The company hopes everyone will use its empathetic AI chatbots for customer interactions.
Was that the wrong thing to say? “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or criticism or just a fact,” says Taylor, who left his job as co-CEO of Salesforce to start Sierra. I assured him I saw it as more of the latter. “It’s not like you’re building girlfriends!” I noted.
Taylor and Bavor believe that the transformative magic of AI is so good that we don’t need any softening. We’ve already been stuck with nightmare systems like phone support and websites that offer multiple-choice options that don’t address our concerns. Now we have an alternative that’s miles better. “If you survey 100 people and ask, ‘Do you like chatting with a chatbot?’, probably zero would say yes,” Taylor says.