The Exchanges

Q of open AI. Um, interesting thing you said before the break, Brett, uh, that Cigna, I think rolled out in what a couple of months with you guys. Um, there is a whole industry of consultants that integrate systems and are, you know, basically connecting business processes and they take a year and they usually do it like. Uh, effective, uh, what's going to happen to consultants in this world?

A Consultants is a broad category. You know, you have strategic management consultants, you have systems integrators, you have, uh, you know, outsourcing firms, you know, that, um, essentially can, like, build software on your behalf, and I think all of them will have different impacts on this technology. The first principles view I have is, Software engineering agents are bringing down the cost of developing software. It's not going to go to zero, but it's, uh, you know, it's going from extremely expensive to relatively inexpensive, and that's a huge change. And so, where you had a dynamic where a company was outsourcing software development to save costs, the cost of the AI agent might be less than the cost of the outsourced, uh, I'll say resource even, so it's somewhat a dehumanizing term, but Often the term used in the industry, and that'll disrupt that part of the industry. But behind every technology project is a business transformation. Um, you know, if you're, uh, digitizing part of your business, The software is a means to the end, not the end to itself. And I think most consultants would say the change management that they participate in, the actual advice on how to do that and how to be competitive has always been the more valuable part of what they do. Um, so I think a lot of these consulting firms will probably need to transition away from, um, you know, uh, the bill…

AI assessment note: “consulting firms will probably need to transition away from, um, you know, uh, the billable hours”

Q trying to figure out whether all these stories of people building their own custom software, uh, actually will, uh, Actually will lead to the change that many of them are promising or, uh, or whether there's actual meat behind this, you know, is Dave Clark's CRM going to fall apart in a week? And it was just a nice post. For LinkedIn engagement or is something real actually happening here?

A I'm quite optimistic about this trend. Um, I actually think the term vibe coding will be like information superhighway where it's a term we don't use in the future because the idea that your software is something that you can change yourself will be something we expect rather than a novel concept. I have two things that sound contradictory, but I don't think they are. So first is Most of the, the cost of software is in maintaining it, not building it. Uh, and that's why most people would prefer to buy a solution off the shelf because you want to amortize the cost of maintaining software among thousands of clients and not have everyone bear it. Just think your ERP system and a new accounting standard comes out. If every company in the world has to go vibe code that new accounting standard, someone's going to get it wrong.

AI assessment note: “I'm quite optimistic about this trend.”

Q the open AI board chair upon Sam Altman's return after he was fired. Over that weekend, uh, you were the co-CEO of Salesforce with Mark Benioff, like we spoke about. You're the Facebook CTO as the company moved to mobile and you built Google maps. So, um, let's just introduce you to our audience on this one. How did you end up in the middle of so much tech history?

A Glenn for punishment. No, I'm just kidding. Um, uh, one of my favorite quotes is attributed to Alan Kay and I haven't actually verified his name. Alan Kay was a researcher at Xerox PARC and he said, The best way to predict the future is to invent it. And, uh, I love it just because I think it captures the mix of optimism and, uh, I'd say this sort of imperative I feel when there's a really compelling new technology to get my hands on it and help shape it, as opposed to observe it passively from the sidelines. And it's interesting you talk about those different trends because, you know, I started my career at Google, went through both social and mobile at, Facebook, and then, you know, learned enterprise software at Salesforce. At Sierra, we help companies build AI agents for their customer experience, so think not having to wait on hold when you, uh, call up, uh, SiriusXM, or, you know, even helping people refinance their home with, with a rocket mortgage agent. Part of our value proposition is actually reflects that history. We say, if it were like, 1994, we'd be telling everyone why they needed a website, and if it were 20, 15, I guess I'd say, here's why you should have a mobile application, and now it's twenty-twenty-six, and we say, you need an AI agent, and your AI agent is going to be your digital front door, and most of your customer interactions will happen via your AI…

AI assessment note: “imperative I feel when there's a really compelling new technology to get my hands on it”

Q we started talking about CRM. So let's end this segment, uh, talking about CRM. Uh, obviously Salesforce is a place where, you know, salespeople log their, there's a call information and then, you know, their leaders can see how they're doing and judge the pipeline and, you know, make predictions on the quarter. Um, does Salesforce become a chat bot or what is the future of a company like that?

