The Exchanges

Q That's super cool. Um, what is the typical adoption? Are people using it for, you know, email chat support, because that's the easiest modality. Do they, Adopt us for everything, including phone and stuff like that.

A It's changed a lot over the past two years, but I'll say the median customer and they'll describe some like interesting outliers, which I hope are sort of glimpses of the future. So most will start with one channel and a few use cases. Um, so, you know, at a lot of healthcare companies, phone remains the dominant channel. So say, hey, for a few types of phone calls, let's have the AI agent take them and see how it does. Do people like it? Are people comfortable with it? Does it lower our cost? Does it raise whatever, you know, metrics? Usually it's customer satisfaction. Um, and does it work more effectively? So for example, uh, like for a car insurance company, it'll be like first notice of loss. You know, I got an offender bender, you know, and that would be the typical way you start. Um, for a lot of more digitally native companies, they'll start with chat. Um, and it, uh, and kind of similar. Um, but almost all of our clients will do both. Um, so SiriusXM, if you call them on the phone, their AI agent, Harmony, which I love that name for SiriusXM, will pick up the phone, and if you go to their homepage and you see the chat, that's also the same agent. So the neat part is, I think it's pretty neat, because you have, like, literally, you have all of your, I'll say, customer experience team, or, you know, whatever you might call it at your company, they can spend all their tim…

AI assessment note: “most will start with one channel and a few use cases”

Q stuff for Stripe or any other company to do. And then the AI productivity story in Other roles is just a bit less clear because as we've discussed, AI is kind of uniquely, um, uh, well suited to coding. And so what do you make of just how does the AI productivity show up? I feel like every company in Silicon Valley is trying to figure this out right now.

A Well, first, I think I'll go back to my why I believe in applied AI. I think the atomic unit of productivity in AI is a process, not a person. I don't think AI Uh, I don't know if you have an assistant, but if you do, he or she might help you prepare for a podcast, might help you prepare for a meeting, he or she might also get you a cup of coffee. AI will be really good at the first two, but quite poor at the last one. So no matter of AGI, short of robotics, will get you a cup of coffee. So I think it's wrong to think about AI as like, sort of replacing people, uh, in addition to being inhumane. It's just sort of nonsensical because AI sort of operates in the world of digital technologies. And I think if you go to, like, an example of even a mundane process in your business, like onboarding a new supplier, think about all the departments and people involved in that. There's a legal department to do a contract. There's some, uh, finance department procurement to negotiate the relationship. You probably have IT that's involved to sort of onboard them into your core systems. And then there's usually a business that's sort of sponsoring it. Fairly mundane happens all the time. If, Let's just say you tracked what is the median amount of time it takes to onboard a new supplier, and it was, um, 17 days, just for argument's sake. I bet you could say, as a CEO of a company, I want to us…

AI assessment note: “I think the atomic unit of productivity in AI is a process, not a person.”

Q Yeah. Yeah. Now we get to it, which is you described building stuff that you know you're going to throw away because the model capabilities will get there. And you're like, occasionally they are developing capabilities that you developed yourself. Isn't Sierra itself kind of short AGI? Sorry, I said I couldn't resist.

A No, it's, it's the right question. Uh, you know, the short answer is I don't know. I mean, the fog of war in the software industry is pretty thick right now. I really believe in the applied AI market though. Uh, I, I think, I think most companies don't want to buy models or buy software. They want to buy solutions to their problem. And if you just go back to, um, the cloud industry, why, why doesn't Amazon and Microsoft do everything for everyone? There's not really like a sort of by somewhat similar logic, like why should any software as a service company exist when you have Bigger scale, all this technology. In theory, they could just develop all the software, and actually, many of them have tried. There's actually competitors to Salesforce and almost all of the above. I think there's so much nuance in how these companies align themselves with different departments at these companies, solve their very unique problems in very specific ways, that is a mix of product, not technology, but product, go to market. Um, it's, It's an ecosystem around it, and I think a lot of that still exists because I'm not sure, like, coding the software was necessarily the hard part, and then similarly, I, I actually think, especially in enterprise software, how you engage with your clients really matters, and, uh, you know, I think, uh, it turns out that, you know, um, GPT-V and, and, you know, Cl…

AI assessment note: “the short answer is I don't know. I mean, the fog of war”

Q So why should you care about the code?

