Person
1 episodes · 22 quoted claims
Intercom was founded in 2011 and, according to the episode introduction, its products operate within 25,000 businesses including Amazon, Lyft and Atlassian.
“The business was founded in 2011 and their products operate with 25,000 businesses, including the likes of Amazon, Lyft, and Atlassian.”
Des Traynor says Intercom began experimenting with AI in 2016 and has had AI products on the market since.
“We have dabbled in AI since 2016. We've had AI products live in market.”
Intercom released its first ChatGPT-era AI feature in beta in December and announced it publicly in January; it assisted human support agents.
“Well, we had our first release in beta in December, and then we talked about it publicly in January.”
Intercom launched the customer-facing Fin bot in beta in March and made it generally available around late May or early June.
“We launched that in beta in March, then we went to general availability, I think, in late May or early June.”
Des Traynor says some Intercom customers saw their support volume fall by 50% after using Fin.
“We've seen customers see 50% of their support volume drop.”
Des Traynor says Intercom handles about 20,000 support conversations a month, roughly a quarter million a year.
“If you take intercom, we do 20,000 support conversations a month, so about a quarter million a year.”
Intercom released a bot buyer's guide to help customers tell apart AI support bots that look similar in simple tests.
“And even yesterday, we released a bot buyer's guide because we're trying to teach customers about these differences.”
Des Traynor says Fin had been available to all Intercom customers for only about eight weeks at the time of recording.
“And then ultimately, we've only really been live to literally everyone, I think about eight weeks.”
Intercom planned a feature in which Fin writes its own knowledge snippets by learning from a company's past conversations.
“We will very shortly have live in market this Fin generated snippets feature where Fin will read your entire conversational context for your business going all the way back.”
Intercom's stated mission since 2011 has been to 'make internet business personal'.
“Our mission from 2011 has been make internet business personal, and that's really what we're about.”
Intercom charges 99 cents per resolution for Fin, and Des Traynor attributes the price to the cost of GPT-4.
“So GPT four is expensive, and as a result, Fin is perceived to be expensive. We charge ninety nine cents a resolution.”
Des Traynor says summarizing all of Intercom's roughly 500 million monthly conversations in real time would be unaffordable at current model prices.
“To give you a simple example, summarize every conversation in real time as they happen. We have 500 million conversations a month. That would bankrupt us.”
Intercom offers a separate product called Custom Answers for sensitive topics where exact wording must be controlled.
“I can tell you what we do in Intercom is we have a separate product to Fin called Custom Answers.”
Before ChatGPT, Intercom had a live automated support product called Resolution Bot.
“We'd been dabbling in AI for years. We had a live product called Resolution Bot, et cetera.”
Des Traynor says Intercom began working on its AI response about fourteen hours after ChatGPT was released.
“I think, like fourteen hours after ChatGPT dropped, we were able to go, and we started working on it.”
Des Traynor cites the spreadsheet tool Equals as an example of a chat interface that lets users write formulas and SQL in plain language.
“So equals is basically a spreadsheet tool. One of the things they have built in is AI, another thing they have is live data sources.”
Des Traynor says he has invested in Kettle, a tool that generates editable vector graphics from text descriptions.
“there's one I've invested in called Kettle, where like again, you just describe the visual of what you want, and they produce a vector.”
Des Traynor describes a Zoom competitor with AI meeting notes that failed to find buyers because it charged about $7 per person on top of Zoom and Google's suite.
“But if you try and take it to a company and say, well, you pay seven a head for this on top of your Zoom fees, and you're already probably buying the G suite anyway.”
Intercom publishes a public changes page showing how frequently its product team releases updates.
“If you go to Intercom dot com slash changes, you'll see the rate of release from our product team.”
Des Traynor says that in 1988, at age seven, he became obsessed with the Commodore Amiga 500 computer.
“And in 1988, when I was seven years old, I basically was obsessed with this computer called the Amiga 500 by Commodore.”
Des Traynor says his mother bought him the Amiga 500, which cost about 700 Irish pounds, roughly a thousand dollars.
“So whatever costing 700 Irish pounds, which is probably like a grand or something like that in dollars.”
Des Traynor says he met both his wife and Intercom CEO Owen at the same meetup, which Owen had organized.
“I met my wife at the same meetup that own had organized, where I met him for the first time.”