Most of us have spent our lives overestimating the pace of technology adoption. But AI presents the opposite challenge. A year ago almost all code was written by hand, and today it’s mostly written by AI. Three months ago personal agents did not exist, and today people are trusting them with their credit cards.
At Sierra Summit in San Francisco, we set out to see how Sierra can help companies answer the hard questions they’re facing as they navigate this new technology. How do we stay on the frontier when the frontier changes every two weeks? How do we empower consumers while maintaining deep, direct relationships with our customers? If everyone has access to the same AI, how do we differentiate ourselves?
We’re excited to partner with our customers — almost 50% of the Fortune 50, one in three of the leading banks, and 80% of the Fortune 50 healthcare companies — to help them tackle these exciting challenges. There’s a huge opportunity for brands with vision and ambition to put clear blue water between themselves and their competition: to use AI to better serve their customers and grow their businesses faster.
Agent OS: frontier intelligence #
A year ago, an MIT study showed that 90% of AI projects never saw the light of day and yet now token-maxxing is top of mind for CFOs. Token spend starts with the hard challenge of using the right model for the job. Some tasks need deep reasoning, others need speed — you don’t need to drive a Ferrari to the grocery store!
Constellation of models
Agent OS uses a constellation of models that are fine tuned to the task at hand — everything from customer acquisition to sales and service. From the get-go we’ve had fine tuned models like Linnaeus and Darwin to understand what customers are really asking and surface the right answers in milliseconds, without hallucinating.
Today, we’re announcing two new models:
- Curie powers the core orchestration loop of the conversation — deciding what path to follow, what tools to call, and writing the replies your customers see and hear.
- Fleming detects when the caller on the phone is another agent, enabling businesses to handle bots and fraud as well as personal agents.
Agent OS ensures your agent has state of the art compliance and adherence, low latency for voice, and a cost basis that is better than you could build yourself, automatically. So you can focus on building your agent, and we manage the tokenomics on your behalf.
Tandem Voice
There’s nowhere the models matter more than voice, where latency and quality are so noticeable. Tandem Voice enables your agent to think fast and think slow at the same time. As you speak, the Conversation layer hears and responds in real time, understanding mannerisms, tone, and the context of the conversation. Underneath, the Reasoning layer uses the full audio and text transcript to map the path forward.
While the Reasoning layer is deciding what to do, your agent is reacting in real time, letting the customer know it’s checking on an order. Your agent has as much time to think as it needs, while keeping the conversation moving.
Persona Studio
Making your voice agent fast is important, but making your voice unique is how you can really drive differentiation. Voice Personas let you shape how your agent sounds and behaves, from its mannerisms to its formality and style. Getting that personality right isn’t just about your brand, it can drive real business impact: one large subscription business saw its resolution rate improve by over 50% after deploying Voice Personas.
Our new Persona Studio enables you to upload your own voice samples and tune the personality of your agent directly in Agent Studio. No engineering and no AI expertise required.
Personal Agent Protocol
Meeting customers where they are also means being ready when their personal agent contacts them. Personal Agent Protocol is an open standard Meta and Sierra are developing along with industry partners at Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart that defines how personal agents interact with businesses. This open standard will solve some of the biggest questions companies face, like authentication, enabling them to empower consumers and decide what functionality is available to personal agents, via APIs or your company’s agent.
Consumers want speed, dependability, and trust. Brands want visibility and control: to know when a personal agent is acting for a customer so you can decide what it can do. And the companies building personal agents want efficiency and access — a direct, consistent way to work with participating companies.
Ghostwriter: from tool to teammate #
We want Sierra to be a tool that not only makes it easier to deploy agents, but helps your entire company be more effective with AI. Our new, reimagined Ghostwriter will change your conception of how enterprise software should work — with AI proactively helping your teams make more effective decisions and be more agile, even in regulated industries like healthcare and financial services.
Ghostwriter is a teammate that’s always on, monitoring your agent and proactively helping you find opportunities to improve your customer experience. It can detect when APIs go down or metrics look off, enabling you to fix problems before they escalate. And it evaluates your agent continuously, helping you run and manage A/B tests.
With all the context from your agent and your conversations in Slack or Teams, Ghostwriter can find and suggest opportunities you didn’t think of.
Horizon: AI that grows your business #
Back in July, we launched Horizon, a platform that enables agents to pursue long-horizon goals, like originating a loan or getting prior authorization for a healthcare procedure.
With Horizon, you can build agents that go far beyond customer service, truly driving revenue growth. Horizon agents proactively engage with your customers over days, weeks, or months, using the power of agentic AI to determine the steps required to close a sale, upgrade a subscription plan, or schedule a test drive. With each interaction, your Horizon agent gets more intelligent.
Context Engine brings together information from your systems and memories of past interactions. Horizon Advisors are the AI decision-makers that use this context to choose the next best action for each customer. They consider what’s worked in the past to decide when to reach out, which channel to use, and how to move the customer forward, all within the goals and guardrails you set.
Each interaction adds to that understanding, informing the next decision and making the relationship more personal. This is how better customer experiences become a lasting advantage: everyone can access the same models, but the context you build with your customers is uniquely yours. Rent the intelligence and own the context.
Sierra’s partner ecosystem #
With Sierra agents, you can drive measurable outcomes beyond just answering questions — from booking flights to collecting payments, rescheduling appointments and refinancing a loan.
To help deliver on that promise, we’re introducing our partner ecosystem — the technology platforms, marketplaces, and service partners bringing Sierra to businesses worldwide. Our agents are connected to more systems and teams. That means you have the freedom to deliver for your customers, with the technologies and partners you trust.
Bring us your hardest problems #
It’s been two and a half years since we launched Sierra and it’s become clearer than ever that in a world where everyone has access to the same intelligence, your customer relationships are your competitive advantage. With an AI agent as your digital front door, those relationships get deeper with every interaction, creating context that is uniquely yours and which compounds over time. While you can rent the intelligence, you must own the relationship.
Our ask is simple: bring us your hardest problems. The ones that span thirty customer conversations, take weeks or months, multiple systems — and need fifty people on a Zoom just to understand, let alone fix. Those are the problems AI was made for and we’re building Sierra to help you solve them.