Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Jul 15, 2024 11:44 AM
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Feb 6, 2024
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Intercom are making a $94m bet on AI customer service.
Their CEO, Eoghan McCabe, recently shared a usually very private internal email on X about their strategy.
6 takeaways from me:
- Intercom are taking AI very seriously (obvious insight), but they also feel that customer service tasks/roles are some of the soonest to get disrupted by AI.
- By sharing this publicly, they're making it clear how they aim to be an AI-first business.
- They're aware of the 2 tracks a company can take when thinking about how to leverage AI.
- A) Push AI into the existing product to power existing/new features.
- B) Re-think & re-design the product from the ground up, as if you were starting today.
(I think they're going for B)
- Related to #2, they're not satisfied with simply adding AI into existing features and workflows. And despite being the leader in AI customer service, they're taking a bigger bet behind the scenes with Fin X.
- They have a clear, honest view of where AI + work is heading. This might be an uncomfortable truth for many businesses, but Eoghan literally spells it out, "AI will do all knowledge work".
- If you also believe this assumption, it should change your strategic decision-making.
- With ~50 new people in the ML team, you've gotta think they're going to be looking at training their own models (possible with OpenAI's help) or trying to wean themselves off a 3rd party like OpenAI.
- Intuitively, a model designed around customer support is going to outperform a state-of-the-art general model.
- We compete with Intercom's Fin product. Intercom's customers can keep using Intercom, but can choose to use My AskAI for the AI customer support (10x cheaper).
- Despite the wild difference in what resources we have available vs. them. I'm not worried.
- “A rising tide lifts all boats” — they're educating the market, validating our direction, and giving us a few new ideas.
I think Intercom are gonna crush the Zendesks of the world over the next few years. And I hope we'll be riding the wave just behind them 🌊
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
