I had to double check this is the same Intercom that started with Ruby and Rails. And it is. Hopefully Salesforce won't ruin it.
Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
221–230 of 261 posts
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That was a scene in The Office. The salesmen phone the cheaper competitor's customer service while on a sales call to let them see how long they would wait on hold if they needed support. That said, I had an experience recently where the chatbot replaced the phone tree that led to a human and it was very helpful.
Chatbots seem to work fine as long as your request is on the happy path.
Call your bank to get a cashier's check? Great.
Call your bank because the cashier's check never arrived in the mail, and you need to recover the money, but you closed the account the check originally came from? Forget it.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#223I 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…
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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#224I 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 it’s something easy enough for ai to handle then why isn’t it just an option on a site?
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend…
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.
Have fun sinking 100s of hours into improving and maintaing that. Someone who sells software for real estate probably doesnt want to get into building software for customer service agents. This makes no sense. There should be urgency to make the product your selling better, not wasting time building support tools. Just pay for it.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#226I 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…
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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#227Fin is dangerously close to Walter Jr. naming himself “Flynn” in breaking bad.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#228I wonder how long it will take for Attio to change their Chat bot away from Fin and remove any mentioning of them
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#229I don’t understand how viable these helpdesk companies are anymore for non-enterprise customers. We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes. It has long term memory about our business. When a customer messages us, Hermes gets all the relevant details about the customer and creates a Pi session using Gemma 4 running locally and customer talks to that agent. That agent can escalate that issue to Hermes and Hermes can escalat…
"This user is contacting us, and has previously contacted us about something, and we want records of this" is a basic need.
> We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes
You didn't just put a computer somewhere and have a customer go up and type on the computer right? You have surrounding infrastructure on that right? That is the value add.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 built an AI support agent in…
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin.
Y'all really over indexing on the "AI"-ness of intercom. Intercom is a chat box and help pages. Those are nice to have and nice to not have to build yourself (you can build your own help pages... great, now you're managing content and have to have an admin to update the docs etc!)
People here really forgetting the notion of "core competency".