Intro: Broadcasting live from the Georgia Technology Summit 2025 at the Woodruff Arts Center. This is Business RadioX. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. So excited to be broadcasting from the 2025 Georgia Technology Summit. And so excited to be talking to my first guest today, Reggie Marable with Sierra. Welcome.

Reggie Marable: What’s up. How you doing? It’s great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well I am doing well. I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Before we get too far into things. Tell us about Sierra.

Reggie Marable: Yeah, excited to tell you about Sierra. So Sierra is a startup that we’re based in San Francisco. Um, we’ve been out of stealth for a little over a year, but we’ve been a company for two years. And what we do is we create customer facing AI agents that represent a company’s brand, and they’re integrated in all parts of the customer experience. And these agents are very sophisticated. They can think and reason like human beings. They speak multiple languages. They have emotional intelligence. And then we interconnect to systems of record and sources of data. And these agents can actually take action on your behalf 24 seven so it allows a brand to put their best sales representative and their best customer service agent in front of their customers 24 over seven and allow them to do self-service.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of the idea? How did this come about?

Reggie Marable: Yeah, our company was founded by two incredible technology legends, Bret Taylor, who’s actually doing the keynote today. He’s the former co-CEO of Salesforce, and currently he’s the chairman of the board for OpenAI. And then also Clay Bavor, who is the number two executive at Google who ran Google Labs, which is all there at the time. All their forward thinking bets, technology bets for the company. So two great founders came together and wanted to capitalize on the power of this amazing technology, and our first focus is improving the customer experience.

Lee Kantor: And then who is the target? What size companies are you focusing in on?

Reggie Marable: We pretty much focus on, um, companies that are financial services, healthcare, telecom, technology companies, consumer electronics, uh, travel, tourism, hospitality. Uh, so just think of anything like where you live, work and play and where you’d want to interact with a brand. Those are the companies that we focus on.

Lee Kantor: And then is there a size or is this for enterprise only or is it for any size company?

Reggie Marable: We’re primarily focused on enterprise. But you know, as we continue to grow and make traction, we will be, um, pretty much working with all types of companies, uh, big, small, but primarily focused on the enterprise. But we are evolving our platform to do a lot of self-service. So we will be expanding into mid-market and SMB down the line. But right now we’re primarily enterprise.

Lee Kantor: So what is kind of the pain that these enterprise organizations are facing where Sierra is like the kind of the dream come true problem solver for them.

Reggie Marable: A great question. I just think about how you interact with the brand. I think a lot of brands want to interact with their customers. They just can’t afford to. So I think the main frustration people have is they wait on hold. And then because of the great Resignation, you’re interacting with an agent that has, um, pretty, pretty low tenure. Um, and then there’s a lot of, uh, you know, back end chair swiveling. So the customer experience is not ideal for a lot of brands. So our vision and our goal is to help improve the customer experience by providing a consistent, delightful experience and allowing, uh, businesses to interact with their customers 24 over seven.

Lee Kantor: Now, is it going to kind of get rid of the dreaded phone tree? You know, press one for this, and then you’re going down the series of really bad questions that aren’t really solving my problem, just frustrating me. And then when I finally get to somebody that’s supposed to help, I have to explain it all again.

Reggie Marable: Absolutely. So our our agents, um, pretty much are the front door of the customer experience. And we can interact with your customers in an authenticated experience where we know who you are and we know everything about you, and also in an unauthenticated experience. But we’re the front door of the experience. These agents, you can talk and chat with them. They’re very delightful. Uh, once again, they can think and reason like human beings and and you’re actually able to have a conversation and explain what you need. And then our agents, because they have access to the systems of record, um, they’re able to quickly resolve your issue, um, recommend a product, help you with your subscription, uh, help you troubleshoot a technical issue, so forth and so on.

Lee Kantor: So how quickly does when you’re explaining this to a prospect, how quickly does that aha moment come?

Reggie Marable: Fairly quickly when I can, um, paint the vision where your customers have the ability to interact with you 24 over seven, and it’s going to be a delightful, consistent experience, and they’re going to be able to handle whatever they need 24 over seven, um, on their own time. And they don’t have to wait on hold, and they can speak with someone that can actually handle their issue.

Lee Kantor: Right. But right now they’re moving from something that’s clunky and inelegant to possibly yours. Somebody sold them that clunky thing and used similar words that you’re using. So when do they kind of get that feeling of home? This is different. This is is that something immediate?

Reggie Marable: It’s the power of large language models. A lot of the quote unquote chat bots and ivrs are built off of older technology. Um, this technology has only been around for, um, you know, a little over two years. So it’s the power of this new technology, the power of large language models and the way AI works, it allows you to have very delightful conversational experiences with your customers. Um, and it’s not rigid. It’s not structured. It’s pretty much open form. And that’s the power of this new technology that our platform is built on.

Lee Kantor: And how quickly will a customer be able to implement this once they raise their hand and say, yeah, I’m in.

