Sierra's Bret Taylor: The Age of Buttons Is Over, AI Agents Will Replace Interfaces

Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra and former co-CEO of Salesforce, has made a radical prediction: traditional software interfaces, meaning buttons, menus and forms, are becoming a relic of the past. He says we are entering an era in which users simply explain the task and an AI agent handles everything else.

Taylor is one of the few people in the industry whose words are taken seriously on several levels at once. He ran Salesforce as co-CEO, chaired Twitter's board during its sale to Elon Musk, and is also known as one of the creators of Google Maps. Sierra, which he founded with Clay Bavor, specializes in AI agents for customer service and works with companies such as WeightWatchers, Casper and SiriusXM.

The core of his argument is simple: the interface is a crutch that exists because computers could not understand people. Now that language models can hold a full conversation and carry out multi-step tasks, the need for visual navigation is disappearing. Instead of hunting for the right button in a CRM or a return form on a website, the user just tells the agent what they want, and the agent acts.

This shift is already visible in the enterprise sector: companies are gradually moving internal processes from forms and portals to chat interfaces with agents. Taylor goes further, however. He argues this is not just a convenient chat layer on top of old software, but a full replacement of the interaction architecture. Traditional SaaS products with their complex UIs risk becoming irrelevant if an agent can do the same job without launching the app.

For the market, this means a serious rethink of how products are built. Companies that invest in polishing UX today may find tomorrow that they are competing not with other interfaces, but with agents that need no interface at all.

Taylor's thesis is not merely Sierra's marketing pitch; it is a challenge to the entire software development industry.