101–110 of 261 posts
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 outsi…
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.
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 very first interaction I have with Heroku is a two-factor sign-in, and …it's this horrible page hosted on salesforce.com, which doesn't have retina graphics (i.e. is blurry on screens Apple have used for 15+ years), doesn't work properly with automatic one-time-code generators (because the login form is heroku.com, but the two-factor is salesforce.com), and …gah! What a mess. Thankfully you fall through into the pretty, well thought-out Heroku dashboard of yesteryear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's practically putting these decisions in the hands of the customer, and if that's what you want to do, then why not put those functions into the customer facing UI to begin with?
Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.
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.
You want to sell stuff? Don't mind my existence, let me look first at everything you have on display, and I'll initiate the conversations when I feel ready.
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 wit…
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.
I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. There is no model training needed. It's all context. Anyone who is training a Qwen model for their customer support is doing it wrong. Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there. The technical stuff is really easy to build.
> 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.