Brett Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a startup that develops customer service AI agents for enterprises, believes the way humans and software interact will change in the near future.
Last month, Sierra released Ghostwriter, an agent designed to build other agents. The startup aims to replace traditional click-based web applications with natural language using this “agent-as-a-service” tool. Users simply describe what they want, and Ghostwriter autonomously creates and deploys dedicated agents to perform the task.
The idea of replacing software with language-based prompts is interesting in large part because many of the tools companies currently use aren’t used regularly, argues Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce.
“When you join a company as a new employee, you sign into Workday, perhaps for a job opening,” Taylor told an audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco this week. He argued that in the near future, rather than learning how to operate complex systems, users will use natural language to complete tasks without interacting with a software interface.
“I really think that’s where the world is headed,” Taylor said.
He added that Sierra is already leveraging Ghostwriter to deploy agents at “unparalleled speed.” As an example, Taylor offered his startup to implement Nordstrom agents in just four weeks.
Sierra announced last fall that it had reached an annual revenue run rate (ARR) of $100 million less than 21 months after its founding. The company was last valued at $10 billion when it raised $350 million in a round led by Greenoaks Capital in September.
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“Most companies don’t want to create software,” Taylor says. “They want solutions to their problems.”
While fundamental software changes may be coming, as Taylor predicted, several technologists and investors told TechCrunch that implementations of AI agents are currently far from autonomous.
Many companies that claim to offer AI agents, such as Sierra and legal AI startup Harvey, employ “forward deployment” engineers who must constantly update and fine-tune customer agents to ensure they work as intended.
