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Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

sierra.ai

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

#141

Post by altmanaltman »

jppope wrote: post #137

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...

In economics, comparing a corporate investment round to a country's GDP is considered flawed. As you noted with your "16 months", the company is sitting on a $950M bank account that it will slowly burn through over the years. Comparing a multi-year pile of cash to a single year of national production distorts the scale.

You are basically comparing a nation's actual hard work and output to a speculative pile of cash. Even comparing corporate revenue to GDP is frowned upon by economists. A company's revenue includes the cost of all the inputs it bought from other companies (such as servers, electricity, and software licenses). GDP, by definition, strips out intermediate costs to avoid double-counting and measures only final value added.

You're also picking nations that do not produce much or have a very low population (Tonga only has 100k people), which pulls down the GDP due to how it's calculated.

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

#142

Post by altmanaltman »

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

they can but why would they, its literally not their business

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

#143

Post by Yizahi »

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…

People are not protesting hypothetical proper LLM tech-support, which indeed can be ok and cheaper than humans. People are protesting actual practical implementation of the LLM tech-support which they already experienced themselves, no need for second-hand retellings or stories/ads. In practice I had LLM of my goddamn bank (where I'm a premium and old client) hang up on me with a response "I don't understand you" and cut the call. And now I need to call them again, wade through a digital labyrinth again and wait on line again. Awesome. Or when I urgently needed help with a government ID application and the only official tech-support is an LLM chat which has approximately 20 super dumb scenarios explained and literally nothing else. And the only LLM sign is that now I need to type my query in free style and not select predefined buttons, but the result is the same. So I had to resort to going to Facebook (thank St. Mark for this "innovation") and beg for human help in the promo page of that application (and I got human help there, lol, don't delete your FB accs people). Or when my internet got cut (cable line fault was discovered later by a technician) and LLM of my MSO fucking banned me, because their system was bugged and kept disconnecting me from their end and I exceeded a really small number of retries (like 8?).

I'm pretty sure every one commenting here has their own horror story about LLM support. Now that is what people are angry at.

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

#144

Post by kakwa_ »

-warren wrote: post #131
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 s…

Your toaster is well... a toaster.

And even something as simple toaster might need some customer support. These things do fail quite often, sometimes dangerously.

Increase complexity even a little; or worse, deal with a service (phone, internet, subscriptions, etc) and you will need this safety net.

Nothing is 100% reliable in this world.

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

#145

Post by ceejayoz »

unclad5968 wrote: post #108
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…

I had to go to an xfinity store the other day, and seeing the things people come in for made me realize why AI is attractive to companies. The four or five people in front of me did not need a human in the loop for their issue. If these people could go to xfinity.com and ask some bot where they can find their bill, how much they owe, or if their internet is down, xfinity employees could focus on actually selling thin…

> If these people could go to xfinity.com and ask some bot… if their internet is down…

See, this is how we get such useless chatbots.

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

#146

Post by specialist »

deaux wrote: post #138
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 pe…

Yup.

Raises the floor at the expense of lowering the ceiling.

And another thing...

Sierra says:

> Transform phone support with AI agents that speak naturally, reinforce your brand, and take action—across inbound and outbound calls.

Reinforce one's branding? For the better? Really?

Seems unlikely.

I've LARPed in most roles around product development. Tech support, sales, QA/Test, tech writing, marketing, etc. Enough to appreciate that engineering the entire lifecycle is important.

A comment elsethread states customers HATE these support robots. I believe it; me too.

Before adopting agentic CX (of whatever its called), I'd worry about alienating my current and future customers.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

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

#148

Post by voidmain »

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…

Making me talk to a fucking robot leaves me with a deep and abiding hatred for your company. I will prefer almost any alternative to doing business with you and hope fervently to read about your bankruptcy.

What percentage of interactions having this result will cancel out your cost savings?

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

#149

Post by fxtentacle »

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…

I think this is going to be wonderful. I'll have my offensive AI call their support AI and prompt-inject my way to a rebate tier that nobody knew existed and nobody can cancel it because all the remaining humans have been reduced to phone-to-screen input machinery.

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

#150

Post by derwiki »

nikcub wrote: post #71
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.

can't believe Bret's bio doesn't mention friendfeed!

Tornado is all but lost to the sands of time
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