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12 Sept 2025 The Logan Bartlett Show EP 150: Bret Taylor (CEO, Sierra): A New Class of Software Winners

“The thing I think will happen, which is a mix of competition and technology adoption is a lot of AI agents now are being compared to their human counterparts, whether it's labor costs or effectiveness, in a market like software engineering or customer service in area that you know, perhaps like you know, conventional wisdom as AI agents will come to be dominant parts of this industry.”

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12 Sept 2025
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The Logan Bartlett Show

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…w of how to value software, just as either a venture capitalist or an economist, it's really changed the markets. And I think I'm excited for that. I think it's going to be a really positive thing for industry. The other great thing is I can dub over you saying Harvey and slice and LaGoura for the totality of that. And so we don't have to give any plugs to, you know, to hearty throughout this. It's a great market. No, it's a great example too, though. I'm curious, like one of the things that I've thought about with your example, and I'd be curious what you think of this is like, this some extent, the outcome-based pricing in general is so demonstrable ROI. And it's very clear what people are willing to pay for it in some ways. And also, you're somewhat beholden to alternatives in some ways. And so I think about what value I get from Zoom. And if Zoom was the only thing that existed in the world, I don't know. We could probably get Red Point to pay $10 million for it or something, right? Just because it's like that impactful to our day to day. But they don't get to charge that because there's teams and there's Google Meet and there's there's other stuff like that. And so I guess as you think about outcome-based pricing for your business or for Harvey and LaGoura, like doing work in that way, is there any framework or like how do you think price pressure plays out in some ways when there are these alternatives that can exist? Do you think that it ends up eroding some of the the ROI pricing that you can get in the early days? I have a slightly different way of thinking about it, but I'll try to answer your question directly too. You can reject my question. No, it's like really obnoxious. That's a different question. I think part of the reason that there's price compression for tools like Zoom or Slack and Teams is in part because the value you get from a sort of horizontal productivity tool is very hard to measure. If you just think about running a 120,000-person company that's a global company, you're paying per seat for something like a Zoom or a Slack or something. It's sort of funny because you're paying the same value per seat for like the most sophisticated research and development engineer and like the new grad in your pick the least strategic department of whatever that company does. As a consequence, I think when you're thinking of horizontal software, whether it's productivity software, communication software, you end up with pricing that is somewhat commoditized and there are some rare exceptions where companies are able to charge premium. In contrast, if you look at the enterprise software market that are oriented towards departments, say service now for ITSM or Salesforce or CRM or SAP for ERP systems, the value that those companies derive per seat for their application is traditionally much larger, usually more than an order of magnitude of software like Zoom, even though many fewer people use it, but it's closer to business value. You know the value of balancing your company's ledger and auditing your financials before earnings call, you know the value of a sale. As a consequence, the business value you're selling is more alue. You know the value of balancing your company's ledger and auditing your financials before earnings call, you know the value of a sale. As a consequence, the business value you're selling is more measurable, it's closer to that business value. The analogy I would give for outcomes based as we're going from impression ads to CPC ads and one way of looking at outcomes based pricing that I don't agree with is you're leaving money on the table. That would be like making a modern, you know, cost per click ads auction saying you're leaving impressions on the table. And that's not the way anyone thinks about anymore, just because history is played out and the value has accrued towards CPCs and cost per conversion now for modern ad networks. I think in the sort of digital economy, the closest you can get to a measurable accountable outcome, the more value will accruate your platform. And so going back to your question, we'll competition cause price compression probably, but I think in general, you know, the closer you are to really valuable business outcome, the more your platform will be valued relative to the value of that business outcome, as opposed to being compared to another piece of technology. And so, you know, it's interesting, I'm not sure what outcomes based would be for Zoom because you'd have to describe the value to every single video call you have. And I'm sure some are quite important when you're, you know, closing a huge deal and some are totally trivial. And that's just not easy. In serious business, we help build AI agents for customer experience and you know your cost per contact in your call center and you know the cost savings that an AI agent could drive, you know, the value of a new product sale and if your AI agent helps make that sale, just like, you know, how much, you know, you pay a salesperson for doing that, you know, how much is valuable it is to your agent. And as a consequence of being really close to that value, I think it's a really natural way to charge for it. And for companies, it means they can model this not proportional to sort of the cost of a technology, but proportional to the value that they're getting as a business. The thing I think will happen, which is a mix of competition and technology adoption is a lot of AI agents now are being compared to their human counterparts, whether it's labor costs or effectiveness, in a market like software engineering or customer service in area that you know, perhaps like you know, conventional wisdom as AI agents will come to be dominant parts of this industry. You have to imagine that in 10 years you'll start comparing agents to other agents and then only to a whole sorts of differences, you know, the cost won't be comparing to labor costs, you'll be comparing it to inference costs, but the effectiveness will presumably be different. And I think the thing people often missed are second order effects. So just going back to Sierra's business, I think a lot of people think about AI agents for customer experience and they think call center automation. And that's true. And you know, the phone call costs $20 today and ack to Sierra's business, I think a lot of people think about AI agents for customer experience and they think call center automation. And that's true. And you know, the phone call costs $20 today and it costs 20 cents with AI. Wow, that's a great opportunity to recoup operating expense savings. But imagine you run a big telecommunications company and your entire business is based on lifetime value. And you have some subscribers who are on a higher tier plan for 10 years or some subscribers are on a lower tier plan for one year. Your business is really a function of customer acquisition costs and attrition. And all of a sudden, you know, your $20 phone call went to 20 cents. Are you just going to recoup those costs so you think how many more conversations can I have with my subscribers and actually increase the size of the plan they're on, reduce the likelihood that, you know, they see it out on television and switch to another, you know, mobile phone provider. And all of a sudden, you realize, wow, that's a lot more important than the operating expense savings I might have gotten from reducing my BPO costs. And I think it will actually change the market. And so in some ways, you could say, you know, will the first or second order facts be price compression? I actually think it will be much more dramatic than that, which is actually what you do with customer engagement will just shift entirely and you'll stop thinking of it as a cost center. When the price of a phone call starts to approach the price of a page view, you're going to do a lot more of them. And as a consequence, I think it's just going to really up end to the markets. And in particular, I think the way you'll value it is very hard to predict right now. But I think it will go closer towards business outcomes than the cost of the technology. I guess it wrapped in that. And I don't mean to ask you to speculate about other businesses, because you have a great one that you're running here today. But there is this analogy that I've sort of flipped back and forth in my mind a little bit, which is internet versus mobile of what is AI as an opportunity set, does the outcomes set look more like the internet in that the value captured by big independent standalone companies is larger than that of existing businesses that have leveraged the technology in some way, shape or form versus mobile. I think we could probably both agree that the biggest beneficiaries of mobile were probably Google with Android, Apple with the App Store, Facebook, probably most of the value that was created was probably in some type of incumbents in some way. And I guess as you think about where there might be net new opportunities or where vectors of value are going to be created, do you think that do you think the same about the internet? The most of the value accrued to Amazon and Google as opposed to it's actually I just haven't done the math on it. I've not argued with you actually. It's true with the most valuable companies of all time and you know in the top five of the you know SMB 500 and all that. But it's so interesting. I remember the book The Long Tale and all that but it's it's created…

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