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 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