In this episode, we sat down with Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, to explore the seismic shift towards Artificial Intelligence in customer service software. Intercom has gone all-in to embrace AI as people's expectations of what chatbots can do started growing with the release of ChatGPT.

(01:16) How did Intercom make a transition to a generative AI product (Fin)?

(05:34) Did the Intercom manifesto play a role in the transition?

(07:16) What was the Intercom before Fin?

(09:01) How much development effort did you spend on AI?

(12:31) UX

(15:20) People used to hate chatbots

(17:51) GPT and building layers around it

(20:50) The future of customer service

(23:57) GPT-4/Llama/Mistral/Claude

(25:58) Are multimodal AI-bots the future?

(27:08) AI-hallucination

(30:11) Customization

(34:34) Will Fin get a voice?

(36:26) Customer support cost and impact on profitability

(39:58) How much should you charge?

(45:26) AI-bot resolution rate

(46:43) Can bots take action?

(48:40) AI-adoption

(51:14) How the Intercom team evolve

(53:38) How did 4 Irish guys create a bi-continental startup?

(56:17) Work distribution

(58:38) Tech in Europe vs tech in the US