Bret Taylor

Sierra and enterprise AI agents

Bret Taylor is the co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, an AI company that builds agents for customer experiences at large businesses. Sierra says it uses AI to help companies create customer experiences that feel more personal and humane, working with industry leaders to deliver measurable business results. He co-founded it with Clay Bavor, and the two met while working at Google.^[1]

Sierra lists offices in nine cities: New York, Atlanta, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, Toronto and San Francisco. Its about page names early customers including CLEAR, Casper and Minted and does not publish headcount, revenue or valuation.^[1]

The company launched its product in February 2024, according to a trade report on its later financing. Seven quarters later it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue.^[5]

Funding and traction

On May 4, 2026 Sierra announced a $950 million round led by Tiger Global and GV at a valuation above $15 billion, bringing total capital raised past $1 billion. Coverage described this as its third major raise in about 18 months, after $175 million in late 2024 and $350 million in September 2025, and roughly triple the $4.5 billion valuation of 18 months earlier.^[4][5]

The announcement said annual recurring revenue was $100 million in late November 2025 and $150 million by early February 2026, and that the company serves more than 40 percent of the Fortune 50. These are company-reported figures. Customers named in coverage included Nordstrom, which launched a voice agent in five weeks, Singtel, live in ten weeks with resolution rates above 70 percent, and Cigna, which deployed in eight weeks and cut patient authentication time by 80 percent.^[4][5]

The founders said the money would deepen the Agent OS platform, expand into Europe and Asia, and push agents beyond support into sales, engagement and customer lifetime value, moving from one-time tasks such as order tracking and password resets toward ongoing customer relationships.^[5]

Product cadence

Sierra's blog shows a steady release schedule. In November 2025 it introduced Agent OS 2.0 and the Agent Data Platform. Agents as a Service followed in March 2026, a product called Horizon in July, Voice Personas in August, and Ghostwriter, a version that works as a teammate inside Slack and Teams, in September.^[5][6]

October 2026 was busy. On October 6 the company introduced the Personal Agent Protocol as an open standard with industry partners and published a draft on October 9; on October 8 it launched fleming-1, a model that detects AI callers; and on October 20 it announced a payments partnership with Stripe. It also publishes agent benchmarks, with two new ones posted on October 21 and 22.^[6]

Chair of OpenAI

Taylor is on the board of OpenAI. Wikipedia reports that in November 2023 he replaced Greg Brockman as chairman after Sam Altman was briefly ousted and then reinstated as CEO, and Fortune referred to him as OpenAI's chair in 2024. Sierra's about page lists the board seat without specifying the title, so readers should check OpenAI's own materials for the current wording.^[1][2][3]

In that 2024 Fortune interview he described the work as governance rather than day-to-day operations. He said he joined because he was worried about the company's mission during the weekend of the Altman firing and rehiring, that he does not see an inherent conflict with running Sierra, and that he would step back from decisions where the roles overlap. He argued that Sierra sits at a higher altitude than AGI research, and that OpenAI is a customer rather than a competitor.^[2]

Sierra and OpenAI are also connected commercially: on September 29, 2026 the Sierra blog announced that Sierra had joined the OpenAI Marketplace.^[6]

From Stanford to Google Maps and FriendFeed

Taylor was born in Oakland, California in 1980 and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at Stanford in 2002 and 2003.^[3]

He joined Google in 2003 as an associate product manager intern. Wikipedia credits him with leading the team that built Search by Location and Google Local, predecessors of Google Maps, and notes that its lead describes him as co-creating the product.^[3]

In 2007 he left for Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence and co-founded the social network FriendFeed. Facebook acquired it in August 2009, and the deal led Facebook to adopt FriendFeed's Like button. He became Facebook's chief technology officer in 2010.^[3]

Quip, Salesforce and Twitter

He left Facebook in 2012 to found Quip, a collaborative productivity software company that competed with Google Docs, and Salesforce acquired it in 2016. He became Salesforce's chief product officer in 2017 and was promoted to president and chief operating officer in 2019, then led the acquisition of Slack, which closed in 2021.^[3]

In November 2021 he was named Salesforce vice chair and co-CEO. On November 30, 2022 the company announced he would step down from both roles at the end of January 2023.^[3]

Taylor joined Twitter's board in 2016 and became its chairman in 2021. The board was dissolved after Elon Musk's acquisition in October 2022. He joined Shopify's board in 2023, the same year he co-founded Sierra.^[3]

Why he matters

Few executives have held product, engineering and general management roles at as many of the defining consumer and enterprise platforms of the last two decades, and fewer still have then started a company in the middle of an AI boom. Sierra's growth since its 2024 launch tests whether agents can become a core enterprise software category.^[3][4][5]

His dual role as Sierra's chief executive and a figure at the center of OpenAI's governance puts him unusually close to both the vendor and the customer sides of the market for AI, a position Taylor himself has said he manages through recusal.^[2][3]

On The Executive List

Bret Taylor is ranked No. 25 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Information Officers discipline. The Executive List edition shows him as CEO and co-founder of Sierra; he also serves on OpenAI's board. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.