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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

#241

Post by christoff12 »

aurareturn wrote: post #215
mchusma wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hear you -- you and other teams are capable of building internal versions that just work.

I'm equally excited -- I've spent much of my career building janky internal versions of popular SaaS out of necessity since we didn't have the budget to buy. To be able to do a better job with less effort is enticing.

But this is: a) a step-change that hasn't had a full year to bake; we should all anticipate the pain associated in the medium term after a few iterations, inevitable feature add-ons, etc. b) beside the point.

Yes, many teams can also build internally, but it doesn't change the fact that others find value in outsourcing. Just because it's much easier, or rather __because__ it's easier to stand stuff up, it's imperative we prioritize what gets built.

If [Anthropic](https://fin.ai/customers/anthropic) themselves are willing to vouch for the value-add, I think it's silly to suggest that teams with budget and higher priorities should trade the time and focus to roll their own.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

rtpg wrote: post #230
aurareturn wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

> 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".

[deleted]

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

#244

Post by madeofpalk »

YZF wrote: post #236
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…

The problem isn't that AI can't give good service. The problem is it's going to be intentionally limited in the service it gives and its ability to make decisions. Every automated service I ever interacted with was built in a way that it would not help you with anything that incurs a cost to the company that built it. I think frontier models are really good at solving technical problems. So if your support call is "h…

> The problem is it's going to be intentionally limited in the service it gives and its ability to make decisions.

Apart from the Facebook AI customer support which would just blindly send MFA reset emails to wherever you asked.

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

#245

Post by y2244 »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #41
jmuguy wrote: post #30

Intercom 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.

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…

Saas is cheap for a small company but once you want large volume or per seat pricing for a large amount of users it gets expensive.

But rolling out your own allows you to then scale at minimal incremental cost

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

#246

Post by jackjayd »

I made a free open-source version of Intercom at the start of the year called Opencom-dev after I got sick of paying what felt like extortionate pricing.

What do people see as the moat here for a firm like Intercom? Is it just the existing customer-base and switching-costs / friction?

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

#247

Post by theturtletalks »

dezgeg wrote: post #212
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.

Hermes has a character limit for its memory and it hasn’t saved customer info. SOTA models are pretty tight on not saving user data. We can also let the Pi session call the tool to get the customer data instead of Hermes.

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

#249

Post by skywhopper »

kaliqt wrote: post #238
YZF wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that AI can't give good service. The problem is it's going to be intentionally limited in the service it gives and its ability to make decisions. Every automated service I ever interacted with was built in a way that it would not help you with anything that incurs a cost to the company that built it. I think frontier models are really good at solving technical problems. So if your support call is "h…

That is again an issue with company culture because the issues should be addressed anyway, AI or human.

Sure but: 1) most companies’ culture in this area is already bad; 2) AI tools enable and amplify the absolute worst of that culture.

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

#250

Post by skywhopper »

fatnoah wrote: post #195
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 p…

    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.
Honestly, this sounds like the hallucination of an LLM with no further options available in its prompting.
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