Enterprise Weekly #521: Intercom's Big Bet, The Future of Agents, and More
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This week, Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe made a bold move: he launched the Fin Million Dollar Guarantee — a public wager on the capabilities of Intercom’s customer service agent, Fin. Eoghan is so confident in Fin’s capabilities, that if the agent fails to hit a 65% resolution rate (the standard benchmark for humans), Intercom will pay customers $1M 💰
Beyond the bravado, Eoghan’s post was a masterclass in narrative and positioning, something every early-stage founder could learn from. Even though Intercom is a growth-stage company, Eoghan has a clear grasp on the current needs of customers, has a vision for the future of customer engagement, and is willing to take a bold strategy to win the market in the long term 💪
“In the very near future, all of your customer operations will run on AI. All customer touch points, at every stage in the customer lifecycle, from marketing, sales, service, and success, will be owned by a perfect, charming, expert customer agent, engaging with every customer and available instantly every hour of the day.
You’ll choose one vendor for all of this, not many. And you’ll choose the vendor who can do the most high quality work.
For the vendors, the opportunity is massive. We’re talking about disrupting literally trillions of dollars of human work, and potentially chasing TAMs 25-50X the size in SaaS. So, unsurprisingly, this space is extremely hot, well funded, and fiercely competitive.”
Eoghan also addressed the elephant in the room — competition. There are a number of players all vying for the same market, but he still believes Intercom is differentiated and has a right to win against Silicon Valley’s up and coming competitors like Sierra ($4.5B valuation) and Decagon ($1.5B valuation).
Reading between the lines, we’re excited about the fact that customer support could be one of the first scaled agentic markets from usage to business model. While many have talked about AI applications pricing based on outcomes, few enterprise-grade companies have made the switch and most are still operating in the current software paradigms of seat-based pricing and usage-based pricing. While Intercom’s move isn’t an explicit business model shift, it is an indication of where the future is heading.
Our takeaway? The bar for AI agents continues to rise. It's no longer sufficient for agents to be merely reliable or bug-free in production; they must now match or exceed human-level performance in task completion speed and quality to be truly competitive.
We’ll be taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming next Friday to celebrate July 4th. We hope everyone has a great holiday weekend! ☀️😎
📚 Read more news:
Wired: AI Agents Are Getting Better at Writing Code—and Hacking It as Well
CNBC: AI is Doing up to 50% of the Work at Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff Says
TechCrunch: Meta Hires Key OpenAI Researcher to Work on AI Reasoning Models
VentureBeat: The Hidden Scaling Cliff That’s About to Break Your Agent Rollouts
WSJ: Anthropic Lands Partial Victory in AI Case Set to Shape Future Rulings
🧵 Read more threads:
Company: Courier Health
Role: Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack
Technology: Patient CRM for Life Sciences
Funding: $20.5M from Work-Bench, Norwest Venture Partners
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Harvey raises $300M led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue
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Thinking Machines Lab raises $2B led by a16z
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Rubrik acquires Predibase for an Undisclosed Amount
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