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.
I'm starting to think it's wise to call a business's support line before ever doing business with them. Actual human immediately? You're at the top of the list. Phone menu labyrinth followed by a human? Ok, fine. Chatbot? Eliminated from contention.
Unless it’s a Meta AI support agent, in which case it will bend over backwards for you up to and including resetting other people’s passwords for you. Now that’s service!
Various companies have found the flip side of that: the AI agent can be overly helpful, and offer you things you're not entitled to. Such as unlocking other people's accounts, or discount flights, or so on.
Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.
afaik you are not the customer for customer support, and in the vast majority of cases human phone support is setup for the opposite case where people just want to be walked through something they can't find in the UI.
So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.
This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.
I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.
I would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t.
I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.
Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
Tier 1/2 typically has greater access to systems than humans do. They can operate in ways that AI agents just don't have access to, maybe for good reasons.
For example, I lost my debit card while traveling. Only an agent could route the card to my hotel.
I like the idea I read somewhere that AI text and agents break the social contract of communication. That if you can’t be fucked to write something yourself to me, then I shouldn’t bother to read it.
However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.
For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.
On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.
That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.
The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware.
The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.
For people like you and me, the only reason for contacting support is when a human decision is needed, ie the UI doesn't allow us to do what we need. This is always the company's fault, and a chatbot is of no use in these cases.
But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.
AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.
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 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.
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
I can't answer that because it's irrational anyway. I don't know, how many millions of people work in support? Because the assumption that all those jobs will disappear is what is holding up the public valuations
> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway
Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
I am not going to do a DCF on this because the assumptions are all invented anyway. But back of the envelope:
>> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support?
Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion.
>> How much market share does Fin capture?
Let's conservatively assume 5%.
>> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple?
5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's assume deflated 6x revenue valiation, not the 15x these things were fetching two years ago, and you get a ~$90B company valuation (that it should grow into soon at least).
And it sold for $3.5b
So the price is telling you the real revenue is nearer 300m than $15b, which puts the actual AI-support software market in the low single-digit billions. Not hundreds of billions
And if the TAM is real but just being captured by the incumbents: Salesforce's own Agentforce, the supposed winner, is at $1.2B ARR. The "someone else is eating it" defense still has to point at the someone, and no income statement anywhere shows hundreds of billions of revenue
For Nvidia to be at $5T and the hundreds of billions a year of capex behind it only pencil out if that compute throws off a huge revenue stream downstream. Support is imo the cleanest test there is to demonstrate future value of AI in the real world (literally the first thing everyone said when ChatGPT 3.5 came out was that support will be eaten first). It's the most mature, most deployed, most automatable, and the exit price of its best player is...pretty small
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.
Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin?
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors.
I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.
I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.
The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house.
There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?
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
They’ve been responsible for a number of crashes in our iOS app since they switched to agentic coding. It’s become our most unreliable 3rd party library.
That prose is painful to read. It has such a cloying quality to it, even when compared against other name change announcements like the rebrand of Google to Alphabet
Wow. So a deal like this is not overnight, its 6-12 months in the making at least. So the name change comes as they knew the deal was closing and doubled down on this new branding for customer agents. Maybe because Saleforce wants Salesforce Fin Customer Agent as a product. Who knows. Don't want to read the post...
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?"
Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud (not to be confused with Agentforce, which will have basically the same goals and the same target market, until they kill off Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud eventually).
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?
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.
The reason people want to get a human on the other end of the line is usually because they want some sort of remediation,like a refund or need to escalate something to someone who can take an action. Right now, AI agents just barf the FAQ back at you. Which is great for your tier 0 calls, but without an easy way to bypass they are just underlining the problem inherent in gethuman.com needing to exist.
Now if AI agents are free to issue refunds or discounts by their own? Great, let's do that and suddenly most people are on board. But get ready for rampant abuse.
Best solution would be an AI cyborg system where it readies a recommendation and a human swings by and approves or denies it without wasting time talking to people. But users would hate that (anti-social), it would still be ripe for abuse. But it is likely the longer term solution, as people will quickly realize they can use web chat or Google AI to get the exact responses as your FAQ bot which means you have removed actual customer service and this is a non-product.
If I had to guess, there's two things they feel AI doesn't address:
1. People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services. Outside of rare exceptions and inquiries, of course.
2. AI has not advanced enough to trust it outright, nor does it have a physical body. So it can't really do anything you wouldn't already just be able to put in the UI for the customer, without needing it's actions reviewed and confirmed by an accountable human. See: accidental truck giveaways.
So investing into AI support over making your business better is seen as misallocation. And using AI support instead of just improving the service is seen as inconvenient. And using AI support when it needs humans to do the support anyway is seen as inefficient.
