Intercom
A customer service software company that rebuilt itself around its AI agent Fin.
Intercom bet everything on AI after five straight quarters of falling net new ARR, giving up about $80M of ARR from other products and $50M through simpler pricing. Fin went from 1 to 12M ARR in year one, priced at $0.99 per resolved ticket, and some customers resolve 50 to 70% of inbound questions with it. Lesson: commit fully to one lane, simplify pricing, and expect people change to be the hard part.
What was said about Intercom
Intercom is cited as a company that may run its own tuned models. Max Schoening of Notion names Intercom alongside Cursor as a company that would run its own tuned models if frontier labs do not pull away.
The mention is brief. It gives no figures and no details on Intercom's models or how they would be tuned.
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
Growth had slid to low single digits with five straight quarters of falling net new ARR before it bet everything on AI. It gave up about $80 million of ARR from other products, cut costs, set aside nearly $100 million for AI, and now sits near the 15th percentile of public software growth. About 40% of staff turned over, and a later survey showed 98 to 99% approval of leadership.
Intercom is cited as a company that may run its own tuned models. Max Schoening of Notion names Intercom alongside Cursor as a company that would run its own tuned models if frontier labs do not pull away.
The mention is brief. It gives no figures and no details on Intercom's models or how they would be tuned.
What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)
Ripped up its strategy the day ChatGPT launched and rebuilt around AI, going all in with a bet-the-farm mindset. It has 900 people, one PM per five engineers, a much larger ML team, and had to restart its pricing after too many models and add-ons piled up. Some customers answer 50, 60 or even 70% of inbound questions with it. It also works in the inbox suggesting and rephrasing answers, though the business is not yet financially transformed.
AI era skills: Why cultivating agency matters more than job titles | Max Schoening (Notion)
Cited with Cursor as running its own tuned models if frontier labs do not pull away.
Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam
Fin charges $0.99 only when the AI resolves a ticket alone, which moved Intercom from seat pricing to outcome pricing. It was once the most complained-about pricing in a Twitter survey, and about 5% of companies price this way today.
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)
In the early days the whole Figma team was on Intercom all day. Engineers debugged live with users and fixed bugs right away.
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)
It found four reasons people hired it, turned off features each pathway did not need, and priced against the rival each replaced, such as HubSpot or Zendesk. It grew to a valuation over $2 billion, and its leadership team did the interviews themselves.
How App Store Screenshots & Preview Videos Increase Downloads
Rev has Intercom in all its apps and reads the questions users send. Repeated questions about what transcription is showed Rev that the app lacked information on it.
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