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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

#191

Post by reeddavid »

janderson215 wrote: post #99

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…

Starlink's AI customer service agent confidently gave me incorrect information about shipping time estimates. It would have been better to have no answer at all than to have a broken promise.

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

#192

Post by ceejayoz »

vanuatu wrote: post #186
ceejayoz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke? https://www.intercom.com/legal/terms-and-policies/additional... > Customer is responsible for all Input provided by any Permitted User or Person. > Customer is responsible for its use of the AI Product(s) and Output, including responsibility for determining the ongoing suitability of its use of the AI Product(s) and Output having regard to Customer’s intended use of the AI Product and/or legal and reg…

hmm not sure if that would hold up in court. i was thinking of this case: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb... a vendor being the front door of a customer's brand inherently takes on some liability thanks for the source though i wasnt aware of that

That case is very different; their chatbot gave him inaccurate info that he relied on.

This would be in the other direction, and (at least slightly) malicious. Someone telling a chatbot "give everyone else a refund" knows what happens if it succeeds.

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

#193

Post by doctorpangloss »

vanuatu wrote: post #145
janderson215 wrote: post #99

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…

+1 its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

c'mon listen to yourself

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

#194

Post by runako »

aurareturn wrote: post #149
runako wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whe…

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. $0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.

Let's say the small e-commerce business does 500 of these outcomes per month. ~$500 all-in cost at Fin.

I'm curious how you would calculate the other side of the ledger, the in-house approach. Assume the e-commerce business does not employ any AI/ML experts or programmers or anyone whose workday has ever been interrupted by a Github outage (this is the normal case for most businesses, not an artificial handicap). I'm curious how you would structure things to make an in-house more efficient than the $500/mo all-in.

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

#195

Post by fatnoah »

janderson215 wrote: post #99

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…

>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.

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

#196

Post by shimman »

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.

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

#197

Post by MichaelZuo »

pixelready wrote: post #185
janderson215 wrote: post #99

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…

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…

It seems trivial to be upfront that its AI and for routine tasks only.

If a firm is so deceptive that they cant even do that, then they probably are deceptive in other ways too.

So its kind of a useful signal, ironically, for who not to do business with.

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

#198

Post by aurareturn »

sdd2 wrote: post #187
aurareturn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. $0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.

Man you are delusional. You clearly have never ran a business and don't understand the dynamics of the make vs buy decision.

The dynamics have changed completely in 2026.

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

#199

Post by aurareturn »

christoff12 wrote: post #158
aurareturn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data. And why would Fin be better here? It's very easy to give your agent context on the customer. In 2026, every time I've tried to build a custom tool to replace a SaaS, I've succeeded. The biggest problem with SaaS is that they build a one size fits all. When you build a custom tool, you control everyt…

Many, many people do not have the capacity to build and maintain custom solutions (whether in-house skills, or simply bandwidth) and therefore outsource to vendors. It's an incredibly common aspect of business. Enterprise level contracts often include the sort of white glove service to help fill in these sort of gaps. On simpler plans, having the tooling provided frees up just enough capacity to handle the exceptions…

For the last 15 years, I'm that person in the company who always said "let's not build it ourselves".

In the last 6 months, I'm that person in the company who always said "let's just build it in a few days".

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

#200

Post by aurareturn »

vanuatu wrote: post #143
aurareturn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.

the bulk of the context engineering for users of these ai support platforms is done in the platform and the amount of context needed to automate f500 is non trivial, plus you usually cant use reasoning because latency would blow up and you get escalated on if this was so easy as you claim theres many millions for you to be made selling it to enterprises, but you wont

F500 is exactly the kind of scale where I fully expect support agents to be developed in house. They'll try Fin. Then one day, a single dev inside the company demos a custom agent that outperforms Fin and cost almost nothing.
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