Boss Class from The Economist Interview: Bret Taylor of Sierra and OpenAI
4 snips
Jan 29, 2026 
Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, former CTO of Facebook and co-CEO of Salesforce. He discusses why AI agents will replace many website interactions by 2026. He explains the urgency to experiment, model limitations like hallucinations, where agents work best today, monitoring and guardrails, and how roles and workflows will shift with AI.
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Agents As The New Corporate Front Door
- Bret Taylor argues that by 2026 every company will need an AI agent and most digital customer interactions will go through agents.
- He predicts a vendor ecosystem will emerge selling purpose-built agents rather than raw models or toolkits.
Experiment Early To Avoid Falling Behind
- Experiment with AI now because competitors who adopt it can reinvest gains for advantage and consumer behaviour is shifting toward AI front doors like ChatGPT.
- Use experiments to build internal expertise before mature off-the-shelf solutions arrive.
Non-Determinism Is An Inherent Challenge
- Models are imperfect and non-deterministic, producing different outputs to the same prompt which complicates testing and robustness.
- Treat AI like humans: accept imperfection and build controls to detect and remediate errors.