Reggie Marable: Depends on the complexity of what they want Sierra to build. But we’ve had one of our customers, Casper. I’m sure you’re using Casper mattresses. We were able to build and put their agent on live production and go live in less than a month. Um, some customers that really want to build very complex, uh, multi-step use cases that could be anywhere from 2 to 4 months, but we’re able to move incredibly fast. Um, because what we do is we have a forward deployed engineering model where we provide a dedicated product manager and a dedicated engineer that seamlessly integrates into your technology team and helps you build these agents so we can move as fast as our customers are able to to move once again, we can we can get an agent live as quickly as a month. Uh, sometimes it takes longer. It depends on the complexity.

Lee Kantor: So why was it important for your firm to, um, get involved with the Georgia Technology Summit and sponsor.

Reggie Marable: A great question. So we have expanded to the East Coast. Um, we’re growing at a very rapid pace, and we made the decision to make Atlanta our East Coast headquarters. So we’ve opened a very large office in beautiful Midtown Atlanta, which is not too far from here. And being that we’re going to be a significant, uh, company in this in the city of Atlanta, we felt it was important to become a member of Tag. Support. Tag. And also our co-founder, Brett Taylor is doing the keynote today. So Tag is a very important and influential organization in Atlanta, especially in the technology scene. And we wanted to be part of that.

Lee Kantor: So what is, um, the reputation of Atlanta and tag, you know, from the West Coast kind of point of view?

Reggie Marable: Yeah, Atlanta has quickly emerged as one of, uh, the best technology cities, um, in North America. Uh, shout out to, uh, mayor, Mayor Dickens, who’s really been focused on making Atlanta a technology hub. There’s a lot of great technology companies like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, meta, now, Sierra that have big presence here in Atlanta. And then also there’s a lot of like great institutions. There’s a lot of great talent in Atlanta. There’s a lot happening in this market. So we felt it was really important for Sierra to be part of Atlanta and also partner with Tag. But being a San Francisco based company in Silicon Valley, Atlanta is really emerging as a technology technology city. And we wanted to be here.

Lee Kantor: So how do you kind of how do you see the difference between the way that we’re doing kind of technology and the ecosystem we’ve created here as compared to the West Coast?

Reggie Marable: Yeah, I think Atlanta is still, um, still fairly fairly, uh, still up and coming when you when you think about Silicon Valley, you know, Silicon Valley is kind of been like the hub and heart of technology worldwide where you’ve got, you know, all these incredible companies that are being created. There’s a lot of VC investment firms that are funding these companies, and we’re starting to see a lot of that happening in Atlanta, like there’s a lot of new companies being created here. There’s a lot of innovation. There’s a lot of support from the VC community to help these companies get off the ground. So I think Atlanta could very well be a force, but I think still, Silicon Valley is the heart and soul of technology and new innovation, right?

Lee Kantor: Like there’s a lot more density there than there is here. Um, in terms of number of firms and VCs that are there. Is there anything like what do you need more of? How can we help you at Sierra?

Reggie Marable: Well, once again, we just we want to be part of the Atlanta community. We’re going to be very active in Atlanta. So just partnering with Tag and helping to increase our awareness, we’re going to be doing a lot of hiring. So just letting people know that we’ve got great, uh, positions here. We’re a fast growing company. We’re going to revolutionize how people interact with brands. And we’re hiring sales professionals, sales engineers, agent Asian engineers. So we’re looking for great people. So I think Tag can help increase our brand awareness in the market and help us find some of the best talent in the world to work at Sierra.

Lee Kantor: So right now, talent is a priority.

Reggie Marable: Absolutely. Uh, there’s you can never find enough talent, especially for a fast growing company. So we’re looking for great people, but we’re also looking to establish ourselves in Atlanta. There’s a lot of incredible companies that we feel we can help us leverage this technology to improve their their customer experience. And we really want to make an impact here, not only with hiring people, but also helping a lot of companies that are, you know, that are creating in Atlanta that have big presence in Atlanta. And everyone like, uses these brands and they’re they’re part of the Atlanta community.

Lee Kantor: And so you’re looking also to, um, have conversations with customer experience officers at some of these enterprise companies in Atlanta and the southeast.

Reggie Marable: Absolutely. Customer experience officers, technology leaders. Once again, we believe, uh, Sierra, we are the front and the lead of helping companies use this powerful technology to improve how they interact with your customers. And we want to help all the companies in Atlanta and all the companies in the southeast take advantage of this amazing technology.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Reggie Marable: Yeah, the best way to connect is to go to Sierra II. And I’ll actually spell the name s I e r a I plenty of information on our website. And there’s also a Learn More tab where you can just fill out some information and we’ll reach out and connect with you. But we’d love to talk to you. Once again, we feel that Sierra is a force. We can help companies improve their experience, and we’re here in Atlanta to help.

Lee Kantor: Well, Reggie, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Reggie Marable: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here and look forward to a great day at the conference.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few. At Georgia Technology Summit 2025.