Change agents: Brex
Editors’ note: This post features Camilla Matias, Chief Operating Officer of Brex, in collaboration with Clay Bavor, Co-Founder of Sierra.
The Internet paved the way for websites, mobile for apps, and AI for agents — and fairly soon, agents will be the primary way businesses engage with their customers. This is a huge shift from traditional rules based software to systems that can think, reason, and take action on their own. For a highly technical company like Brex with a goal to become AI-native fast, the decision whether to “build or buy” our customer agent was an important one.
Ultimately we chose to build with Sierra because we wanted our engineering team focused on what Brex does best — helping companies spend smarter — while still maintaining complete control over our customer experience.
Six months later and Brex’s Sierra-powered customer agent can handle everything from basic support questions to looking up account data, tracking card deliveries and retrieving transaction details. Customers now get their answers 90% faster, saving them over 15,000 hours per year. And if a customer needs to chat with a live agent, the seamless integration with Brex’s contact center ensures they are reliably routed to the right person, with the correct context.
Customers now get their answers 90% faster, saving them over 15,000 hours per year.
Speed and simplicity were also key for Brex. Our Operations and Customer Experience (CX) teams can build customer journeys themselves without code — while our engineering team has access to the underlying agent via Sierra’s Agent SDK. This ensures that it’s tightly integrated with Brex’s broader software development lifecycle. Also because Sierra’s Agent OS is multimodal, we were quickly able to pilot voice the same quarter we launched chat.
Since Brex and Sierra started working together — and as we scale AI to more and more parts of both our businesses — three things have become very clear.
- For companies to gain the full benefits of AI, automation tools like agents need to be accessible to, and manageable by, both technical and non-technical employees.
- Whether you work in CX, operations, or engineering, your role will evolve into managing AI systems to help you scale and innovate, versus doing the heavy lifting directly.
- AI helps solve the age-old tension between the cost and quality of care, so more companies can have more conversations with their customers — generating valuable insights that can be used to improve their products and services.
It’s taken a while for the technology to catch up with the hype — and applied AI is still in its infancy. But together we’ve shown how you can build better customer experiences (with higher CSAT and resolution rates) and deliver improved business outcomes (higher revenue and margins) with AI.
