Paul Adams on Intercom's pivot to AI after ChatGPT. The company launched Fin, an AI customer-service agent, in March 2023. It now solves over 1 million problems weekly for 6,000+ customers with a 65% resolution rate.
March 2023.
Over 1 million resolutions per week.
Over 6,000 customers.
Over 65% average resolution rate.
Five quarters of declining revenue.
Like brutal. Talk to you about the transformation of our company. ChatGPT just had a birthday three years old and if you took the intercom three years ago versus intercom today, they are entirely different companies. And this is really important because a lot of SaaS companies I think are saying that they're AI companies, but they're not really AI companies. We've gone through this transformation. It's been brutal, like brutal. It's really hard. It's really hard. And if you're a SaaS company who thinks you're an AI company and you've not gone through brutal transformation, you're not there yet. And so I'm going to show you what we did and hopefully it'll help you kind of think about things. But things changed. We then had five quarters of declining revenue growth and this was not a good period for the company. And Owen, our co founder and CEO came back into the CEO role and then ChatGPT showed up three months later. So Owen had just come back, we were in this kind of tricky spot and ChatGPT showed up and a combination of the machine learning team and excellent team telling us this is the moment, this is a one way door for humanity. This is the real deal, the iPhone moment, the next technology cycle. So we bet the entire company on AI. We, we bet the entire company. It was a risky thing to do. We ripped up our strategy, we ripped up our roadmap. We made these decisions in a very small number of days. Like you're talking one to two weeks after ChatGPT, we decided we're in this tricky spot, that we had nothing to lose or felt like we had nothing to lose. We had hundreds of millions of ARR, a lot to lose. We felt like we had to do it. So we built Fin and launched it in March 2023. So we went very, very quickly from betting the company on AI to launching Fin. And Fin was an AI agent for customer service and people really liked it and found a lot of value in it and it worked. If you fast forward to today, Fin has over a million resolutions a week. So every single week Fin is resolving over 1 million customer problems. We've over 6,000 Fin customers and Fin's average resolution rate is over 65%. So the resolution rate over those entire 6,000 plus customers is 65%. So in other words, Fin resolves 65% of the queries that it's asked about and Intercom is on this like entirely different journey now. We have a very bright future. Fin is this groundbreaking product, transformational product, but the journey from Owen coming back and ChatGPT three years ago to today was really hard. It was really hard and we learned a ton of things along the way.
