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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

#201

Post by aurareturn »

spwa4 wrote: post #153
aurareturn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I agree. When I look at Fin's home page and marketing, I think to myself that this stuff can mostly just be text documentation given to an LLM. It's a tool built for MBAs but most of the work is done by a software engineer to give Fin that context in the first place. So all Fin is is a UI on top of the context engineering done by a software engineer who integrated with Fin. It's extremely easy to duplicate Fin's…

Well, it's a few weeks of work, systems integration, and you'll need an SRE too if you're hoping to run it on any scale. But yes, I agree.

You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data?

It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules.

They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.

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

#202

Post by spwa4 »

aurareturn wrote: post #201
spwa4 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a few weeks of work, systems integration, and you'll need an SRE too if you're hoping to run it on any scale. But yes, I agree.

You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data? It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules. They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.

They call it rules? Because of course one of the defining properties of LLMs is that they can decide to deviate, reinterpret, or ... rules. Which makes them more like guidelines, or so the meme goes.

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

#203

Post by vanuatu »

aurareturn wrote: post #200
vanuatu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tech forward f500 is possible (but.. even anthropic used fin)

most f500s are going to outsource. i think sierra is already at 40% of the f50? and each of those deals they have to compete against teams of inhouse engineers and convince execs to buy instead of build

the reality is agents at scale is a hard problem and most f500 engineers are not equipped to solve it

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

#204

Post by bennyelv »

spwa4 wrote: post #112
whyage wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has zero value because you can just buy a bunch of servers and rack them. And on and on.

But how would you ever get the PhD-level mathematical riddle that AWS sends you every month? The one they call the "bill". You can't just get that level off difficulty anywhere!

Once you’ve cracked that one, you can get billing tenure by working out how to explain the Azure invoice….

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

#205

Post by nailer »

phillipcarter wrote: post #188
nailer wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For those who are curious (since we don't want to trample curiosity), Eoghan McCabe is a known abuser -- and has even apologized for it in the past -- and he attended David Sack's Trump fundraising event for the Trump 2024 campaign, including getting a photo with the man. He has reversed his stance on immigration (favoring the current admin's policies and ICE expansion), although it was likely the case that he attend…

I'm not sure "he supports the PayPal/Yammer/Zenifits guy and protecting the US border" was the massive expose you thought it was. Half of the country does that, it's not remarkable at all.

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

#206

Post by aurareturn »

spwa4 wrote: post #202
aurareturn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data? It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules. They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.

They call it rules? Because of course one of the defining properties of LLMs is that they can decide to deviate, reinterpret, or ... rules. Which makes them more like guidelines, or so the meme goes.

And why would Fin's LLM solve hallucination/deviation over Claude/GPT?

A rule is just a line of text to an LLM.

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

#207

Post by mtmail »

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 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.

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

#208

Post by jaredklewis »

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…

If there is something that can be done without human approval, I don't want to call support to do it. I want to be able to do it myself on the company's website. I only ever want to call support if I want something that I think is going to be outside of the usual policy, if that makes sense.

So instead of companies working on their AI support execution, I wish they would just work on their website.

Can someone give me examples of the kind of support they want from a company that could be provided by AI, but could not be better provided by a well designed app and/or site?

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

#210

Post by dzhiurgis »

vanuatu wrote: post #151
carlosjobim wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need an agent for that? They need to look at a database or some rules to make their decisions anyway, so why not make a normal system to let the customer self-serve?

An agent is self serve. Even better because they can disambiguate intent at the top level The average person gets frustrated with finding instructions and forms, they just wanna say “give me a refund” and an agent can execute it autonomously

This.

It's been blatantly obvious for years now that the future is where we have single agent that works out kinks and problems for you. Astonishing, but most companies don't want you to do that, almost like they are dedicated to prevent you to have great ux. IMO few more years and shit like AI tarpit and captcha will be made illegal.

Gudnaet.

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