Intercom

It’s Wednesday at 2pm. A routine deploy goes out. Within minutes, customers cannot open the app. Alarms fire, the pager goes off, and the heartbeat metrics begin to drop. In some ways, this is close to a best-case incident. It’s daytime, the team is online, and the author of the change is available. There is already a strong hypothesis of what went wrong. And yet, incidents can still spiral without the right process, tools, and shared instincts. At Fin, shipping is our heartbeat.

CSAT captures less than 10% of your conversations, and the responses you do get skew toward extremes – the delighted and the furious. The vast majority of customers say nothing at all, especially when they’re busy and would rather move on. That silence is a blind spot. You’re reporting to leadership and coaching your team based on a sample that doesn’t represent most of your customers. No amount of CSAT tuning fixes a response rate that low. Coverage isn’t the only limitation, either.

When you work at a company that’s constantly shipping new product features, keeping your knowledge base up to date can be a challenge. When you’re using an AI Agent, the consequence of having an out-of-date knowledge base is high. It means every time the product team ships a new feature and customer questions start to land, the Agent doesn’t have the information it needs to answer.

If nobody on your team has trained your Agent on how to communicate, it’s going to sound like an LLM when it speaks to your customers (because it is one). Conversation design is an emerging discipline in AI-first support teams built to solve this exact problem. A conversation designer owns how your Agent communicates: tone, structure, level of detail, customer experience, handoff and escalation process.

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for Salesforce to acquire Fin for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027. Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today.

Without access to your backend systems, your AI Agent can answer questions, but it can’t take action. A customer asks to change their payment plan, they get a clear explanation, but a support rep still has to step in and make the change. Someone else needs to update their account, the same thing happens. The Agent knows the answer, it just doesn’t have the ability to act. That gap between answering a query and resolving it keeps your team handling requests your Agent could take on.

Today, we’re announcing that Fin can be used as a Service Agent on top of HubSpot and Freshworks, meaning you can use the world’s best Agent without migrating off your helpdesk.

When competing in business, you have two choices. Try to win the game your competitors have chosen to play, or play a different game. In our category, which we call Customer Agents, our well-financed competitors have made generous use of fabricated demos, particularly when it comes to their voice technology. Voice is just extremely hard. And while we all know that the future of customer experiences will be Agent-driven voice, we’re not there yet today.

Your customer finds your product and it looks right for them. They read the pricing page, watch the demo video, and feel ready to talk to someone. They hit “contact sales”. Then they wait. The entire industry oriented itself around managing that wait. We called it “speed-to-lead,” and it became the measure of a high-performing sales development org. We hired more SDRs, built faster routing rules, added shift coverage, and measured ourselves on response-time dashboards.

When considering AI Agent options, some teams don’t focus on the right evaluation criteria. Not because they aren’t rigorous – most are – but because they are only rigorous about a subset of the criteria. I’ve had a lot of exposure to our customers and prospects running a “proof of concept” (POC) to evaluate an AI Agent for customer service over the past few years.