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The Logan Bartlett Show · 2 min · Sep 12, 2025

Applied AI companies need value beyond making the tech work

Bret Taylor · CEO, Sierra

Bret Taylor says early AI products win by making difficult capabilities work, but that advantage fades as platforms mature.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 5:59Outcome pricing captures value beyond cost savings8 min
  2. 18:00Incumbents struggle most with the messy middle of a shiftPro pick 8 min
  3. 1:07AI agents expand software into labor markets5 min
  4. 27:33Applied AI companies need value beyond making the tech work2 min
Up next · BG2Xiaomi built a car factory in three years with 2,000 workersPro pick 7:03
“if that continues to be your value proposition from 1998 through 2025 you're not going to exist as a company because it becomes a commodity”
Bret Taylorat 28:25 · The Logan Bartlett Show
28:25

Takeaways

  1. Early platform value often comes from making difficult technology usable.
  2. Agent and voice capabilities that are hard today may become commodities.
  3. Ask what the product delivers once the technology itself is no longer a differentiator.

About this segment

Bret Taylor says early AI products win by making difficult capabilities work, but that advantage fades as platforms mature. Applied AI companies need durable product value beyond the underlying technology.

Bret Taylor

Bret Taylor is CEO of Sierra and chairman of the board of OpenAI.

Co-founded and leads Sierra, an enterprise AI agent company; chairs OpenAI's board and co-created Google Maps.

  • Logan Bartlett, Host · Software Investor, Redpoint Ventures

    Backs enterprise software companies like Ramp, Cribl, Cyera and Legora.

From “Bret Taylor: A New Class of Software Winners”, Sep 12, 2025. Watch the full episode

Answers “Are AI wrappers a real business?” See all 13 answers

Transcript

From the transcript The Logan Bartlett Show publishes with the episode.

  1. 27:38

    about the technology evolution which is in the early days of a new technology whether it's the smartphone or the web browser in the early days of the technology adoption cycle a lot of the value and as making it just work like it's it's hard to make a website or a database that scales to consumer scale on a website that was true in 1995 it was true in 1998 in 2025 it's absolutely trivial to make a website it's absolutely trivial to make a scalable database you're going to sell or whatever and do it in afternoon so if you're in the early days these technology cycles often startups and incumbents will be selling the vision of what that new platform is and it works and that's the value proposition if that continues to be your value proposition from 1998 through 2025 you're not going to exist as a company because it becomes a commodity because essentially

  2. 28:40

    the platform matures and so the entire ecosystem around it matures I assume that will happen with a reasoning agents and action-taking agents and voice agents and all the things that are really really hard today and so as a consequence I think you know for companies that are building applied AI agents they need to focus today on making it work because it's one of the main values that the companies provide but they need to as you think about you know building a product which is like what is our value on top of that and you know what I was joking around about is like every SaaS coming just a database in the cloud well there's it turns out they've created a ton of value on top of that database no one cares about the fact that the database scales anymore that's not like a question you have about your SaaS product and if you do it's got bigger problems right

  3. 29:34

    and I think so I think what's going on now is I think people are not in a rational way sort of just literally translating the technology to a domain and the question I would have if I were doing due diligence for your companies like what is the product you know like once once the fact that the technology works is no longer the differentiator what does it become