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 can be daunting.

Enter Sierra. Co-founder Clay Bavor walks us through the sophisticated engineering challenges his team solved along the way to delivering AI agents for all aspects of the customer experience that are delightful, safe and reliable—and being deployed widely by Sierra’s customers. The Company’s AgentOS enables businesses to create branded AI agents to interact with customers, follow nuanced policies and even handle customer retention and upsell. 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

Mentioned in this episode:

Bret Taylor: co-founder of Sierra
Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot: 2020 Google paper that introduced Meena, a predecessor of ChatGPT (followed by LaMDA in 2021)
PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways: 2022 Google paper about their unreleased 540B parameter transformer model (GPT-3, at the time, had 175B)
Avocado chair: Images generated by OpenAI’s DALL·E model in 2022
Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli: 2023 Microsoft paper on how models like GPT-4 can be manipulated into providing better results
𝛕-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains: 2024 paper authored by Sierra research team, led by Karthik Narasimhan (co-author of the 2022 ReACT paper and the 2023 Reflexion paper)

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

01:03:54 Outcome-based pricing

01:05:55 Lightning Round

Episode 266 - Jesus gives the Lord’s Prayer and confirms the need to persevere in prayer - Sunday July 27, 2025 - Lk 11:1-13