The Exchanges

Q it may even be worth also defining like, what are the products that Sierra provides today for its customers? And then where do you want that to go? And then maybe we can feed that back into like, what are the components of that? Obviously, folks are really emerging as a leader in your vertical, but it'd be great just for a broader audience to understand what you focus on.

A Yeah, sure. I'll just give a couple of examples to make it concrete. So if you buy a new Sonos speaker or you're having technical issues with your speaker, you get the dreaded flashing orange light. You'll now chat with the Sonos AI, which is powered by Sierra to help you onboard, help you debug, whether it's a hardware issue, a wifi issue, um, things like that. If you're a SiriusXM subscriber, their AI agent is named Harmony, which I think is a delightful name. And, uh, it's everything from Upgrading and downgrading your subscription level to, if you get a trial when you purchase a new vehicle, speaking to you about that. Broadly speaking, I would say we help companies build branded customer facing agents. Um, and branded is an important part of it. It's, it's part of your brand. It's part of your brand experience. And I think that's really interesting and compelling because I think just like, you know, when I go back to the proverbial, 1995, you know, your website was on your business card. It was the first time you had sort of this digital Presence and I think the same novelty and probably we'll look back at the agents today with the same sense of, oh, that was quaint. Uh, you know, I remember if you go back to the Wayback Machine, you look at early websites, it was either someone's phone number and that's it, or it looked like a DVD intro screen with like lots of graphics. …

AI assessment note: “we help companies build branded customer facing agents.”

Q Can you describe some of the key challenges in, like, taking, you know, the capabilities of Foundation Monster and then making them work in, like, the company agent context?

A One of the techniques, and I think you all probably talked about on your, your podcast that's very common today is it's what's called retrieval augmented generation. Um, and essentially what that means is, uh, you take a large language model and rather than using the model and its innate knowledge from the pre-training process to, um, emit answers, you combine that model with a database of content and you say, Use the content as a source of truth, and you ask the model to summarize, uh, selected content from that, that database. And that's kind of a roundabout way of saying if you can ground the agent and knowledge that you provide it, but also you can take off the shelf models and, and integrate it with proprietary business data. So it's a really popular technique right now. I would say that's a really exciting area, but what we found in practice is that broad category of technology investment is woefully Uh, insufficient for almost any meaningful customer experience. If you think about, you know, all of the interactions you've had with brands that you care about, what percentage of those conversations were asking questions? Probably none of them. It's all about taking action, right? It's upgrading or downgrading a subscription. It's returning an order. It's a warranty exchange. It's a, you know, filing a claim with an insurance company. All of those are not only not simply an…

AI assessment note: “All of those are not only not simply answering questions, but also taking action”

Q piece of it is if you're actually running all your application, all the data, everything else on one of these cloud providers, pinging out to a third party service just adds latency. So you add the round trip, you add a second sort of buying behavior around, um, approval, budget, Uh, security, et cetera. So do you think it's just going to roughly consolidate around the clouds plus or minus?

A I do think it will roughly end up the cloud of providers in partnership with the big research labs, which is roughly the current, uh, you know, landscape. I'm not sure I completely agree on the security and latency front. It's possibly true. It was interesting. I think that, you know, most companies, most large enterprises now use multiple cloud providers. Uh, most of them use software as a service and don't necessarily care where it's hosted as long as the security and reliability requirements are met. And there's obviously some exceptions to this, but I think thanks to 20 years of software as a service, people sort of evolve their expectations to not ask, you know, where do you get your power? And just say, what is your, you know, SLA for this service? And I think that's probably a positive trend. So I do think there's probably meaningful latency and security issues to overcome, but I, that all being in the same substrate, I'm not sure I make that leap. I might be wrong. I just, you know, I, I view the evolution of software as a service having evolved that, but going back to my history rhyming point, I think you'll have a relatively small number of foundation model builders and doing pre-training. I think there'll be a market of tools companies, um, you know, well, great one in AI might be scale AI. Um, you know, Snowflake was a great example in cloud that might also be an ex…

AI assessment note: “I do think it will roughly end up the cloud of providers in partnership”

Q Can we go back to, um, you said goals and guardrails for a minute? Um, like, um, as you described, we're going away from, you know, complex rules engines as business software. That's like a pretty big mindset shift for your customers to ingest. How do you work with them on, um, I guess, evaluation of, like, how well Sierra agents work and get people comfortable with that?

A Yeah. So a couple of things I'll describe technically and then talk a little bit more operationally as well. So technically we work a lot with our customers to actually formalize and define their processes, you know, and, um, sometimes our customers come in with really well defined processes. Sometimes they don't. We like to say an agent's made up of not only the factual knowledge, but the procedural knowledge, you know, with the process follows and it gets into the, the, the integrations with systems. And we spend a lot of time talking about where do you want guardrails? Where do you want Creativity. And where do you want agency? And then we do a lot of experimentation, you know, uh, in a proof of concept, have it live and actually through sort of, uh, this technology encountering the cold, hard reality of actual people, you know, did this actually meet the expectations you thought you had? And then with that, we've developed a lot of tools for customer experience teams. Uh, so we think that AI should not be the domain of Technology teams exclusively. Um, you know, the team that owns your customer experience at your company, maybe it's in the office of the chief digital officer, maybe it's a formal customer experience team. They should be the ones with their hands on the steering wheel of these experiences. So we built a lot of tools and platforms where those teams can audit a…

AI assessment note: “we do a lot of experimentation, you know, uh, in a proof of concept”

Q Do you have a hypothesis on form factor?

A Because of the perseverance of the smartphone, probably if I had to pick, I think the smartphone will remain, but coupled with things like AirPods and CarPlay and others, you'll interact with it more through different modalities. Um, but the Anker supercomputer in your pocket probably won't go away. But I don't say like I'm hoping for it. You know, I brought it up because how many consumer device companies have tried to build something on the side of a smartphone that Was a, you know, perfect fit. And I think smartwatches maybe could qualify as a success, but still, it's not nearly the market of a smartphone. I think that's really interesting, and I also wonder, there was a, I don't know what years it was, but, you know, when everyone got Alexas on their counters, it was, what, a decade ago?

AI assessment note: “I think the smartphone will remain, but coupled with things like AirPods and CarPlay”

Q Do you do that as part of the prompts or do you do post training or how do you actually implement that into your product?

A A combination of all of the above, you know, there's some parts of tone and brand that are adequate for prompts depending on the models. There are some parts of brand that are more sensitive, you know, like you, Don't want your AI agent giving medical advice or giving financial advice, and that's sort of tone, that sort of substance, and we do a lot of what we call supervisor models, so we have models supervising other models. Um, it's turtles all the way down. Our joke in our office is the solution to every problem in AI is more AI, um, and which is really exciting, and I think it is the fun part of our platform is, you know, we have a lot of tools at our disposal to solve these meaningful problems. I think it is really exciting in the same way I always think of Apple when I think of Brand experiences. If you go to their office in Cupertino, or you walk into an Apple store, you unbox their product, it's kind of got the same vibe, you know, and you see that made in California, designed in California, and you're like, this is an Apple, uh, experience I'm getting. I think you should, you know, uh, think about your agent as a part of your brand experience, and, and because it can have personality, you know, it could change per person. That's really different. You know, it's sort of the difference like Black Friday, maybe 15 years ago, everyone got the same campaign. My guess is th…

AI assessment note: “A combination of all of the above, you know, there's some parts of tone”