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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

#251

Post by aurareturn »

christoff12 wrote: post #241
aurareturn wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 associate…

"Anthropic is using it so it must be valuable". I think I've heard this a lot before but with different companies.

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

#252

Post by miki123211 »

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…

There was an Intercom executive making a very interesting case for AI customer support on Patrick mcKenzie's "Complex Systems" a while ago.[1]

My main takeaway from that interview was that tier1 CS is a low-wage, high-turnover industry, so the amount of training agents can realistically get is limited. AI support is cheaper, smarter, and can take in more context faster. With AI, it makes sense to have a "support engineer" who identifies the edge cases and writes Markdown documents instructing agents on what to do in those cases. This actually lets you make agents much, much more helpful than human employees ever could be.

[1] (There's a high-quality transcript available) https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/des-traynor/

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

#253

Post by kyawzazaw »

dheera wrote: post #108
zelphirkalt wrote: post #107

I am convinced, that anything touched by Salesforce is going to become an obnoxious product and at some point either become a plague walled garden one has to deal with at corporate jobs, or it dies an agonizing death, from its own user hostility. Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.

Intercom was obnoxious already. Reminds me of when I walk into a store and someone immediately accosts me with "may i help you" and then I walk right out. You want to sell stuff? Don't mind my existence, let me look first at everything you have on display, and I'll initiate the conversations when I feel ready.

a greeting is "accost"?

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

#254

Post by kyawzazaw »

karakoram wrote: post #217

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.

a small team can do customer service agents at much cheaper.

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

#255

Post by robeym »

Given how easy it was to get our own version of an AI service tool set up, I'm shocked to see a huge, capable company buying it's way into that functionality as opposed to using their large existing datasets to fine-tune an internal tool. Is 3.6B really the better option?

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

#256

Post by merlindru »

embedding-shape wrote: post #62
merlindru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you asked the same selection of people about Saudi Aramco or SK Hynix none of them would know what those are either though, right? I do think 60B for Cursor is way overvalued. Just not sure how to quantify

Fair point, those are valuable for other reasons. My point was more to illustrate "Nike is valuable because of the brand", without using those exact words :)

ah i see your point - my bad

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

#257

Post by nailer »

jackjayd wrote: post #246

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?

> What do people see as the moat here for a firm like Intercom?

It's the AI model that scores higher than Anthropics on customer support tasks.

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

#258

Post by karakoram »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #254
karakoram wrote: post #217

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.

a small team can do customer service agents at much cheaper.

Yeah sure, but I am more wondering about the financial side of the deal. Especially in this capital and AI M&A environment. What kind of multiple of revenue or EBITDA did they get to end up with such a low number?

Google says revenue was 400 Million so the multiple was not even 10x? I remember in October 2025, CEO of Thoma Bravo said that a $50 Million ARR revenue startup/company was being valued at $10 Billion.

Looks like multiples have come drastically down.

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

#259

Post by dbbk »

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…

Interestingly I had a pleasant experience with Vercel's AI support recently. I challenged a charge I shouldn't have had, it self-diagnosed to confirm that the invoice had been generated incorrectly, and actioned a refund! No human in the loop.

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

#260

Post by irishcule »

lubujackson wrote: post #68
embedding-shape wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

The reason people want to get a human on the other end of the line is usually because they want some sort of remediation,like a refund or need to escalate something to someone who can take an action. Right now, AI agents just barf the FAQ back at you. Which is great for your tier 0 calls, but without an easy way to bypass they are just underlining the problem inherent in gethuman.com needing to exist. Now if AI agent…

The newest AI Agents are much more advanced that "FAQ bots", they kind of have hybrid deterministic and non-deterministic flows in how they handle customer requests, depending on the request.

Some companies set them up exactly as you describe, they handle the low effort, easy to solve issues and then escalate to a human for "bigger" things. There is still a lot of value in that process as now maybe 76% of your customer requests are solved without human intervention and the humans agents can focus on the more meatier requests.

Some companies do not though, I know of Airlines using AI Agents with full flight re-booking flows happening end to end with no human intervention and its working well.

I think AI Customer Service Agents have already moved beyond what you yourself have personally witnessed.

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