Bret Taylor from Sierra: The Button Era Is Over, AI Agents Will Replace Interfaces

Bret Taylor, cofounder of Sierra and former co-president of Salesforce, made a radical forecast: traditional software interfaces—buttons, menus, forms—are becoming relics of the past. According to him, an era is dawning in which users simply explain a task, and an AI agent handles everything else. Taylor is one of the few people in the industry whose words are taken seriously at multiple levels.

He steered Salesforce as co-president, was chairman of Twitter's board of directors during its sale to Elon Musk, and is also known as one of the creators of Google Maps. Sierra, which he founded together with Clay Bavor, specializes in AI agents for customer service and works with companies such as WeightWatchers, Casper, and SiriusXM. The essence of his thesis is simple: interface is a crutch that emerged because computers could not understand humans.

Now that language models have learned to conduct full conversations and execute multistep tasks, the need for visual navigation disappears. Instead of searching for the right button in a CRM or a return form on a website, a user simply tells the agent what they want—and the agent acts. A similar shift is already visible in the corporate sector: companies are gradually moving internal processes from forms and portals to chat interfaces with agents.

However, Taylor goes further—he argues that this is not merely a convenient chat overlay on old software, but a complete replacement of interaction architecture. Traditional SaaS products with their complex UIs risk becoming obsolete if an agent can perform the same task without launching an application. For the market, this means serious rethinking of how products are built.

Companies that today invest in polishing UX may discover tomorrow that they are competing not with other interfaces, but with agents that don't need interfaces at all. Taylor's thesis is not simply Sierra's marketing pitch, but a challenge to the entire software development industry.