Sierra

Sierra is a conversational AI platform for businesses — described on its site as "the leading conversational AI platform for businesses" — that lets companies build and deploy customer-facing AI agents across chat, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and ChatGPT, in 59 languages, available 24/7. It was founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, who "first met while working together at Google."

Sierra's stated goal is to help businesses "build better, more human customer experiences with AI." Rather than a single chatbot widget, the platform combines agent-building tools (Ghostwriter, Agent Studio), a way to securely connect agents to a company's own systems of record (Context Engine — order management, CRM, and similar systems), and monitoring/optimization tools (Explorer, Insights) so a company can build, observe, and iterate on its own AI agents rather than just turning one on.

Sierra publishes more than 30 named customers on its site, including Rocket Mortgage, Gap Inc., SiriusXM, Uber, Vanguard, SoftBank, and CLEAR, and prices its product with "outcome-based pricing," saying customers "only pay when the software achieves specific, valuable outcomes" rather than publishing fixed plans or per-seat pricing.

Sierra is built and configured by a company's own team rather than something an individual signs up for and self-serves. Per the company's site:

1. Describe or show how the agent should behave — Ghostwriter lets a team "build or modify your agent simply by describing how you want your agent to behave," covering prompt workflows, systems integrations, guardrails, tone, and style; inputs can include uploaded SOPs, transcripts, whiteboard photos, and audio recordings, or a plain-English description of the goal.
2. Connect it to your own systems — the Context Engine securely connects the agent to systems of record such as order management or CRM, so it can carry out full customer tasks rather than just answer questions.
3. Deploy across channels — a single agent can be deployed consistently across chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and ChatGPT, including distinct Voice Personas for voice channels.
4. Monitor and improve — Explorer answers natural-language questions about conversation performance using analytics and sample conversations, while Insights provides built-in testing, automated monitoring, and proactive alerts to drive ongoing performance improvement.

• Enterprise customer support and service — the site's published customers include Rocket Mortgage, Gap Inc., SiriusXM, Uber, Vanguard, SoftBank, and CLEAR, spanning finance, retail, media, and mobility.
• Consistent multilingual, multichannel support — deploying one agent identity across chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice, and ChatGPT in 59 languages instead of building separate bots per channel.
• Task completion that touches internal systems — using the Context Engine to connect an agent to order management, CRM, or other systems of record so it can resolve full customer requests, not just answer FAQs.
• Ongoing agent quality management — using Explorer and Insights to analyze conversation performance, run tests, and catch issues, rather than deploying an agent and leaving it unmonitored.