Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

3uler

What the hell? That is so cheap? I would value this at least as much as cursor? What gives?

tommica

How does salesforce have that much to spend? Like they are big, but this is a lot of money.

asim

When did intercom change its name to Fin?

davidu

Massive congrats to Eoghan McCabe, what an amazing story arc. We love when a CEO comes back and gets the business back in fighting shape and then delivers an incredible win. CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS. I freakin' love it.

MrDOS

> The AI Agent is powered by the company’s proprietary AI model, Apex When will I be able to talk to Salesforce Apex from Salesforce Apex?

hienyimba

The "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space. but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.

cpursley

Wild, the AI support and bots suck so bad, I've literally lost sales due to them. No matter how much support docs and history you feed them with for context, they just don't cut it. People would rather wait for a real person than go in loops with a wrong/bad support answer...

darkwater

Intercom... well, Fin's announcement: https://www.intercom.com/blog/salesforce-signs-definitive-ag...

light_triad

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.

xnx

Good for Intercom. I have to assume that Salesforce will immediately rename this since any brand recognition was already eliminated a month ago.

jmuguy

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.

kreutz

This sucks. I love Intercom. I hate Salesforce. I do not have confidence in Salesforce to be good stewards. Will never forgive how badly they've botched Heroku.

crsv

Huge outcome for Intercom. I don't see the value at all, but grats to the Intercom team for getting their bag.

twodave

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.

mattbrewsbytes

AI support agents, chatbots, etc. on web sites these days are the equivalent to search engines during the dot com boom. Everyone felt that having a search engine on their dot com was the killer feature that was going to win. There were a lot of companies building search engine technologies and selling them too. Now its ubiquitous that most ecommerce sites have a search bar but nobody cares about the underlying technology much, its consolidated and commoditized. Good on Intercom for getting acquired. If we're seeing larger consolidation/acquisitions happen, does that mean the hype train has hit a key station?

projektfu

I always hated seeing Intercom bugs when a simple help menu would work better, but it proves that being annoying is a winning strategy. As my various SaaS packages have switched to AI bugs, I have never had one successfully help me until I say, "Can I please speak to a human?"

Robdel12

Huge congrats to the intercom team on that! Intercom was pretty great for me during my Percy support years. Their current AI direction is rough, though. When I went to use them for my product I was (am?) building, I found intercom unrecognizable with the entire ai pivot. Honestly made me sad but that’s how it is these days

alpineman

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

redwood

Intercom is a great example of a feature that in theory could have expanded into a more full product but stayed laser focused on that smaller vision instead. Nothing necessarily wrong with that as they did not allow themselves to become fully enshittified. Still it would be cool if they had really expanded it to offer a competition to Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud while preserving their minimalist and design forward approach. I understand that AI became the thing that invested in instead which was inevitable

janderson215

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.