Taylor: Sierra charges per resolved interaction, mirroring sales commissions
Bret Taylor · He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor (Sierra) · Jul 31, 2025 · at 1:05:52
Sierra CEO Bret Taylor describes the pricing model of his enterprise AI agent company Sierra.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In our industry, basically we say, hey, if the AI agent, you know, solves the customer's problem, they're happy with it, and you didn't have to pick up the phone, there's a pre-negotiated rate for that. And that's we call it like resolution based. There are other outcomes as well. We have some sales agents being sales, paid a sales commission, believe it or not”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Bret Taylor
Taylor: Python is a comically bad programming language for AI to generate
“Python is probably the most common generated code just because how much it's in the training data and data scientists love Python and I love Python too. It's such a comically bad thing for AI to generate just because it's one of the most inefficient programmin…”
Taylor: FriendFeed lost to Twitter despite superior uptime and product features
“I think it was a time when like Twitter had the fail whale and it was down half the time and people couldn't even use it. And, you know, we, our product, we were innovating faster. We had more features. People liked it. We could. And we were up a hundred perce…”
Taylor: PayPal Mafia learned more about entrepreneurship than Google PMs
“Folks like the PayPal mafia, I think learned a lot more about entrepreneurialism than like a typical PM at Google.”
Taylor: Software engineering will become operating code-generating machines
“I do think the act of creating software is going to transform from typing into a terminal or typing into Visual Studio code to operating a code generating machine. I think that is the future of creating software, but I think operating a code generating machine…”
Taylor: My traditional software engineering skills will no longer be valuable
“I think just like what I was good at will no longer be useful in the future or certainly not like valuable in the future and that's okay.”
Taylor: Foundational computer science will remain essential to constrain AI
“And I think computer science especially at least sort of the foundations of it will continue to be the foundations of how we build software and understanding that when you're interacting, particularly with something that's smarter than you producing code, you …”