Conversational AI and customer experience agents
Sierra
Sierra builds AI agents that help businesses handle customer service, sales and retention across voice, chat, email and other digital channels. Its agents execute tasks such as processing insurance claims, returning orders and managing subscriptions. Ghostwriter creates agents from business documents, recordings or plain-language instructions, while Insights provides conversation analysis, testing and visibility into agent actions. Horizon supports longer customer relationships through persistent context, proactive engagement and plans spanning days or months. Sierra offers outcome-based pricing.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, Sierra combines enterprise software and consumer product experience: Taylor previously served as Salesforce co-CEO, while Bavor led Google Labs. Its τ-Bench research, begun in 2024, evaluates whether agents complete tasks end to end. Extensions test knowledge retrieval and tool use by checking changes to simulated backend databases, alongside voice interactions with interruptions, noise and connection problems. Sierra also acquired Takeoff in July 2026.
In May 2026, Sierra reported serving over 40% of the Fortune 50, with its agents powering billions of customer interactions. Sacra estimates annual recurring revenue reached $200 million that month. Sierra’s May financing announcement outlined a $950 million raise led by Tiger Global and GV at a valuation exceeding $15 billion.
3 talks
Newest first
3 speakers at AIE
Affiliations reflect their AIE appearances, not necessarily current employment.
Start here
- Rise of the AI Architect — Clay Bavor and Alessio Fanelli
Start here to understand how branded-agent examples involving ADT, SiriusXM’s Harmony, and Chubbies illustrate the emerging AI architect role.
Clay Bavor · Alessio FanelliAI Engineer World's Fair 2025
- The Agent Development Life Cycle
Follow with this talk to learn how AI nondeterminism informs a methodology for building reliable conversational agents.
Zack Reneau-WedeenAI Engineer Summit 2025
- The Dirty Secret of Forward Deployed Engineering
Read this for the historical progression from on-site deployments and DevOps firefighting to data integration, Ontology modeling, and AI-agent work.
Natalie MeurerAI Engineer World's Fair 2026
Messages from the stage
Agent ownership spans design and business judgment
The fireside discussion with Clay Bavor and Alessio Fanelli presents AI architecture as a role combining technical awareness, brand and experience design, and business judgment. Ongoing conversation review makes improving an agent part of that responsibility.
Quality assurance follows the conversation
Zack Reneau-Wedeen discusses conversation-level quality assurance and reporting alongside developer and customer-experience platforms. His session also covers practical voice-agent testing with Deepgram and Mac audio-routing tools.
A changing role with durable accountability
Natalie Meurer argues that forward-deployed engineering encompasses distinct historical roles. Customer accountability and measurable outcomes remain central as coding agents make software production cheaper.
Affiliations reflect each recorded session, not necessarily current employment.