How Intercom is redefining customer support with Claude

This is one of the defining technological revolutions of our lifetime. My name's Fergal Reid. I'm VP of AI here at Intercom, which is in beautiful, sunny Dublin today. At Intercom, we build software for customer service teams to talk to their customers. We've been building AI products in customer support for six or seven years, but they were always part of our business, whereas now AI is the future of our business. Customer support, customer service is going to be completely changed by AI and that's just become the most important thing for our business. There are tasks that humans are good at, tasks that require a high level of empathy, maybe judgment, and then there’s other tasks that AI models like Claude are better at. If you have a human customer support representative, and they are answering literally the same question for the 15th time today, it gets boring. They start to lose concentration. So yeah, we've built this product called Fin, and what Fin does is it answers those repeated end user customer support questions, and does it quickly and accurately and without anyone needing to wait around. Fin will look at all the information in the business' customer support knowledge base and it'll give them a reply. We’re trying to save time for the business, we're trying to make them more efficient, but we're also trying to save time for the end user. Anthropic are really setting out to try and build a model that, you know, has a lot of the same values we care about. They want to make it trustworthy, accurate, and we care deeply about that as well. When they came out with Claude Sonnet 3. 5, we started to use it, and we were really like, “Wow, this is a very impressive model. ” When we get a model that looks impressive, we go and we tend to test it in production. And we did a massive A/B test with literally millions of end user interactions, and Claude was the winner of that test. That's why we chose it to power Fin. An underappreciated benefit of really modern language models like Claude is the extent to which they can handle translation between many different languages, and that really unlocks the global reach of AI products. So Fin, for example, works in over 45 languages from Chinese to German to Japanese, and we really rely on Claude to handle the translation layer there. Fin has been an amazingly successful product for us. We hit eight figures in revenue in our first year, and we're really delighted with Fin's progress. Absolutely, Anthropic have helped with that.