Uncapped with Jack Altman
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: How much of that is technical versus change management? [00:00:00] S1: It’s a mix of both. I don’t know if it’s 50-50. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think of it as two people or one person who does both? [00:00:00] S1: We have a mix of roles. We’ve evolved that. We try to hire really technical people in all roles though because part of our secret is we want to be your trusted partner in AI. So you want the person who is working with you every day to be the most knowledgeable AI person. [00:00:00] S0: It’s like a forward-deployed change management engineer. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, exactly. What’s really neat about it, if you’re a really talented technical person who wants to transform an industry, you can do it at Sierra. We’re working with most of the healthcare insurance companies. If you want to change healthcare costs, what a cool vantage point to do it from. We’ve been able to attract some really remarkable people. [00:00:00] S0: You said that it’s not just support agents now. What else are you finding shoots in?
· Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S1: I’ll give you one of my favorite relationships: Rocket. Based in Detroit, remarkable story. Their founder’s done more for Detroit than I think any one person’s done for any city. Remarkable company. They own Redfin, which is a home search site, Rocket Mortgage, which is the number one consumer mortgage originator in the country. They recently bought a mortgage servicing firm as well. You can go to redfin.com and use an AI agent to search for a house. You can go to rocket.com and finance that house with an AI agent. And then with the acquisition of the mortgage servicing firm, when you’re servicing your mortgage, you’ll talk on the phone with an AI agent as well. Everything from finding a house to originating the mortgage to servicing that mortgage, I think that’s pretty cool. They have an amazing CTO named Shawn Malhotra, pretty visionary. I love their CEO Varun too. It’s everything from finding a house all the way through servicing. It’s what we believe a lot of businesses will do, look at their entire customer lifecycle from purchase consideration—which is a fancy way of saying browsing. I think homes are probably one of the more considered purchases you could do—through executing the purchase, through having issues with it, all the way through retention. For a lot of our telecommunications customers, their AI agent is actually doing negotiations. You’ve probably negotiated your cable bill at some point. Our agents are doing billions of dollars of negotiations for everything from satellite radio subscriptions to cable television subscriptions. It’s pretty cool. Over a billion dollars of mortgage folders a month.
· Jack Altman, Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S0: Basically all transactional communications eventually. [00:00:00] S1: The way I think about it is: a website is a technology, but your .com, the one with your brand at the top, is your website. We’re doing that for agents. Agents will do a lot of things. The one with your brand at the top that your customers go to, whether it’s buying or servicing, we’d like to help you make that. As agents go, they often interact with other agents. If you think about a home and auto insurance company, you may have a claim adjudication agent that’s quite complicated. Our agent that’s having the phone conversation when you’re in a fender bender will interact with that. But it is almost the intersection of all of that technology because it’s your front door. Our whole hypothesis is that every company needed a website in 1997. Every company needs an agent in 2027. We want to be that company. [00:00:00] S0: What’s the nuance about agent builders though? I know you have a view that just being a generic agent builder is not the right thing.
· Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S1: I’ve been surprised by how many large incumbent enterprise software companies’ first foray into AI was an agent-building tool. It just feels like an inevitable commodity in my mind. Maybe making a website was hard in 1995, but today there’s a million ways to make a website. Most of them are open source. You have cool companies like Vercel, which I love, but it’s not like there’s a huge market for this stuff. In practice, I think the same will happen with agent building. OpenAI will have a great tool. Probably all the foundation model companies will. There’ll be open source packages like LangChain and LangGraph. The idea that you have the right to win there… I don’t know if anyone has the right to win there because it’s just a horizontal technology and I believe in open source. It’s going to become a commodity. My belief is that value is really going to be in agents that do things, hiring those agents and purchasing those agents for what they do. I believe in companies like Sierra, I believe in companies like Harvey. I really admire what they do. They have an agent that will do an antitrust review. I think there’ll be a finance agent that audits your financials. There’ll be one that helps you onboard a supply chain vendor. Just think about onboarding a new vendor. There’s a procurement process, a legal process, a contract review process. Whether or not it’s completely autonomous or human-in-the-loop, all of that could be augmented by AI. That’s a product. Agent building’s not a product. Agent building is a technology.
· Jack Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Speaking of the platforms, aside from being the founder of Sierra, you’re also on the board of OpenAI. You’re the chairman there. I wanted to ask you specifically about Codex. Over the last couple weeks, it’s been unbelievable. It’s like a curtain just came down. Did you expect this? Did you think that what has happened here was going to happen? When did you start to have an inkling that code was going to go vertical like this?
· Bret Taylor
[00:00:00] S1: I’ll say yes, I expected it just because being on the board of OpenAI we talk a lot about it. All the labs—Anthropic and OpenAI in particular—talk a lot about using coding agents to help build AI. Certainly building an AI researcher is an important part of building an AGI lab. The weird part about it, for me as someone who is a software engineer, is I didn’t feel it until I used it. You can talk about it all the time, and then the first time you one-shot something and it turns out really good—not slop, but really good—it’s an emotional experience. For me it was. It was like, “Holy shit. This is real.” As you said, it’s really over the past three months that it has felt really materially different to me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’ve been thinking about the past 20 years of software engineering. I remember the first time I worked on an engineering team that had real CI/CD, where you’d check in code and it would just automatically end up in production. I remember how it felt. If you’ve ever worked on an engineering team that did that versus one that did manual releases, it’s completely different. Because to have something that can safely go from commit to production, there are so many things that have to happen to make that work. You end up relying a lot on testing—unit testing, integration testing, and canary testing—because the last thing you want is someone clicking a button and taking down the service. It’s almost impossible for a team that is doing manual releases to convert into true continuous delivery because there are so many implied processes that are incompatible with that. It’s easy to start that way and very hard to convert. Clearly in three years, we could talk about what the best practices are to set up a software team that’s optimized for this technology and we’ll know what those best practices are. Right now we’re just figuring them out in real time. My hypothesis is that the companies that figure it out first will move the fastest. The other part of that is the companies that don’t will move much more slowly. Andrej Karpathy had a really interesting post about this too. A lot of folks are deep in here and have been thinking about it and it’s fun to see the industry you love flipped on its head in real time.