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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.
The problem isn't that AI can't give good service. The problem is it's going to be intentionally limited in the service it gives and its ability to make decisions.

Every automated service I ever interacted with was built in a way that it would not help you with anything that incurs a cost to the company that built it.

I think frontier models are really good at solving technical problems. So if your support call is "how do I do this with the product" and there is a way to do that then I agree it can be a great experience. At the point where you need to involve the engineering team and maybe get bugs fixed I imagine the AI will push back because the entire reason the AI is there is to solve cost and if it ends up creating bugs or bugging the engineering team it'll start consuming money instead of saving it. It probably could be engineered to do this but the incentives are pretty strong not do that.

Yeah, I think AI support is great for those low effort calls where someone wants something simple and clear and company policy is set up to just give it to them. That’s why a lot of people like Amazon’s bot, it has direct access to account details and can auto-approve simple things like a return that is slightly outside the return window etc…

But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.

It's all about the execution. Most of our customer's prefer AI (per their feedback, so there is some selection bias) since they can get quick responses 24/7 rather than wait. That said there are still many cases where you need human intervention and it can be frustrating to have to get through the AI first (my experience with Stripe's AI support).
+1

its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

If it’s something easy enough for ai to handle then why isn’t it just an option on a site?
Best AI I have used for support was Githubs, and even then Github has some nuance between its different enterprise offerings that it didnt quite grasp.

I find that 99%+ of support LLMs are just an extra hurdle that cant provide me with what I want.

I used Kogans chat LLM the other day, I gave it the details of my enquiry and it escalated me to a human. The human reviewed the case and then raised a ticket for a technical contact. I am not particularly angry at the LLM or the first human, but one of them is definitely redundant and wasting my time.

>My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution.

This is the key, IMHO. I have not been able to access my Coinbase account for some time due to a login issue. (No error is displayed, but a successful login returns me to the login screen). The AI driven phone agent was actually very good at working through the problem, but there was no escalation to a human after that. When the agent couldn't solve my problem, it told me to mail a physical letter describing my issue to an address on 5th Ave in NYC.

My last customer service call was fast (connection time) and friendly. The person wasn't sure so she said "let me ask my colleague $female-first-name" and I heard her typing. "Is $female-first-name an AI chat bot?" Yes, it was, and then she read out a whole answer, an excerpt that's already on the website. In this case the person added little extra value and I guess will be replaced soon.
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.

[1] (There's a high-quality transcript available) https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/des-traynor/

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.

I don’t understand how viable these helpdesk companies are anymore for non-enterprise customers. We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes. It has long term memory about our business. When a customer messages us, Hermes gets all the relevant details about the customer and creates a Pi session using Gemma 4 running locally and customer talks to that agent. That agent can escalate that issue to Hermes and Hermes can escalate to us.
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.
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.

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.
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
Why does $3.6B sound really low. Intercom seems like a major player in AI customer service. What's the catch here?

If I remember correctly, they were the first of the customer service chatbot SaaS companies to quickly pivot to a complete AI product.

A lot of hype too by their employees and founding team for Fin on LinkedIn. I did NOT expect the final exit to not even touch double digits. Very interesting.

> The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex

When will I be able to talk to Salesforce Apex from Salesforce Apex?

When did intercom change its name to Fin?
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?"
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.

Lots of negativity in this thread, but I think its genuinely impressive that Fin beats GPT-5.4 and Sonnet 4.6 at customer service tasks: https://venturebeat.com/technology/intercoms-new-post-traine...
I'm sad to see Intercom/Fin's CEO, Eoghan McCabe, did not face repercussions after credible allegations about sexually harassing his employees came out in The Information in 2019 [1]. Some quotes:

> When the woman said she, too, wanted to go home, Mr. McCabe told her that he wanted her to remain, the people said. After the other two employees had left, Mr. McCabe made a lewd remark to the saleswoman and said that he would like to sleep with her, the people said. She declined and eventually left his home, they said. > Later, the saleswoman said Mr. McCabe’s actions had frightened her, according to one of the people who spoke to her about the incident, who declined to be named.

