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Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#61

Post by dzhiurgis »

carlosjobim wrote: post #54
twodave wrote: post #42

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 U…

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 ne…

But chatbots can make decisions too.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#62

Post by embedding-shape »

merlindru wrote: post #37
embedding-shape wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

If you asked the same selection of people about Saudi Aramco or SK Hynix none of them would know what those are either though, right? I do think 60B for Cursor is way overvalued. Just not sure how to quantify

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 :)

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#63

Post by itake »

conception wrote: post #48
twodave wrote: post #42

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 U…

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.

no...

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.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#66

Post by agenticfish »

hienyimba wrote: post #20

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.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#67

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alpineman wrote: post #64

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? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#68

Post by lubujackson »

embedding-shape wrote: post #23
hienyimba wrote: post #20

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 guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

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.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#69

Post by HtmlProgrammer »

hienyimba wrote: post #20

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.

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

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#70

Post by alpineman »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
alpineman wrote: post #64

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? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?

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
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