, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, which is a cool startup that my company uses.

That's possible because you've narrowed the scope of what you're trying to solve to, uh, a specific person at your company or specific role at your company for the companies building those technologies. They've narrowed the scope of technology problems from science to engineering to do it. So if I think about it, say, okay, let's look at the our our legal costs. Well, maybe you should talk to Harvey. That's a cool AI startup that's more narrowly focused on that.

Maybe it's content marketing. A lot of our retailers are showing up to Black Friday, Cyber Mondays coming up, and you know, how do you personalize your campaigns? There's a long list of really compelling startups working on marketing personalization using this technology. You want to impact customer service, call Sierra. Uh, obviously, I'm biased. I think we're the best, uh, in this, and I think we're the market leader in this area. Our agentic AI future is here. And now that it is, what does it mean to build these AI agents responsibly?

That's in a minute after a short break. We like to really kind of interrogate this idea of responsible AI on this podcast. So what does responsible AI mean for you and for Sierra? Yeah, it's a it's a great question. I I really like OpenAI's mission, which is ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. I think that is a a lofty mission that may not apply as much to, uh, more a applied companies like Sierra. But I I always start on benefiting humanity and, uh, ensuring that, you know, technology is not inherently good or bad.

It's what you do with it. And and I think responsibility and responsible means that you're playing a part in that. You're not passive in that conversation with stakeholders, whether it's your customers or governments or society. One of the things that I I think a lot about is where technologies have great promise but have violated society's trust. Um, probably nuclear energy is one of the areas that, you know, most of the folks that I know are smart in climate believe and and wish that nuclear were more prevalent as we figure out how to scale energy storage and and renewable energy.

But because there's been multiple moments of violating society's trust, uh, society sort of revoked our license to to invest in nuclear. So when I think about AI, I think a lot about that, which is, you know, we need to, um, experiment with this technology. But we need to ensure that all the companies working in this space do put in the appropriate guardrails so that our society's experience with this technology doesn't trip over those wires. Where people say, Hey, um, I'm not sure this is good, you know, I'm not sure this will benefit society.

So we just think a lot about trust and that word trust. I think it means multiple things. Uh, I think it means, you know, does a technology actually do what it says it's going to do? Another form of like trust is are the experiences I have with this technology good, you know, D w- in a more qualitative way. And I know that's might seem far afield from responsible, but I do think that when you think about society's relationship with a technology and take like complex ones like social media, the smartphone, it can be an inkblot test of whether you think about, oh, I'm addicted to this technology and I pull it all the time, or I have a supercomputer in

my pocket. They could do all this. It's both are true at the same time. So I really think that with AI, our relationship with it as society is the sum of all of those experiences. It can be bigger, headier things like AI safety. It can be small things like the last time I chatted with an AI, was it delightful or was it annoying? And I think, uh, our relationship with AI will be the sum of all of those things.

And I think that when I think about responsibility, is that we as developers of this technology need to be accountable for that and and participate in those conversations and not be a passive participant.

I love that. Last question. You have started, sold, and ran many companies. What's your advice for founders of AI companies today?

I think that it's really important to relentlessly focus on your customer's success if you're building an AI company. Like the dot-com bubble, there is so much excitement about the technology itself. It's tempting to be the coolest person at the Silicon Valley cocktail party because you have the coolest demo. Rarely will that mean that you will become the most successful company because that's driven exclusively by building value for customers. And I think because there's so much excitement about the technology, I I'm not sure it's inversely correlated, but there's a strong risk that the excitement of your peers building AI might not be correlated with value for customers.

And I think that right now, having entrepreneurs that spend disproportionate amount of times with their customers and actually deeply understanding the business value they're providing will be much more likely to create an enduring business right now.

Amazing, love that. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

I am so excited for a better customer experience powered by AI, whether it's coming from Sierra or many of the other emerging companies in this space.

With Black Friday and the holidays just around the corner, this is the kind of tech that will make your life easier. People often think about these customer service AI chatbots when something goes wrong, like a canceled order or a delayed shipment. But it's not just about that. We're going to see more and more of these AI brand ambassadors. And the promise is that these AI ambassadors will elevate the customer experience all around. If you've had the experience of talking to a smarter AI chatbot or an AI agent, was it helpful?

Was it personable or even delightful? Let us know. Leave us a voice message at six zero one six three three two four two four. That's six zero one six three three two four two four. And don't forget to rate and review us. We're a new show, and this really helps other people find us. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Rachel Ishikawa, and our associate producer is Jordan Smart.

Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holliday. Production support from Timothy Leely. And our head of podcasts is Lital Mulat. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for at Pioneers of AI. Thanks so much for listening.