Sierra’s Bret Taylor says the era of push buttons is over

Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a startup that builds AI clients to support businesses, believes that the way people interact with software will soon change.

Last month, Sierra was launched Ghostwriteran agent designed to create other agents. With this “assistant as a service” tool, the startup aims to replace traditional websites with natural languages. Users simply specify what they need, and have Ghostwriter create it automatically and send an agent to do the job.

The idea of ​​replacing software with language-driven languages ​​is particularly interesting because many of the tools used in businesses are not used regularly, argues Taylor, the former Co-CEO of Salesforce.

“You log into Workday when you’re on board as a new employee, maybe even to sign up,” Taylor told the audience at the event. HumanX conference being held this week in San Francisco. Instead of learning to use complex machines, he said that in the near future users will use natural language to complete tasks without using software.

“I think the world is going,” Taylor said.

He added that Sierra is already using Ghostwriter to deploy agents “at unprecedented speed.” Taylor offered, for example, that his startup hired an agent at Nordstrom in just four weeks.

Sierra announced last fall that it had arrived $100 million at an annualized rate (ARR), within 21 months of its launch. The company was last read $10 billion when it raised $350 million in a round led by Greenoaks Capital in September.

“A lot of companies don’t want to do software,” Taylor said. “They want solutions to their problems.”

While major changes in software may be coming as Taylor says, several technology experts and investors tell TechCrunch that, at this point, the implementation of AI assistants is not entirely autonomous.

Many companies that claim to provide AI assistants, including AI startup Sierra and Harvey, employ “forward-delivering” engineers who have to update and manage clients to make sure they’re working the way they want.