Bret Taylor of Sierra on AI agents, outcome-based pricing, and the OpenAI board
About this episode
Bret Taylor discusses AI agents, outcome-based pricing, and insights from his experience on the OpenAI board.
Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and Chair of the OpenAI board, joins John for a pint to discuss the rapid shift toward an agentic future. In this episode, Bret explains why outcome-based pricing is the future of software business models, and why he believes the atomic unit of AI productivity is a process, not a person. They cover why big companies struggle to adopt AI because they are “shipping their org charts.” Bret also discusses a new type of hyper-generalist, reflects on his experience with the OpenAI and Twitter boards, and explains why he believes we might see the end of the smartphone era. Timestamps (00:00:26) Coding (00:16:23) Sierra (00:27:14) Agentic UX (00:38:47) Building support agents (00:45:43) Co-developing with the models (00:50:08) SaaSpocalypse (01:00:50) Stripe Sessions (01:01:33) Outcome-based pricing (01:09:14) Is Sierra short AGI? (01:13:50) AI productivity (01:23:47) How to structure a tech business (01:30:25) Board drama (01:38:24) AI predictions
More episodes of Cheeky Pint
- What comes after smartphones, with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel
- The economics and trends of the restaurant industry, with Tony Xu of DoorDash
- The world of voice AI, with Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs
- The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai
- Compliance at scale and why TAM is a distraction with Christina Cacioppo of Vanta
- The 20-year journey to fully autonomous cars with Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Cheeky Pint podcast page.