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  • Hacker News
  • Why does $3.6B sound really low. Intercom seems like a major player in AI customer service. What's the catch here?

    If I remember correctly, they were the first of the customer service chatbot SaaS companies to quickly pivot to a complete AI product.

    A lot of hype too by their employees and founding team for Fin on LinkedIn. I did NOT expect the final exit to not even touch double digits. Very interesting.

    by karakoram
  • If that's the exit valuation of the most popular AI support tool (even Anthropic use them) then this doesn't support the trillion valuations of companies like Nvidia, SpaceX (AI), etc
    by alpineman
  • For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.
    by twodave
  • I am convinced, that anything touched by Salesforce is going to become an obnoxious product and at some point either become a plague walled garden one has to deal with at corporate jobs, or it dies an agonizing death, from its own user hostility.

    Salesforce is basically like Atlassian. Don't expect any good things to roll out of that one.

    by zelphirkalt
  • Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.
    by jmuguy
  • I don’t understand how viable these helpdesk companies are anymore for non-enterprise customers. We replaced our helpdesk with Hermes. It has long term memory about our business. When a customer messages us, Hermes gets all the relevant details about the customer and creates a Pi session using Gemma 4 running locally and customer talks to that agent. That agent can escalate that issue to Hermes and Hermes can escalate to us.
    by theturtletalks
  • Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago.

    There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outside the CRM.

    by light_triad
  • I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience is far better than the situation we have today. I never have to repeat myself and if it’s tied in with your account specifically, it’s like getting escalated to a level 3 support rep immediately.
    by janderson215

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