The era of clicking buttons is over, says Sierra’s Brett Taylor

Brett Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, a startup that builds AI agents for enterprise customer service, is convinced that the way humans interact with software will change in the near future.

Last month, Sierra launched Ghostwriter, an agent designed to build other agents. With its Agent-as-a-Service tool, the startup intends to replace traditional click-based web applications with natural language. Users simply describe what they need, prompting Ghostwriter to independently create and deploy a specialized agent to carry out the task.

The idea of ​​replacing software with language-based prompts is interesting largely because many of the tools currently used in organizations are not used regularly, asserts Taylor, who was previously co-CEO of Salesforce.

“You log into Workday when you’re a new employee, probably for open enrollment,” Taylor told an audience at this week’s HumanX conference in San Francisco. Instead of learning how to navigate complex systems, he said users will soon use natural language to complete tasks without interacting with a software interface.

“I really think this is where the world is headed,” Taylor said.

Sierra is already leveraging Ghostwriter to deploy clients “at unparalleled speeds,” he added. Taylor, for example, showed that his startup implemented a Nordstrom dealership in just four weeks.

Sierra announced last fall that it had reached $100 million in annual revenue run rate (ARR), less than 21 months after its founding. The company was last valued at $10 billion when it raised a $350 million round led by Greenoaks Capital in September.

“Most companies don’t want to make software,” Taylor said. “They want solutions to their problems.”

While the fundamental shift in software may be coming as Taylor predicted, several technologists and investors told TechCrunch that currently AI agent implementation is far from autonomous.

Many companies that claim to offer AI agents, including Sierra and legal AI startup Harvey, employ “future-deployed” engineers who must constantly update and fine-tune customers’ agents to ensure they are working as intended.