Bret Taylor
speaker
184 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Bret Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So we're essentially helping companies build their branded AI agent for all parts of their customer experience. The reason why I think this is a really exciting area for our customers and for me personally, is that I think we're in the era of conversational software.
So I remember when in 2007, when when Steve Jobs announced this and I'm guessing you were 11 then based on our previous conversation. So you may not remember it as vividly as I do. I remember it well, Brad. OK, good. I remember this. That's good.
Yeah, it was mind blowing. It really was. What's interesting though is in the corporate world, the dominant smartphone at the time was the Blackberry. And if you talk to anyone who had a Blackberry, they'd be like, there is no way I'm going to ever type on a touchscreen. The Blackberry keyboard is and was beloved. People still talk about how efficient they were with it.
But you fast forward 10 years and 100% of those people had iPhones in their pocket. Why was that? The reason was the multi-touch interface in the iPhone, plus all the benefits afforded by having a big touchscreen from having a full featured web browser to be able to watch media.
We crossed a quality threshold where it was actually effective enough relative to the BlackBerry keyboard that everyone said, this is just better. We're just going to adopt it. And now we have more smartphones in the world than people.
And I think if you measure what percentage of human computer interactions are coming from smartphones, touchscreens today versus mice and keyboard, it's got to be 95% plus. I think with GPT-4, we crossed that quality threshold of effectiveness with conversational AI, meaning you can now have a conversation with a computer and it actually works. It understands nuance. It understands sarcasm.
And as a consequence, if you fast forward four or five years, when you're interacting with any of the consumer brands you work with, your insurance company, your phone company, you will probably be having a conversation with an AI more than you'll be clicking around on a website or clicking around on an app.
And just like mobile apps didn't replace websites, they just sort of took a number of use cases away from them. If you think about when you go to your bank, your bank's website versus the app on your phone. I don't think conversational agents will replace apps and websites, but I do think that every company will need one.
We like to say like in 1995, the way you existed digitally as a business to have a website in 2025, the way you will exist digitally is to have an agent. So in the context of Sierra, in the context of that word agent, we're trying to enable companies to build their own, the one with their brand on it that does everything that their customers want to do.
And really in the fullness of that vision, if you think about everything you can do on a company's website, it's amazing. It's pretty expansive. It isn't just about automating something that exists and helping with customer service. So that's a meaningful part of it.
We really think this is a new category of digital experience and companies will and do want to be present in this world of conversational AI, but it's very hard to do. And that's why we're building a solution to facilitate it.
I think chat and voice and multimodality, I think the reason why I think conversational AI is a meaningful form factor is because it's low friction. So if you look at the use of WhatsApp around the world, this means that you can essentially exist as a business in WhatsApp and be a completely full featured customer experience.
If you think about CarPlay, which if you've tried to use apps while driving your car and using CarPlay, it's fairly limited, right? But now imagine that you can have a full productive experience on your commute into work. You look at five or ten years ago when Alexa was exploding and everyone was putting smart speakers on their kitchen counters. We have them in our house as well.
All of a sudden, you're right now for our family, that's getting the weather turning on music, right? That type of thing. Imagine that was a full featured computer and you could order an Uber, you could check your calendar, you could
you know follow up on an email while you're making your coffee having these conversational experiences both text voice well i'm not arguing that it is the perfect form factor for every experience but just like the the same way i don't know what percentage of your email you type on your phone versus your Probably 90 plus percent.
And you wouldn't say it's because typing on your phone is easier than typing on your keyboard. It's a convenience thing. And so my point on going through those different form factors of being in your car, being in your kitchen, you know, being in WhatsApp and not having to install an app, those things, like I think, consumer experiences are driven by convenience and lowering friction.
And my thesis is just like touchscreens have come to dominate our experience with computers because of convenience. You can have a conversation in so many different places. You don't need an instruction manual. I think it will be the main way we work with computers.
It certainly seems feasible, but I temper that with if you look at the past 15 years of consumer electronics innovation, how many companies, including the ones that make smartphones, have tried to make devices that replaced or augmented the phone unsuccessfully. This device here, this phone... It's so good at so many things and everyone already has one.
It's essentially completely removed the market for almost every other type of consumer device. So in the short term, my intuition is that the combination of a smartphone with Ray-Ban glasses or AirPods or the like, probably meaning you might need to look at your screen less than you do today.
But my intuition is because of the prevalence of smartphones around the world, it will still end up being the primary computer that mediates those conversations. But to the point that you made, as conversational experiences start working more I always get the big phone just because I like the big screen. I think a lot changes.
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