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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

#211

Post by mchusma »

aurareturn wrote: post #199
christoff12 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I agree with you 100%. Fin and products like this simply do NOT solve the hard part of providing support in 2026. Basically, the hard parts are (1) coming up with the tools for agents to use, like searching for data, making updates, etc. (2) reviewing the logs of actual usage and adjusting prompts, docs, tools based on the real feedback. (3) tuning human escalation procedures.

This process is an ongoing effort, with an upfront engineering commitment which depends entirely on the product, but can be months of work. But if you have your own backend, I would argue this hard works is made HARDER by implementing something like Salesforce/Fin, because you have to now pipe a bunch of data and structure over to them, which is a pain.

LLM models capable of doing this are a commodity, the UI for customers and support teams is pretty trivial, the database/backend is trivial.

Outside of some cases, if you have your own app, and you have a given support volume, build your own.

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

#212

Post by dezgeg »

theturtletalks wrote: post #163

I 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…

What does "long term memory" mean? It can write down notes from past/recent support requests? If so, that sounds like risk of one customer's data leaking to another.

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

#213

Post by mchusma »

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.

You are right. These outcomes also skew heavily towards the easy stuff for LLMs to get. So tickets that take a human 1 min to respond to now cost you $0.99 ($60+/hour) and you are stuck only doing the hard tickets.

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

#214

Post by cadamsdotcom »

theturtletalks wrote: post #163

I 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 sounds incredible - do you have a writeup somewhere of what you did? I’d love to learn more!

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

#215

Post by aurareturn »

mchusma wrote: post #211
aurareturn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I agree with you 100%. Fin and products like this simply do NOT solve the hard part of providing support in 2026. Basically, the hard parts are (1) coming up with the tools for agents to use, like searching for data, making updates, etc. (2) reviewing the logs of actual usage and adjusting prompts, docs, tools based on the real feedback. (3) tuning human escalation procedures. This process is an ongoing effort, with…

Agreed.

A recent example is that we replaced our support ticket system with an in-house built one. The new system lives in the same database as our app. Every ticket now has real live customer data. You can't get this kind of integration easily using a 3rd party tool.

It was surprisingly easy to build. Just took 2-3 days for us. Massive improvement in productivity. Took about $100 in tokens to build. Maybe an hour of maintenance work per week.

This larger company took 48 hours: https://tradecore.com/resources/blog/we-replaced-zendesk-in-...

Doing this would've be seen as crazy in 2023. But in 2026, it's often an advantage. Better, more integrated, cheaper, faster.

I'm happy to buy if it's something I know we don't have the expertise to build. For example, you'll never catch me saying we need to build our own database. But for something like Fin, I know exactly how to build it for my company and I think I can build a better agent with better context, faster iteration, cheaper, and more tailored to my company's business.

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

#216

Post by janderson215 »

reeddavid wrote: post #191
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.

I’m not affiliated with Starlink nor trying to defend them, but I would argue the shipping estimate comes from a black box and is totally unrelated to the AI agent. My shipping estimate in the app said expected to ship between June 22 and July 2, but it’s actually arriving tomorrow. I’m happy with it in my case, it I could understand if coming outside of the window (either early or late) is frustrating.

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

#217

Post by karakoram »

Why does $3.6B sound really low. Intercom seems like a major player in AI customer service. What's the catch here?

If I remember correctly, they were the first of the customer service chatbot SaaS companies to quickly pivot to a complete AI product.

A lot of hype too by their employees and founding team for Fin on LinkedIn. I did NOT expect the final exit to not even touch double digits. Very interesting.

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

#218

Post by solarkraft »

gib444 wrote: post #43
s_dev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 days ago. No joke. https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/

"Fin is clearly our future" by choosing a word which means "end" in Latin and Spanish ... LOL Almost like a pre-announcement about the acquisition?

“your customer journey ends here”

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

#220

Post by phillipcarter »

nailer wrote: post #205
phillipcarter wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not write an expose. I replied to a VC who went out of his way to congratulate the CEO, who is a known abuser and man with openly awful politics that contradict the values of those who he purports to lead. Not unlike my own CEO, for what it's worth, except for the abuser part.
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