A Well, Salesforce is, uh, first of all, Mark's a great leader, so if you're gonna pick, like, companies who can make the transition, founder-led, great leaders, so never count him out at all. It's also a multi-product company. Um, you know, the largest product in Salesforce's portfolio, at least when I was there, was, uh, Salesforce Service Cloud. They bought Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, and so I think if you think about Salesforce as just managing leads and opportunities, it's probably too narrow, and so, You know, Salesforce has all this, these assets, and the question is, what is the quote-unquote agentic manifestation of, uh, the value proposition they provide? And, you know, I'm not close enough to them anymore to really say, uh, black and white, but they have a lot of great assets, great leadership to do it.

AI assessment note: “what is the quote-unquote agentic manifestation of, uh, the value proposition they provide?”

Q going to the internet and searching for it, but that doesn't get baked into the core of the model. So it's using these tricks or some people call it scaffolding, um, orchestration. To get most of these improvements, and it's not like the underlying technology is getting that much faster. That's the argument. Um, and so then maybe eventually the tricks will run out. What do you think about that?

A Um, first of all, I think all, all, all criticism is important to listen to if you're in science and you want to make progress. My take, first of all, I think there's a, one of the nuanced, uh, aspects of the progress we've seen, particularly this past year, is, um, the models have gotten a lot more intelligent. They may have been sufficiently intelligent, like a year ago, for most consumer applications, like my trip planning to Copenhagen. I'm not sure how much the reasoning capabilities of GPT-Five-Two would have benefited that trip planning. We were at peak travel agent. I'm being a little facetious here. But if you're using, yeah, well, but if you're using, um, codex to write software for you, the difference between GPT-V and GPT-V and GPT-V was huge. And you can see this online, just all the developers using it, because reasoning capabilities for authoring complex software is incredibly valuable. So I think one of the dynamics that's sort of playing out, um, particularly for people using, uh, ChatGPT and Gemini for, I'll say, Casual everyday use, which most of us are at this point, is a lot of the model improvements are, are not necessarily visible for those class of applications, but incredibly visible if you're using it to, say, develop software or to prove an unproven math conjecture. Um, so that's an interesting dynamic, which is, and I think it's gonna probably over t…

AI assessment note: “a lot of the model improvements are, are not necessarily visible for those class of applications”

Q me is a big question that I have about Sierra, which is, um, there's been so much, uh, discussion about this AI rollout and what's, you know, gone right and wrong and, and what's taken the AI projects from pilot into production. And you've got it in production with these big companies that are trusting you with big actions. How have you gotten them to trust you with this stuff?

A I think it all starts with the customer and the consumer. Um, you know, you were implying some of the risks of AI, which I'll talk about, but, uh, if you survey your listeners and survey their sentiment about waiting on hold, it would surprise me if you could find one person who had a positive experience with that. I think we spend Like, years of our life waiting on hold, and the reason for it is somewhat, uh, like a mix of sort of business and technical, uh, until recently the phone line was analog, so there was no way to build a digital experience there, so if someone did call you on the phone, you had to staff a, a call center to answer it, and if you want to not wait on hold, you had to overstaff that call center, right, with people be sitting around most of the time doing nothing, which just cost a lot of money. And if you think of a consumer brand, and let's say your average revenue per customer every month is 10 dollars, that might be less than the cost of a single phone call. So you actually can't afford, for most businesses, literally can't afford to have a phone conversation with your customers. But now you can, because you can actually have an AI agent pick up the phone. You don't need to wait on hold. It could be multilingual. It can have perfect access to your systems. Uh, it can, Help you find, if you know the retailer next in the UK, it can help, you know, find y…

AI assessment note: “you were implying some of the risks of AI, which I'll talk about, but”