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.

Unless it’s a Meta AI support agent, in which case it will bend over backwards for you up to and including resetting other people’s passwords for you. Now that’s service!

afaik you are not the customer for customer support, and in the vast majority of cases human phone support is setup for the opposite case where people just want to be walked through something they can't find in the UI.

So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.

This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.

Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.

Various companies have found the flip side of that: the AI agent can be overly helpful, and offer you things you're not entitled to. Such as unlocking other people's accounts, or discount flights, or so on.

Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.

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 would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t.

I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.

Counterpoint: I’ve had recent support calls with two large corporations, both with humans. In both cases the humans lied about what could be done to address my issue.

In one case I was literally repeating back to the human what I’d just been told, and getting them to confirm that what I said was correct. First bill arrives and I find out the truth.

Second case I was told I’d have to cancel and create a new account to add a service. I decided to keep my existing account and learned that there is a web page where I can easily self-serve and add the additional service in one or two clicks. (I assume like the human actually made more money for “new account signups”.

My point is that the feeling of being a valued customer is really independent of whether you’re interacting with a human.

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...

I like the idea I read somewhere that AI text and agents break the social contract of communication. That if you can’t be fucked to write something yourself to me, then I shouldn’t bother to read it.

However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.

For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.

On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.

That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.

It could be great but it’s already awful.

For people like you and me, the only reason for contacting support is when a human decision is needed, ie the UI doesn't allow us to do what we need. This is always the company's fault, and a chatbot is of no use in these cases.

But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.

AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.

This is the second company (that I know of) that got acquired shortly after an AI pivot and re-brand. See: OpenAI to acquire Ona https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491821

Salesforce buying the support bot before the support bot becomes the CRM is very on-brand.

customer support -> customer disassociation

AWS has zero value because you can just buy a bunch of servers and rack them. And on and on.

This is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance

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 with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.

SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.

Correct. Seen this first hand.

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.

They’ve been responsible for a number of crashes in our iOS app since they switched to agentic coding. It’s become our most unreliable 3rd party library.

It's a win, but I'm not sure its the win they were hoping for. A regular congrats is probably sufficient.

Knowing salesforce a little, only if you upgrade to a different license tier.

You’ll need wrap it in flow first

30 days ago. No joke.

https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/

…why? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?

Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud (not to be confused with Agentforce, which will have basically the same goals and the same target market, until they kill off Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud eventually).

Since we're sharing anecdotes, I work in this space and my team automated a large part of customer support for a large scale up using an AI agent. The kicker is that customers rate their interactions with the AI agent higher than their interactions with customer support staff.

AI is definitely capable of taking on customer support work at the moment, and to a high standard as well. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's not a grift either.

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

Solving 80% of menial support tickets automatically through agents trained on your help center, freeing up your actual support agents to focus better on meaningful tasks seems a tiny bit more than a grift.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this from but their customers find Fin to be a hugely impactful tool

Woof, yes! Though I'm glad Heroku remains, and I ought to also be glad that it has been stable all these years, …it's clearly neglected.

The very first interaction I have with Heroku is a two-factor sign-in, and …it's this horrible page hosted on salesforce.com, which doesn't have retina graphics (i.e. is blurry on screens Apple have used for 15+ years), doesn't work properly with automatic one-time-code generators (because the login form is heroku.com, but the two-factor is salesforce.com), and …gah! What a mess. Thankfully you fall through into the pretty, well thought-out Heroku dashboard of yesteryear.

These days it would be better in reverse i.e. expose the docs as docs and human points their Claude at that. In starting to do that!

There’s essentially no such thing as good case deflection. All of it exists at the expense of customer experience.

But businesses will always chase that dream of reduced customer contact, so Salesforce will keep selling it to them.

So I haven’t looked into it a ton, but doesn’t it seem like a great case to have an AI answer the call immediately, get the users account pulled up, and document the issue with some refining feedback?

An AI secretary seems perfectly acceptable for both sides. The expectation is that a real human comes in soon after but this seems like a way to free up the most tedious parts of the process for both sides.

Cursor at 60B is WAY overvalued. At this point you have to assume that anything that gets touched by Elon is hyper driven financial engineering.

European versus US startups maybe?

While I think that this is a bad move for Intercom, it's actually brilliant for Dublin and Ireland that they have finally exited.

Intercom allegedly has ~400M of annual revenue, making the multiplier less than 10X. Huge customer base and established brand. Looks like a steal indeed!

Spoken like someone that’s never seen the Salesforce bill of even a small company. Absurdly high

They had almost $9 billion in cash on hand at the end of April 2026. And net income of $2 billion. So they afforded it pretty easily.

https://investor.salesforce.com/financials/quarterly-results...

By laying off people.

Salesforce made 37.9 billion in 2025 of revenue. 6.2 billion in net income (or profits)

Salesforce had ~14 billion in free cash flow last year they have tons of money.

They're not building out AI infrastructure

they are not just big, they are huge

Its the US Dollar that is worth so much less...

No, screw this guy for his horrible behavior and openly awful politics. Congrats to the rest of the team at Fin who actually delivered this milestone.