I’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin Agentforce and Intercom Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.
Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
121–130 of 261 posts
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#122For 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…
Dont worry this is Marc Benioff burning another 3 billion, on a non profitable company, while regularly showing up on CNBC to claim Salesforce was doing so much Agentic AI...
Hopefully Salesforce did their due diligence, because the "AI agent" story here on Intercom (Fin) seems highly inflated. The product seems to be a a hybrid of RAG, some post trained models, curated help center content, custom answers, workflows, a bunch of if-else rules, API connectors, escalation logic, and specially generous resolution accounting.
Calling every solved interaction with the "AI did it" is misleading unless they separate confirmed resolutions from assumed resolutions, and disclose how much came from rules and workflows or custom answers versus LLM reasoning...
From their own docs, it seems a Fin "outcome" can be counted on, not only when a customer confirms resolution, but also ...when the customer simply does not ask for more help after Fin responds...A very soft resolution metric...
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intercom allegedly has ~400M of annual revenue, making the multiplier less than 10X. Huge customer base and established brand. Looks like a steal indeed!
The world we live in… 10x revenue is a “steal”. Lots of embedded assumptions about growth and margins to convert that revenue multiple to discounted cash flows.
A steal compared to other “AI-adjacent” valuations.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
But chatbots can make decisions too.
If they can, then it's going to be a nightmare for companies when people manipulate the bot to give them what they want, or a refund, etc. 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?
I thought I remembered seeing this somewhere already where an AI chatbot was being tricked into producing working 50% off discount codes?
P.S. It was 80% and I read it 4 months or so ago: https://archive.is/20260311192059/https://medium.com/techx-o...
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#125Earlier 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…
"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 suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to
You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#126[flagged]
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#127Intercom 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.
I do think people tend to over estimate how much staff care at all about the outcomes of new initiatives. Rolling out a new in house chatbot? More likely just going to fire everyone and give you more work.
So many companies have such failed cultures they are just getting by delegating all serious matters to younger companies with people who actually care. If your staff never benefit from any of their work, nobody has any reason to care about how well you build your own in house Support / CRM / Chatbot / SaaS.
Not sure if this has been coined as a term, but its some form of "effort arbitrage"
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"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.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.
> I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
> I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
I imagine it's the lowest paid person who had a hand in implementation? Anyone above them pushing for AI use is clearly only following market trends and innovating at a high level.
Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B
#130For 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'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.
Phone menu labyrinth is worse than chatbot in some cases. Depends on the phone menu and the chatbot.