02:47:12 路 John Coogan, Bret Taylor
[02:47:12] S1: So, yeah, I mean, what [02:47:13] S2: all these government services. Got Medicare, you've got Medicaid, you've got the Department of Veterans Affairs, you've got, you know, immigration, like, you know, the passport agency. All of them run large call centers, but more importantly, people depend on them. You know, people depend on them. You have, you know, someone on Medicare or you have a vet who depends on Department of Veterans Affairs for their health care. It's a really big both payer provider. If you look at, you know, what we do for, you know, folks like Cigna and Blue Cross Blue Shield and you squint, well, it's almost that entire stack in a in a federal agency. And, you know, for good reason, there's just a very high bar for cloud technologies when you're serving the federal government and this is the main certification that kinda opens the door there. We're already working with a few agencies, none that I can fortunately talk about today. We work with FINRA, the regulator. Mhmm. So we we've always been really passionate about, we want the best technology to be available even in regulated industries. And so it's a big step for us. We're really excited about it. I hope hope we can contribute to the quality of life as US citizens, you know, and do so in a way that's a lot more cost effective.
02:48:17 路 John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:48:17] S1: Yeah. I'm I it's interesting. Like, would you would you is the is the biggest low low hanging fruit just taking some of these agencies and making them available twenty four seven? I feel like one of the most frustrating things that I run into is like, call from nine to five. And I'm like, I have a job. Yeah. [02:48:39] S0: The thing like the difference between interacting with like a public utility versus like waste management. Right? Like waste man like waste management. Right? Like Yeah. You know, maybe it's not perfect, but like it's pretty fast. Like you can get stuff done. Like it's efficient. And then like the trying to do the same exact thing with like a public utility, you know, usually you I I I always personally estimate like, okay, if it would take me like, you know, ten minutes with waste management, it'll take me like thirty minutes with a public utility. Sure. And so like bringing bringing that there's there's no reason that those two things can't be at parity, but it is entirely it is almost entirely a a technology and like process Mhmm. Problem.
02:49:22 路 Bret Taylor
[02:49:22] S2: Right? A 100%. And there's a couple of factors that I think go into why it's so hard to have great experience with some of these government programs. You know, first, a lot of people do need to call things on the phone and it's only been the past couple of years that we could digitize a phone call with AI agents. So we've essentially digitized the last remaining analog channel and everything you said is true, could it be twenty four seven. As importantly, it could be multilingual. If you imagine staffing up a big call center and you wanna represent all the languages in this country from Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, you know, like go down the list, really really expensive to do. Now you can do it at scale. Each new language, the marginal cost is effectively zero. And then the other part of it is for good reason, as I said, there's just a a really high compliance bar for technologies to be available. And as a consequence, if you look at, you know, what waste management or just pick any private company, they can go off and get the best of breed solution for any given technology problem they have. That is not something all federal agencies can do. And so what I'm really proud of is that CIRA is the best of breed solution in customer experience. We power everyone from, you know, Singtel to Rocket Mortgage on our platform. And now because we have this certification, federal agencies have access to the best of breed solution in this space as well. And so I'm really hopeful. I think AI if you look at some of the parts of the economy, the governments, both state and federal, the healthcare industry which has gotten progressively less productive over the past decade, it's one of the few parts of the economy that has, I think AI is incredibly important because these are the parts of the economy that need productivity. You know, we actually want to have great service as citizens and reduce our spending. AI is the answer. So we're really passionate about it. We're patriots here and we love our technology. And so I'm just excited that we can apply it in a in a in a great way.
02:51:08 路 John Coogan, Bret Taylor, S5
[02:51:08] S1: Talk about pilot programs and conversion to real customer. Is that timeline a KPI for you? Is that something that you monitor very closely? I have to imagine that it's speeding up. But whenever you shake the hand of a CEO and they say, Let's do this, or someone in the federal government perhaps, an agency lead and they say, I'm ready. I'm I'm bought in on the vision. The demo looked good. But then there's obviously an implementation time. Does that look What like did it look like a year ago? Where is it going in the future? [02:51:43] S2: We track it and we measure it in days not weeks. [02:51:47] S5: And [02:51:47] S2: so, you know, some of our favorite like Nordstrom, know, from, you know, concept to a 100% of their phone calls was thirty five days. [02:51:56] S1: That's good. Said three thousand days is good, then we're back to, oh, you're game in the stats.
02:52:02 路 Bret Taylor
[02:52:02] S2: What's the thing about that too is we started out at 1% of their phone calls in I think four weeks and went to a 100% in just a week and that's because of the Nordstrom team. Yeah. You know, actually in Fiserv, which is an amazing, you know, financial technology company for banks, just broke the record. So I don't know if I'm at liberty to show the number of days Yeah. But That's they have an amazing president named Divya. She was just top down, like, we're gonna do this and broke the record. So we have a leaderboard internally about how quickly when a customer talks to us can we go live and start delivering value. For what it's worth, I think it's really relevant in this world. You can Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, it's all, you know, token maxing. Yeah. What value are we getting from the tokens? Like, is kind of in the headlines right now. We don't really have that issue with our clients because, like, our thing is, like, let's start answering the phone as quickly as possible, start driving those operating expense savings as quickly as possible, but as importantly, that you can actually improve sales, improve CSAT at the same time. Our you know, as you know, we've been really pioneering this idea of outcomes based pricing with the idea being you only pay Sierra when we successfully resolve a call or successfully make a sale. It's it sounds like a small business model thing, but it's big because we don't get paid until it's live. So Yeah. It really aligns like all the incentives. Like, we don't care about the sales process. We care about the go live process.
02:53:23 路 John Coogan, Bret Taylor, Jordi Hays
[02:53:23] S1: Sure. And I [02:53:24] S2: think it really changes, I would say, almost the social dynamics between vendor and customer where we really become a partner because we have the same incentives as our clients. And I think it's a really big shift and you know how much I'm an advocate for it, but I actually think a lot of the, you know, token maxing issues would go away if more companies were just focused on outcomes. [02:53:43] S0: We're How are you tracking the popularity of the message talk to a human? Or the statement. [02:53:52] S1: No. No. When I pick up the phone I say talk to an agent, agent, and then they put me on the phone with an AI agent. It's great.