> People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services
It'd be weird to start a startup around that, sounds like something for a consulting business instead, parent specifically mentioned they've founded customer support startup, must be something actually related to customer service, I'm assuming.
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
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.
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.
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
Say you grabbed a random selection of just 100 million people in the world, then ask them two questions, "Have you heard about Nike?" and "Have you heard about Cursor?", what would you guess the ratio would be like?
Even when you use "Nike the Company" vs "Cursor as a general search term" to compare search history in Google Trends, it's 71/5, so I'm guessing most people would say they've heard about Nike, while probably most never heard about any software program called "Cursor".
Fair point, those are valuable for other reasons. My point was more to illustrate "Nike is valuable because of the brand", without using those exact words :)
Intercom allegedly has ~400M of annual revenue, making the multiplier less than 10X. Huge customer base and established brand. Looks like a steal indeed!
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.
Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.
So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.
This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.
I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
Tier 1/2 typically has greater access to systems than humans do. They can operate in ways that AI agents just don't have access to, maybe for good reasons.
For example, I lost my debit card while traveling. Only an agent could route the card to my hotel.
However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.
For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.
On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.
That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.
It could be great but it’s already awful.
The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.
But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.
AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.
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.
Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
>> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion.
>> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%.
>> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple?
5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's assume deflated 6x revenue valiation, not the 15x these things were fetching two years ago, and you get a ~$90B company valuation (that it should grow into soon at least).
And it sold for $3.5b
So the price is telling you the real revenue is nearer 300m than $15b, which puts the actual AI-support software market in the low single-digit billions. Not hundreds of billions
And if the TAM is real but just being captured by the incumbents: Salesforce's own Agentforce, the supposed winner, is at $1.2B ARR. The "someone else is eating it" defense still has to point at the someone, and no income statement anywhere shows hundreds of billions of revenue
For Nvidia to be at $5T and the hundreds of billions a year of capex behind it only pencil out if that compute throws off a huge revenue stream downstream. Support is imo the cleanest test there is to demonstrate future value of AI in the real world (literally the first thing everyone said when ChatGPT 3.5 came out was that support will be eaten first). It's the most mature, most deployed, most automatable, and the exit price of its best player is...pretty small
Salesforce trades at a 4x revenue multiple, FYI.
Also, taking a TAM and multiplying it by 5% to back into a revenue figure is like “if we only get 1% of the market” math.
I’m not saying you’re directionally wrong. But the claims you’re making can be rigorously made. And I’d argue they’re interesting when they are.
That $3 bln number encodes all of that in a price. Not much more to rationalize. It's quite beautiful.
Fin is a short term play and that's fine.
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.
I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.
I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.
There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?
When will I be able to talk to Salesforce Apex from Salesforce Apex?
https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/
https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/
Almost like a pre-announcement about the acquisition?
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?
but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.
Now if AI agents are free to issue refunds or discounts by their own? Great, let's do that and suddenly most people are on board. But get ready for rampant abuse.
Best solution would be an AI cyborg system where it readies a recommendation and a human swings by and approves or denies it without wasting time talking to people. But users would hate that (anti-social), it would still be ripe for abuse. But it is likely the longer term solution, as people will quickly realize they can use web chat or Google AI to get the exact responses as your FAQ bot which means you have removed actual customer service and this is a non-product.
1. People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services. Outside of rare exceptions and inquiries, of course.
2. AI has not advanced enough to trust it outright, nor does it have a physical body. So it can't really do anything you wouldn't already just be able to put in the UI for the customer, without needing it's actions reviewed and confirmed by an accountable human. See: accidental truck giveaways.
So investing into AI support over making your business better is seen as misallocation. And using AI support instead of just improving the service is seen as inconvenient. And using AI support when it needs humans to do the support anyway is seen as inefficient.
It'd be weird to start a startup around that, sounds like something for a consulting business instead, parent specifically mentioned they've founded customer support startup, must be something actually related to customer service, I'm assuming.
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.
You can't possibly mean a glorified editor-shell isn't as valuable as say Nike, Deutsche Bank, Target, Ford or Nintendo?
That's a glorified feet-shell. So like-for-like?
Even when you use "Nike the Company" vs "Cursor as a general search term" to compare search history in Google Trends, it's 71/5, so I'm guessing most people would say they've heard about Nike, while probably most never heard about any software program called "Cursor".
I do think 60B for Cursor is way overvalued. Just not sure how to quantify
While I think that this is a bad move for Intercom, it's actually brilliant for Dublin and Ireland that they have finally exited.
Lots of embedded assumptions about growth and margins to convert that revenue multiple to discounted cash flows.
https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/quarterly-results...