Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor declared last week: the era of clicking buttons is over.
He isn't just floating a concept — his company Sierra has reached $100 million in annual revenue and a $10 billion valuation in two years, backing up the claim.
What Sierra does
Sierra builds enterprise-grade AI customer service agents. Instead of FAQ bots that give irrelevant answers, these agents can check bills, modify orders, process refunds, and update addresses — actually solving user problems.
Its client list spans two distinct worlds: tech companies like Deliveroo, Discord, Ramp, Rivian, SoFi, and Tubi, and traditional enterprises including ADT (smart home security), Bissell (vacuum cleaners), Vans (sneakers), Cigna (health insurance), and SiriusXM (satellite radio).
This customer mix itself says something: AI customer service agents are no longer just toys for tech companies — traditional enterprises are seriously buying in.
Ghostwriter: the agent that builds agents
Sierra's core new product is Ghostwriter, a meta-agent platform for creating other agents.
The logic: previously, deploying an AI agent required engineers to configure workflows, design UIs, and define trigger rules. Ghostwriter attempts to natural-language this entire process — you describe what kind of agent you want, and it automatically generates, configures, and deploys it.
Sierra calls this model "agent as a service." You're not buying a software tool; you're buying the ability to generate agents that do real work, tailored to your business needs in real time.
Concrete example: Ghostwriter helped Nordstrom deploy a full customer service agent in four weeks. Four weeks, not four months.
What "the era of clicking buttons is over" means
Taylor's statement reflects a judgment about the paradigm of software interaction.
For decades, using software meant opening an interface, finding the right button, form, or menu among dense options, clicking, and waiting for results. This UI-driven model has barely changed from the desktop era to mobile.
Sierra's bet: describing intent in natural language, with AI executing the specific actions, will replace most UI interaction scenarios.
Not "you tell AI what you want, AI gives you a plan, then you click" — but "you say what you want done, and it gets done."
Starting with customer service has strategic logic: service workflows are complex, repetitive, and rule-heavy — ideal for AI takeover. But Taylor's ambition clearly extends further. Ghostwriter's positioning already goes beyond customer service, targeting "all click-based workflows."
The weight of $100M in two years
Sierra was only publicly revealed in February 2024, co-founded by Clay Bavor (former Google Labs VP) and Taylor.
In under two years:
- Annual revenue exceeded $100 million (as of November 2025)
- Valuation reached $10 billion (after a $350 million funding round in September 2025, led by Greenoaks Capital)
This growth rate is fast for enterprise software. Compared to Salesforce's own early trajectory, Sierra is not lagging.
Taylor naturally brings resource advantages — he's not only a former Salesforce co-CEO but also chairman of OpenAI's board. How much this background helps in landing large enterprise clients needs no elaboration.
Not every agent is an agent
Behind Sierra's growth is a less-discussed issue: the enterprise customer service AI space is already crowded.
From big players like Salesforce Agentforce and Microsoft Copilot to a host of AI customer service startups — why Sierra?
Taylor's answer: most so-called "AI customer service" is actually advanced FAQ, backed by knowledge base retrieval. Sierra's agents genuinely perform operations — checking orders, changing addresses, processing refunds — which requires real integration with backend systems, not just text generation.
Ghostwriter, in a sense, is designed to solve exactly this problem: lowering the engineering barrier to "connecting with backend systems," enabling more enterprises to quickly deploy agents that actually do things, not just chat windows that answer questions.
Whether the era of clicking buttons is truly over isn't for one person to decide. But Sierra reaching this scale in two years at least shows that enterprises are willing to pay real money for "AI that executes operations for you, not just gives advice."
Sources: Sierra's Bret Taylor says the era of clicking buttons is over (TechCrunch), CocoLoop, Bret Taylor's Sierra reaches $100M ARR in under two years (TechCrunch), Bret Taylor's Sierra raises $350M at a $10B valuation (TechCrunch)