at first I thought Sierra games was making a comeback...
a new Space Quest is worth every penny!
Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
81–90 of 168 posts
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assume Sierra owners are too young to know what Sierra games means. I was absolutely obsessed with their logo (1) at school time. 1. https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMQi7olp-tw
It occurs to me just now that the logo is in fact a mountain and not a breaching Orca whale like I'd always thought
isn't it the yomesite's half dome, on their logo?
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#83I don't get this for several reasons: 1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human. 2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of…
> How much money are you really going to save this way?
A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost.
In terms of the investment:
It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business.
If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
I respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”. The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an ide…
If you're calling it an "AI assistant" then it's probably not the type of system I was talking about and I probably don't like it either. AI call routing is having an IVR tree's functionality where the call system does the work to map it to a number in the tree. Anything more than that is getting into something else AI.
E.g. instead of waiting for the IVR tree to be read out to find out you needed to press 4 for the shipping department the AI asks "Please state the department you wish to connect to or reason for calling" and you just say "shipping" (or however much of a life story you want to give it) and it's the call system's job to figure out where in the menu that is instead. For repeat calls once you know its AI call routing you can just say "shipping" right as the call starts, the same as you'd known press "4" before the 2nd time around an IVR tree, except you don't have to remember the random digits.
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
hes board chair of openai and is ex co-ceo of salesforce, ex cto of facebook, can get a meeting with any exec in F500... their moat is distribution
Is that really a moat though or something like a firehose of gasoline?
its a moat vs. other startups and it carried them to multi-B valuation
obviously the product needs to deliver and nrr needs to be good in the long run
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#86I can't speak to the business itself but they recently published a refreshing take on improving the product engineering interview experience in the age of AI
https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview
Well worth a read even if you are generally anti-AI.
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#87I don't get this for several reasons: 1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human. 2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of…
> How much money are you really going to save this way? A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost. In terms of the investment: It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business. If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.
If 40% of the F50 are already using this, and others too, why aren't we already seeing a huge drops in the employment numbers ?
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#88I don't get this for several reasons: 1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human. 2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of…
adding some context as someone who works in this space
1. most people (average, non-tech people) reach for the phone to call in for easily solvable problems. Plus, if the agent is integrated deep enough & has tools to interact with crms, you can raise the ceiling on the types of problems it can solve.
You're trying to avoid the bad customer experience of human 1 reading off their script, then they transfer you to some other department who may or may not know how to solve your problem, and the entire interaction cost the company way more than the value created, so the company is disincentivized to help customers.
2. All the companies in this space start with the outsourced BPO market for cx (multi billion market still) but the next market is going to be in revenue generation and churn prevention at scale, i.e. how do you proactively avoid customer issues, how do you upsell and generate revenue instead of reducing cost, how do you keep customers happy?
3. I think more companies will pivot to outcome based pricing on the contrary, makes it so much more measurable than seat-based and protects margins better than usage based. Plus cx is one of the few industries with very well known metrics
4. Kind of? Most companies in this space don't use native voice models which are noticeably dumber, they use transcription + a stronger text model + TTS. The majority of customers can be handled with the latest SOTA text model and you need smart context engineering to handle the long tail of more complicated asks
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a tech literate customer, my willingness to entertain AI chatbot decision trees is rock bottom. I have no patience to try to find the correct incantation to actually fix something (or the, “before I transfer you to a person, let me try to help you first”). For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way…
An AI chatbot is orders of magnitude better to get the answer "you cannot be helped" than wading through every possibility in a phone tree.
They're going to give the AI the same capabilities as the phone tree. It'll either say they can't be helped, or the user will hang up in frustration.
Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
#90It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most…
I have yet to encounter an AI agent that was able to handle my support questions adequately. I always end up having to get a human (which is becoming increasingly difficult or virtually impossible).
I'm sure AI Support Agents will be implemented better, but so far in my experience, the humans I connect to far outperform the AI agents.