OpenAI Chairman Brett Taylor knows a thing or two about finding the next big thing in the technology industry.
So if Taylor, who I met when I was co-CEO of Salesforce (CRM), decides to give me a few minutes, I pick up the phone.
Or, in this particular case, try interviewing him and his newest co-founder, Clay Bavor, on Yahoo Finance Live (video above).
“Clay and I truly believe that conversational AI will be the way companies interact with their customers in the future,” Taylor said. He co-developed his Google Maps and later Facebook (META) and Salesforce.
Enter Sierra, Taylor’s new venture that just came out of stealth mode this week.
Since leaving Salesforce at the end of 2022, Taylor has been building the startup with his friend and former Google (GOOG, GOOGL) colleague Bavor.
Sierra, which is reportedly valued at nearly $1 billion after a $110 million funding round from VC giants Benchmark and Sequoia, is essentially a customer service bot on steroids.
The bot is said to have the ability to converse with real people. As human interaction evolves, bots will also leverage a variety of large-scale language models.
End goal: Improved customer satisfaction and more profitable sales streams for your company.
Taylor claimed that Sierra is another customer service bot among a number of new AI bots.
“I think [conversational AI is] It’s much bigger than that. Looking at ChatGPT, the number of users has increased to his 100 million. That’s faster than any consumer product in history. I think this really represents a major shift in consumer behavior,” Taylor said.
Bavor added, “We are working toward one of the most difficult and potentially impactful problems in AI: putting AI directly in front of customers. ” he added.
The San Francisco-based company already has some big-name brands as customers, including SiriusXM (SIRI), Sonos (SONO), and WeightWatchers (WW).
Totally, who knows where Sierra will be in a year’s time. I think there will be more customers and the bots will become even sharper. Knowing Taylor, I suspect the company will add new services that complement its core mission.
Over time, Sierra could follow in the footsteps of Taylor’s other businesses and become part of a larger tech giant (maybe Salesforce again?).
But one thing is for sure: the next wave of AI is beginning to arrive, and with it, we’re getting a glimpse of the impact this new generation of bots will have on businesses.
McKinsey estimates that generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion worth of additional benefits to the global economy annually. Approximately 75% of its value can be delivered across four areas: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development.
The numbers in certain sectors are even more impressive.
For example, across the banking industry, this technology has the potential to deliver the equivalent of $200 billion to $340 billion in additional value per year if use cases are fully implemented. McKinsey researchers found that the potential impact on retail and consumer packaged goods is “$400 billion to $660 billion annually.”
Robots aren’t coming, they’re here.
Brian Sozzi I’m the executive editor of Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter/X @BrianSozzi And even more linkedin. Have a tip about a deal, merger, activist situation, or more? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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