Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

sierra.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 168 posts

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

#101

Post by calvinmorrison »

jjmarr wrote: post #96
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…

SWEs get paid to get good at reading documentation on processes. I think HN is biased since we'll only escalate once documentation can't help us. I'm also bullish because AI coding agents give up easily if my problem is complicated. I think it'll be easier to convince an AI to transfer me to level 2 support than a human.

[dead]

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

#102

Post by mandeepj »

toraway wrote: post #99
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…

> Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time. But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of f…

> possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something.

Refunds could require approval. And, it could not be just the agent's sole decision.

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

#104

Post by a1o »

reconnecting wrote: post #53
tombert wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually didn't play the game until I was fifteen, in ~2006. I didn't know the answers, but I found out you can just hit ctrl-alt-x and skip the questions.

Take a look at how it was in 1995. InterAction (Sierra Online) magazine [PDF copy]. Article about the Larry 6 release on page 50. https://sierrachest.com/gfx/Publications/IA/IA_8_1/023_Inter...

Whoa, the Vivid 3D Pro on page 62 looks awesome!

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

#105

Post by woeirua »

ej88 wrote: post #88
woeirua wrote: post #68

I 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 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 right now for reasoning, there’s too much latency for a conversation. So you’re either using an older, but significantly less capable model, or you’re paying out the nose for fast mode. If the former then you can’t trust the agent to do the right thing (see points 1&2). If the latter, there’s no cost savings over a human. So which is it?

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

#106

Post by jimbob88 »

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 review recordings from calls routed to Sierra and a few other similar systems on a regular basis for . The calls come from folks of all walks of life, not just tech folks.

I’d say the vast majority of callers absolutely hate talking to these things and spend most of the call trying to get to a human, often getting frustrated and hanging up (shows up positive in the metrics, call handled without transfer!).

Though I’m not sure the companies deploying them really care, they’re just happy they can fire call center employees.

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

#107

Post by fastball »

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.

He is the Chairman of the OpenAI board.

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

#108

Post by unclad5968 »

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 things. I imagine it's basically the same for every customer service.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by usaar333 »

toraway wrote: post #99
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…

> Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time. But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of f…

Voice agents have capabilities and policy to alter customer state. Just the other day I called into a CC company and the AI waived an interest charge.
Post reply on HN