Massive congrats to Eoghan McCabe, what an amazing story arc. We love when a CEO comes back and gets the business back in fighting shape and then delivers an incredible win. CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS. I freakin' love it.
End of an era. I met Eoghan (and Des) at JSConf back around 2011. Twilio (represented at JSConf by Carter Rebasa) and Stripe (Alex Sexton) were also getting started around that time.
It was a super hopeful time: JQuery meant programming for the web was less painful, sockets and HTML5 SSE meant realtime was just starting.
Intercom and Olark were one of the first two "install this <script> tag" based customer support apps. They made websites a way to talk to companies rather than just read see and buy.
I can't believe the exit took so long, especially in a field so crowded. But it looks like it was well worth it.
Everything around you was made by someone just like you.
The "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space.
but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.
Since we're sharing anecdotes, I work in this space and my team automated a large part of customer support for a large scale up using an AI agent. The kicker is that customers rate their interactions with the AI agent higher than their interactions with customer support staff.
AI is definitely capable of taking on customer support work at the moment, and to a high standard as well. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's not a grift either.
Solving 80% of menial support tickets automatically through agents trained on your help center, freeing up your actual support agents to focus better on meaningful tasks seems a tiny bit more than a grift.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this from but their customers find Fin to be a hugely impactful tool
Wild, the AI support and bots suck so bad, I've literally lost sales due to them. No matter how much support docs and history you feed them with for context, they just don't cut it. People would rather wait for a real person than go in loops with a wrong/bad support answer...
So I haven’t looked into it a ton, but doesn’t it seem like a great case to have an AI answer the call immediately, get the users account pulled up, and document the issue with some refining feedback?
An AI secretary seems perfectly acceptable for both sides. The expectation is that a real human comes in soon after but this seems like a way to free up the most tedious parts of the process for both sides.
Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago.
There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.
Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.
This sucks. I love Intercom. I hate Salesforce. I do not have confidence in Salesforce to be good stewards. Will never forgive how badly they've botched Heroku.
For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.
AI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized.
Good on Intercom for getting acquired.
If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?
I always hated seeing Intercom bugs when a simple help menu would work better, but it proves that being annoying is a winning strategy. As my various SaaS packages have switched to AI bugs, I have never had one successfully help me until I say, "Can I please speak to a human?"
Huge congrats to the intercom team on that! Intercom was pretty great for me during my Percy support years. Their current AI direction is rough, though. When I went to use them for my product I was (am?) building, I found intercom unrecognizable with the entire ai pivot. Honestly made me sad but that’s how it is these days
If that's the exit valuation of the most popular AI support tool (even Anthropic use them) then this doesn't support the trillion valuations of companies like Nvidia, SpaceX (AI), etc
Intercom is a great example of a feature that in theory could have expanded into a more full product but stayed laser focused on that smaller vision instead. Nothing necessarily wrong with that as they did not allow themselves to become fully enshittified. Still it would be cool if they had really expanded it to offer a competition to Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud while preserving their minimalist and design forward approach. I understand that AI became the thing that invested in instead which was inevitable
I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience is far better than the situation we have today. I never have to repeat myself and if it’s tied in with your account specifically, it’s like getting escalated to a level 3 support rep immediately.
There was an Intercom executive making a very interesting case for AI customer support on Patrick mcKenzie's "Complex Systems" a while ago.[1]
My main takeaway from that interview was that tier1 CS is a low-wage, high-turnover industry, so the amount of training agents can realistically get is limited. AI support is cheaper, smarter, and can take in more context faster. With AI, it makes sense to have a "support engineer" who identifies the edge cases and writes Markdown documents instructing agents on what to do in those cases. This actually lets you make agents much, much more helpful than human employees ever could be.
I am convinced, that anything touched by Salesforce is going to become an obnoxious product and at some point either become a plague walled garden one has to deal with at corporate jobs, or it dies an agonizing death, from its own user hostility.
Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.
Is this the same Fin that you get when contacting Anthropic support?
> The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex, that is purpose-built for customer support
Wow. If so, Anthropic is not using their own AI for their own support! (I had assumed the AI support agent was an Anthropic one, because, well, Anthropic.) And given how poor my experience with Anthropic support is, I have a very, very low view of Fin.
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[ 29.6 ms ] story [ 1496 ms ] threadIt was a super hopeful time: JQuery meant programming for the web was less painful, sockets and HTML5 SSE meant realtime was just starting.
Intercom and Olark were one of the first two "install this <script> tag" based customer support apps. They made websites a way to talk to companies rather than just read see and buy.
I can't believe the exit took so long, especially in a field so crowded. But it looks like it was well worth it.
Everything around you was made by someone just like you.
When will I be able to talk to Salesforce Apex from Salesforce Apex?
but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.
AI is definitely capable of taking on customer support work at the moment, and to a high standard as well. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's not a grift either.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this from but their customers find Fin to be a hugely impactful tool
But businesses will always chase that dream of reduced customer contact, so Salesforce will keep selling it to them.
An AI secretary seems perfectly acceptable for both sides. The expectation is that a real human comes in soon after but this seems like a way to free up the most tedious parts of the process for both sides.
There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.
Good on Intercom for getting acquired.
If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?
My main takeaway from that interview was that tier1 CS is a low-wage, high-turnover industry, so the amount of training agents can realistically get is limited. AI support is cheaper, smarter, and can take in more context faster. With AI, it makes sense to have a "support engineer" who identifies the edge cases and writes Markdown documents instructing agents on what to do in those cases. This actually lets you make agents much, much more helpful than human employees ever could be.
[1] (There's a high-quality transcript available) https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/des-traynor/
Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.
> The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex, that is purpose-built for customer support
Wow. If so, Anthropic is not using their own AI for their own support! (I had assumed the AI support agent was an Anthropic one, because, well, Anthropic.) And given how poor my experience with Anthropic support is, I have a very, very low view of Fin.