Sierra turns Ghostwriter into a proactive teammate in Slack and Teams

From a copilot to a team member

Until now, customers used Sierra's Ghostwriter inside the Sierra application, where they prompted it to build and deploy agents. Sierra says its customers have moved "from code to clicks to prompts" with the tool, which has sped up how they build and deploy agents.

The new version changes where and how Ghostwriter works. Instead of signing in to Sierra, teams add Ghostwriter to a channel in Slack or Teams, and it joins the team. Users can @-mention it for an update on how the customer service resolution rate is trending, a chart of how a sales funnel is converting, or to start a new experiment.

Sierra describes the new Ghostwriter as always on, proactive, asynchronous and creative. It draws on the context of the team's conversations and on the millions of customer interactions the company's agent is handling, with the aim of surfacing insights and business ideas that teams did not know they needed.

Examples from customers

Sierra gives several examples of the proactive behavior. One customer wanted to resolve more calls without transferring people to a support associate. Its team used to meet every week to review calls, discuss ideas and decide what to try next, a process that took about a week. Ghostwriter now does the first pass. According to Sierra, it reviews recent calls, identifies three specific changes, shows the conversations behind each, estimates how many customers each change could help, and recommends which two to tackle first. It also shares what Sierra calls a wall of love: five moments of customer delight to inspire improvements. It then helps turn the ideas into experiments, monitors results and tells the team when they are statistically significant.

At another company, Ghostwriter investigated what looked like a payment failure. It found that the payment had succeeded, but the response from the company's system was missing a policy number. It proposed separate fixes for the backend system and the agent integration.

In a third case, Ghostwriter reviewed one company's conversations and suggested an experiment nobody had considered. It had spotted an opportunity to increase both resolutions and revenue, found conversations supporting the idea and proposed how to test it. Nothing was obviously broken, Sierra says. The agent simply noticed a pattern across conversations.

Knowing when to speak up

Sierra says it designed Ghostwriter with a personality focused on reading the room. It is meant to keep quiet unless it has something meaningful to say, and to pick up on social cues such as nobody replying to its messages. Each week it also reflects on how it showed up and adapts based on direct and indirect feedback.

Sierra cites a customer that was compiling a list of papercuts in Slack ahead of a Tuesday review. The afternoon before the review, Ghostwriter posted examples it thought could be added to the list and tagged the appropriate person.

What it means for customers

Sierra argues that when everyone has access to the same intelligence, a company's edge lies in the context and relationships it builds with customers. Ghostwriter is positioned as a way to build agents quickly, hold more conversations with more customers, and then understand that context more deeply to improve experiences and grow the business.

Sierra says it will begin rolling out the new Ghostwriter more broadly the week after its post, so customers will soon be able to judge the claims for themselves.