> During the meeting, Schuur said she told Mr. McCabe that his behavior was inappropriate. The Intercom CEO cried during the meeting and said that he hadn’t realized there was a power imbalance between himself and the young woman, Schuur said. > “I felt like I was just a guy at a party and she was just a girl,” Mr. McCabe said, according to Schuur. > Two former Intercom employees present for the harassment training seminar said Mr. McCabe didn’t attend.

> At an Intercom party around 2014, Schuur said she witnessed Mr. McCabe slap the saleswoman’s buttocks. At a different event around that time, another former employee said she saw the Intercom CEO place his hand on the same woman’s thigh. Four former Intercom employees, including Schuur, also said the woman told them of the advances, which she said were unwanted.

> A key figure in the company’s culture was Mr. McCabe, described by employees as both brilliant and temperamental, with a tendency to cross boundaries with junior female employees.

> Mr. McCabe, through an Intercom spokesperson, declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement: "In the early years of the company I demonstrated some poor judgment. I apologized at the time [...]"

> But early employees said he also showed flashes of temper and vindictiveness. He was known for occasionally writing scathing messages to employees in group messages, according to a former employee who saw them. On at least one occasion he told another person leaving Intercom that he intended to tarnish their reputation in the tech industry, that person said.

I previously tweeted about this and McCabe threatened to sue me.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/harassment-allegatio...

cached content: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zsAytvQRuEwc0ftY3OtlXwvj...

I thought Salesforce had a few activist investors on the board that wanted the company to stop all acquisitions and focus on the core product. Whatever happened to them? Did they bounce after they hit a payday?

Company is down 30% YTD and Salesforce seems to be back on its acquiring spree.

As someone with extreme phone anxiety to begin with, long waits on phones are deal breakers for me. If you are a company that answers your phone quickly by a real person you've earned yourself a lifelong customer.
This is disappointing. I've worked closely with Intercom for the past few years. I've run Fin implementations at multiple companies. I've found their product team incredibly strong & the product to be customer friendly. Salesforce... not so much.

imo - Fin's AI chat is the best on the backend of empowering teams to self-serve & integrate with Helpdesk. They don't require consultants.

I really hope they don't lose all of that in this acquisition.

I’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin <-> Agentforce and Intercom <-> Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.
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
Given how easy it was to get our own version of an AI service tool set up, I'm shocked to see a huge, capable company buying it's way into that functionality as opposed to using their large existing datasets to fine-tune an internal tool. Is 3.6B really the better option?
Huge outcome for Intercom. I don't see the value at all, but grats to the Intercom team for getting their bag.
I made a free open-source version of Intercom at the start of the year called Opencom-dev after I got sick of paying what felt like extortionate pricing.

What do people see as the moat here for a firm like Intercom? Is it just the existing customer-base and switching-costs / friction?

I don't want to buy a product that doesn't want a human to talk with me before or after sales.
Intercom... well, Fin's announcement: https://www.intercom.com/blog/salesforce-signs-definitive-ag...
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.
Woah, feels like Intercom just threw in the towel. I always thought they if anyone would be the ones to come out on top for customer support. Their brand was #1 in perceived cutting edge in my eyes.
Congratulations to building a cool company that inspired thousands, then converting it to LLM reply bot, and then selling it to enterprise graveyard to be dehumanized and monetized even further.
Yikes, I dont think there is anything special about Fin. They claim they have their own model but it appears they are just using OpenAi and Claude as well which is hidden in their docs.
Good for Intercom. I have to assume that Salesforce will immediately rename this since any brand recognition was already eliminated a month ago.
I had to double check this is the same Intercom that started with Ruby and Rails. And it is. Hopefully Salesforce won't ruin it.
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.
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.

I wonder how long it will take for Attio to change their Chat bot away from Fin and remove any mentioning of them
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?

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
Fin is dangerously close to Walter Jr. naming himself “Flynn” in breaking bad.
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...
I guess all those podcast ads worked for Fin, then.