This doesn't matter. Another comment cuts to the quick of it: "If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.".

This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.

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

> 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.

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.

You disagreed with the hivemind so you got flagged.

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.

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

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

No mafia ties needed, just your regular Security State plant. From here [1] (I'm sure there's also an official link for it, can't be bothered to check):

> OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.

and the money quote:

> “Artificial intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed,“ board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/comments/1dh4wx4/form...

With advances in AI you would've thought the priority would be on automating as much as possible of the non-human facing work and double-down on meaningful customer relationships - but no.

Their secret is that they have hoards of fake AI Customers who will call into their client's AI Customer Support and respond to surveys saying they were extremely happy with the support, so the client has to pay for perfect simulated outcomes.

AI customer support is trash and everyone hates it , but it makes the Wall St numbers go up, so it's a good thing.

I don't think businesses that previously had zero phone support can afford Sierra.

They seem to be a "for pricing, let's go play C-level golf" type of company.

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 there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.

AWS can do this out of the box

Last time I tried using real-time chat support for a technical issue, I spent 30 minutes explaining my problem to a human only to find out they were a sales rep whose only solution was to sell me more services. Once I said I didn't want that, they transferred me to tech support who gaslit me and left me on read long enough to make my session time out.

I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.

a new Space Quest is worth every penny!

maybe in an ironic unforeseen twist they are....to people running datacenters there?

Why should they?

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

At least I'm not the only one:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment

I was about to post a snarky comment along the lines of "Sierra? The publishers of Homeworld and Homeworld 2?"

Every single word domain seems to have become some new AI company.

Likewise, I was hoping for more Space Quest :(

That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.

But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.

Me too, now I am suddenly wanting Space Quest 2026!

Space Quest IV: Roger?

Same. A new Gabriel Knight would be fun!

So you want to be a hero?

Well, if MicroProse could do it...

A new Lode Runner when

EDIT: holy shit I stand corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner