Sierra

Sierra is a company that builds conversational AI agents for customer service, founded in 2023 by Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce and chairman of OpenAI, and Clay Bavor, a former Google executive. Its platform lets companies deploy branded AI agents that handle customer conversations over chat and voice, resolving issues like processing returns, changing subscriptions, troubleshooting products, authenticating users, and answering account questions rather than just deflecting to articles. Sierra emphasizes that its agents are grounded in a company's own policies and systems, can take real actions through integrations, and are governed by guardrails and supervisory models intended to keep responses accurate and on-brand. The company provides tooling for building, testing, and monitoring agents, along with analytics on resolution rates and customer experience, and it works closely with customers to configure and improve agents over time in a model closer to a managed service than self-serve software. Sierra prices primarily on outcomes, charging when an agent successfully resolves a conversation. The company grew quickly, reaching a reported ten billion dollar valuation and one hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue within about two years, and its agents are used by consumer brands, financial services firms, healthcare providers, and other large organizations.