A Why should I care about the code? Um, you know, I care about correctness, I care about robustness, and I think, I know intellectually, I don't need to look at how the compiler unrolled this loop to verify its elegance and correctness, yet somehow I feel that way about code, and I'm not sure the code doesn't matter, but I've been trying to force myself to not care because I feel like I won't be like a self, Self-actualized software engineer in the future, if I'm too precious about that artifact, which used to be so central to me. Right now, writing Markdown files, like maybe that's fine. It feels somewhat like a local maximum, and maybe we'll just be like, oh, of course it's Markdown is how, you know, we work with machines. If you think about what a compiler does, um, there's this interesting mix of like formality and informality, and if you've used like Python versus Rust, sort of different ends of the spectrum, Now that you're not writing the code, I really wonder what that programming system should feel like and look like, and I don't mind chatting with Codex, that's fine. But I also think, you know, as you imagine, like all the tests that you care about, all the, like it showing you demos and mockups, and I wonder sort of what the future integrated development environment, for lack of a better term, will be in that world. So what I'm trying to do is force myself to not be em…

AI assessment note: “I care about correctness, I care about robustness”

Q What have you learned in the OpenAI board?

A Uh, a lot. Um, I mean, certainly the most interesting part is the AI research. Um, you know, I've never been affiliated with a true research lab before, and that's fascinating to me. Um, I, uh, it is very inspiring. I mean, it is, it's very easy to grow, not cynical, but like, you know, you can look at, you know, OpenAI, Google Anthropic, and say, like, who's, you know, whose model scores better on this leaderboard, to actually go in and see this company where every single researcher is trying to make safe AGI and not come out of this board means inspired is impossible. Like, it's amazing. Um, the other thing is, it's the first not-for-profit board I've been affiliated with, um, and, uh, that's really interesting as well, just because. It's a different thing, yeah. Well, and I mentioned the fiduciary duty is you have a duty to the mission. Yeah. And, uh, that is really clarifying and interesting as well, because when you're making decisions and you realize, you know, you have, your sole duty is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity. Um, that's really different. It's really interesting. I've never had a fiduciary duty to a mission before. So that's really interesting to me because I take those duties really seriously and like reflecting in a board meeting and you're making a decision You think about it very differently, um, through that context. Um, an…

AI assessment note: “I've never had a fiduciary duty to a mission before. So that's really interesting”

Q all of the context you're working with Exists in the repo. Uh, it is in text. Uh, it's kind of neatly organized to be executed and read by humans, and so there's kind of a good bounce there. Um, the problem is that customer service agents are not, uh, of that character, and so how do you actually smush everything into a format where your AI agent can answer it?

A Yeah, we, uh, we spend a lot of time thinking about that to some degree. Uh, one of our engineers called almost like we're creating like a domain specific language for specifying customer experience. You know, like what is the mechanism of specifying it? We use this metaphor we call journeys, which is, you know, what is a customer journey end to end? And what does the agent need to be successful in that journey? What tools does it need to access? What information does it need to access? And you can, if you think about the capabilities of an agent like skills and a coding agent, you'll add, ah, different capabilities over time as the customer is talking to you. The key thing that's been a breakthrough that is probably not surprising to, like, the technologists listening to this, but has been a huge difference between those, like, crappy chatbots of four years ago is the reasoning capabilities. You know, I think the, you know, well, we had one client who had acquired three companies, and they had three identity systems, three CRM systems, three of everything, and so they had this big IT project where they were going to unify all those systems, but I was like, why don't you just have the agent, like, go in all three of them and just think, and they're like, well, what if there's duplicate data, what if the data conflicts? They're like, you know, that's going to, and I was like, we…

AI assessment note: “creating like a domain specific language for specifying customer experience. You know, like what is”