Bret Taylor (Sierra, OpenAI): Why the future of enterprise software belongs to vertical agents

Sierra founder and OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor joins Pigment co-CEO Eléonore Crespo to discuss how AI agents are reshaping enterprise software and customer experience.

Bret brings a rare perspective on technology waves. He founded Google Maps, served as CTO of Facebook, and was co-CEO of Salesforce before launching Sierra, an agentic AI platform for customer service. In this conversation, he shares what it means to build in the middle of a defining shift, why vertical AI agents will unlock entirely new software categories, and how to design trust into systems that are powerful but imperfect.

Key topics:
Why the wave is always bigger than any one company
Turning customer love into a repeatable system, not one-off heroics
How AI agents will become the atomic unit of enterprise software
Designing for trust when models are non-deterministic
Why vertical specialists with deep domain expertise will win out
The future of user interfaces in a world of personal agents
How leaders can keep learning as AI moves increasingly faster

Read the key takeaways here: https://www.pigment.com/perspectives-...

Guest: Bret Taylor, Founder & CEO of Sierra, Board Chairman of OpenAI
Host: Eléonore Crespo, Co-CEO of Pigment
Production: Marcos Rocha and Pigment
Series: Perspectives by Pigment


Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: Bret Taylor’s career in tech (Facebook, Salesforce, Sierra)
00:23 Lessons from two decades of tech shifts and innovation
01:49 Scaling customer centricity: Building a machine for happy customers
03:35 Reshaping customer experience (CX) with AI agents
09:55 Designing for trust, accountability, and safety in AI agents
13:33 The next leap for AI agents: tooling and design patterns
17:31 The atomic unit of AI as the agent
21:19 Underexplored AI architectures and bringing humans into the loop
23:38 Mental health, AI alignment, and parenting in the age of AI
28:23 How leaders can keep learning amidst constant AI breakthroughs