Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#131

Post by -warren » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:02 AM UTC

ej88 wrote: post #43

It'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…

Somehow, I think we're missing the point and maybe braincells are being sent in the wrong direction. Well designed products don't need good customer support. My toaster works well. Haven't called them once.

If we are designing a thing is so terrible that it makes customer support necessary (other than the obvious corner cases that ai cannot solve) then sure, let a computer do it. We’ve already failed at every other step.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#132

Post by dllrr » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #14

linkregister wrote: post #12

I think this is generally a good product because businesses that previously had zero phone support can now afford to have something. However, the hard work of actually building out the various workflows and decision trees is not automatic. Previously, a call center employee would receive abuse from a caller for being unempowered to make a decision. Instead, an LLM will perform the same role. Ideally, businesses will…

AWS can do this out of the box

Hilarious

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#133

Post by dllrr » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

hoofedear wrote: post #28

It’s interesting that the example interaction they use on their homepage is a no-friction example that can be handled without an AI chatbot. Why not something more complex that properly demonstrates the value?

And why do the numbers sound impressive but the words are verrrry specific (authenticating a new ... what?! What does that even f'ing mean?!)

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#134

Post by ej88 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:21 AM UTC

woeirua wrote: post #105

ej88 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

1 & 2 are totally dependent on the company being willing to let their agents do things that they haven’t traditionally let humans do. For example, issue refunds, or do things that cost money but generate good will. I am skeptical that companies will be OK with their agents doing those things on their own volition. 3. Cool so the user didn’t indicate if they were satisfied. What then? 4. You can’t use a SOTA model rig…

1&2 are already happening, these startups take on brand liability and trust to do so

3 depends on how companies want to measure it, but lack of user submitting satisfaction score is not a good thing

you can use a model w/o reasoning, + use various tricks to simulate low latency

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#135

Post by throwaway320948 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:21 AM UTC

tencentshill wrote: post #117

bsimpson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coauthor (and presumably cofounder) is Clay Bavor. He's a Google exec who was the face of their VR efforts when he was there.

What VR efforts? Cardboard?

[dead]

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#136

Post by nick__m » Tue, May 05, 2026, 4:00 AM UTC

petra wrote: post #87

ergocoder wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

Either it doesn't work or it's happening gradually and then suddenly, like bankruptcy according to Hemingway.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#137

Post by jppope » Tue, May 05, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

Maybe its just me, but $950M seems a lot of money to invest in a "company".

Had to check my assumptions though so I looked up what the lower end of GDP for a country is and sure enough they have American Samoa, Dominica, and Tonga beat. Now that money is probably meant to last 16 months so its not quite apples to apples but kind of wild regardless.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#138

Post by deaux » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:00 AM UTC

ej88 wrote: post #43

It'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…

> It'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

For the other 20-50% it's much worse, and that's the problem. And people on HN will tend not just to fall in that group but in the top 5% of "least solvable by just reading the website" questions.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#139

Post by tstrimple » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

ej88 wrote: post #43

It'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…

At the risk of being labeled as racist, I'll take an LLM chat bot either in text or delayed voice to an outsourced Indian call center any day. This isn't an indictment of Indian's and their ability to communicate. But the type of folk Indian call centers tend to fill their worker pool with to keep costs adequately low. I've worked with a ton of amazing folk from India, but they are not the lowest common denominator that call centers tend to hire from.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#140

Post by swyx » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

captn3m0 wrote: post #11

If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder. > Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.

we did a well received interview with him if you'd like to hear about Sierra in his own words https://www.latent.space/p/bret