Ada vs Sierra

Ada is an AI customer service platform from Toronto, founded in 2016 by Mike Murchison and David Hariri. It started as a no-code chatbot builder and has repositioned itself as an agentic customer experience platform: AI agents that answer and resolve customer inquiries end to end across messaging, email and voice, rather than deflecting them to a help article.

The agent orchestrates several large language models, reads your knowledge base, and uses Actions to call your systems so it can look up orders, change bookings or issue refunds. Playbooks encode multi-step standard operating procedures, and the platform includes testing, coaching, analytics and an automated resolution metric to track how many conversations finish without a human. Ada lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance. There is no self-serve plan: pricing is quote-based after a sales demo.

Ada fits large consumer brands with hundreds of thousands of support conversations a year, such as Pinterest, monday.com, Grab and Life360. Smaller teams usually get faster value from Intercom Fin or Tidio Lyro, which price per resolution and install in an afternoon. Zendesk AI agents make more sense if you want to stay inside one helpdesk vendor, and Decagon and Sierra are the main newer enterprise rivals.

In February 2026 Ada launched a unified Reasoning Engine that powers its agents across all channels from one intelligence layer. When evaluating, ask for a pilot on your own transcripts and compare the automated resolution rate, not deflection, against your current baseline.

Sierra is a conversational AI platform that lets large companies deploy branded AI agents for customer service and sales. It was founded in San Francisco in 2023 by Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce and chair of OpenAI's board, and Clay Bavor, a longtime Google executive. Its core job is resolving requests end to end, such as changing an order or rebooking a flight, by taking actions in the company's systems rather than just answering FAQs.

Teams build agents in Agent Studio or let Ghostwriter create one from SOPs, transcripts or recordings. A single agent can run across chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice and ChatGPT. Horizon plans multi-step outcomes over days or months, and Insights adds conversation analysis, monitors, experiments and observability. There are no public plans: Sierra sells enterprise contracts with outcome-based pricing, so you pay for resolved conversations or other agreed results.

Sierra fits large consumer brands with high contact volumes and complex back-end systems; customers shown on its site include SiriusXM, Rocket Mortgage, Gap, Wayfair, SoFi and Vanguard. It is not built for small businesses that want a self-serve chatbot. Intercom Fin is easier to switch on inside an existing help desk, Ada targets a similar enterprise buyer with a longer track record, and Yellow.ai is strong in Asian and multilingual markets.

Sierra is growing fast: it reported $100 million in annual recurring revenue in November 2025 and raised $950 million in 2026 at a reported valuation above $15 billion. Expect a sales-led process and a scoped pilot first.