Pioneer 2024: Intercom’s first ever AI customer service summit, in summary
We’ve just hosted our inaugural AI customer service summit, Pioneer, and there are so many incredible insights and stories to share.
Thousands of customer service and tech enthusiasts joined us, both in person in London and online via livestream, to explore how AI is transforming the support space. The energy and excitement was evident through all the talks, customer sessions, and enthusiastic conversations.
The event was a true celebration of the pioneers leading the way at a time of great change. We announced Fin 2, the most advanced AI Agent in the industry, put the spotlight on our wonderful customers who spoke about how they transformed their support in an AI-first world, and heard from our Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor on how AI is getting real.
Renowned tech writer Benedict Evans spoke about cutting through the AI hype of the moment to realize actual real-world value, and in particular how to think about the changes ahead.
Some of our amazing customers shared their lessons and experiences adopting AI-first customer service, sparking lots of conversations among the audience.
And we ended the day with a special live recording of our Off Script series with two incredible guests: English actor, author, and comedian Stephen Fry and musical pioneer, visual artist, and activist Brian Eno. They discussed what technology has meant for them, and what AI means for society at large.
You can watch the on-demand recordings here and catch some of the key takeaways below. Enjoy.
Next-generation, now
Our Chief Executive Eoghan McCabe kicked the day off with a big vision of how AI is transforming customer service. He also articulated the big scope of Intercom’s ambition. As he put it, “Our commitment to you is that you’ll never find a better-performing or feature-rich customer service AI agent anywhere on the market.”
To reinforce that commitment, our Chief Product Officer Paul Adams launched Fin 2, our next-generation AI agent that deliver our highest resolution rates with powerful new capabilities to handle your frontline support. In Paul’s words, “Fin 2 is the first AI agent that delivers human quality service. That has been our mission and it can do it. We’ve built it in partnership with all of you.”
This new generation AI agent is the culmination of so many years building customer service tools and incredible effort on the part of our product teams. And this technology is only getting better from here. An inspiring keynote at an inspiring time for the industry.
Lighting the way forward
Intercom Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor spoke about how this AI thing is getting real. That doesn’t mean it will be smooth sailing, as he admits – we’re somewhere in the peak of expectations in the AI adoption hype curve. Expect to see a lot of people questioning the value – people will ask hard, skeptical but sometimes important questions.
But as Des explained, eventually every aspect of a product will change – who uses it, who buys it, the pricing, performance, and more. The whole landscape will get rewritten across all industries. But it won’t happen all at once or as quickly as we think. Instead, the evolution of AI will be like the adoption of electricity, as Des put it. Electricity didn’t happen overnight, but when it did it fundamentally transformed everything.
“Electricity didn’t happen overnight – it was 1879 when Edison filed a patent for the light bulb,” Des says. “It was the 1900s before things like London lit up. And then the second order effects, well, the 9-5 that we all know and love came from the fact that electricity existed. Then late night shopping and shift work. All of these things were only possible because of the rollout of electricity. That’s the sort of second and perhaps third order effects from one dude filing a patent for a light bulb in 1879.”
The future, as Des sees it, is bright and getting brighter.
Paradigm shifts
“World-renowned influencer and AI expert” Benedict Evans, as he jokingly described himself, delivered a typically perceptive presentation on how to think about the ways in which AI will transform industries such as customer service.
Evans cited examples of how technological transformations has previously disrupted industries to guide how to think about what happens next – basically, there are no clear answers, but boundless possibilities ahead. As Evans pointed out, our assumptions around the trajectory of these technologies are often misplaced – spreadsheets didn’t spell the end for jobs in accountancy and finance, for example.
Evans followed it up with a fascinating Q&A session with Des, where they explored the implications for customer service, and the key foundational shifts that will determine how this generative-AI era plays out.
“Every 15 years or so we’ve gone through one of these platform shifts,” Evans pointed out. “It changes how we do our work, changes what the tools are, changes what tools can be built, changes what kinds of companies and what kinds of products we all use.”
A personal history of technology with Fry and Eno
The day concluded with an extraordinary meeting of minds, as Stephen Fry joined Brian Eno for a live recording of our Off Script series.
And Off Script it most certainly was – a winding, illuminating conversation about their respective relationships with technology. They swapped stories about how tools such as the Mac and the synthesizer shaped their careers and lives, and how their initial enthusiasm for technology has given way to a good deal of skepticism as the impact of social media has become a greater part of our lives.
The pair have enjoyed a front-row seat in the world of technological transformation over the past half century – as became clear with first-person anecdotes featuring the likes of Apple designer Jony Ive, pioneering AI researcher Marvin Minsky, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to name a few.
They also shared their thoughts on how AI will affect culture and society – a cautious perspective, it’s fair to say, informed by their own creative efforts and concerns about the impact of AI on the entertainment and arts industries.
Ultimately, though, Fry and Eno reflected on the potential of AI technology to transform lives for the better, when used in the right way, for the right reasons.
“Let the machine do what the machine does,” Fry said, “and the better machines do things the more attention you can give to what it is that humans do and what humans are. As AI takes over various clerical and bureaucratic jobs, logistical jobs, and so on, the the more your work every day will be about people, it will be about imagination, it will be about creativity, it will be about fresh thinking.”
Innovator sessions
Throughout the day, we had wonderful conversations on the Innovator Stage with three of our customers: Angelo Livanos, Senior Director of Global Customer Support at Lightspeed Commerce; Natalie Hurst, Director of Customer Success at Nuuly; and Constantina Samara, Head of Support at Synthesia.
These customers are seeing real results using AI, right now. And they shared just how much Fin is transforming their support operations, team dynamics, and customer experience. If you missed the live conversations, we’d highly recommend you check out the on-demand recordings. But in the meantime, here’s a quick recap:
Lightspeed Commerce
As an AI-forward company, Lightspeed was excited to use AI tools like Fin AI Agent and AI Copilot to allow them to do their jobs better, further enjoy their work, and delivers better experiences for their customers. But with hundreds of agents supporting customers in multiple regions and languages, they couldn’t just flip a switch and roll AI out overnight.
To make sure their teams were set up for success to make the most of Fin, they placed a great deal of focus on training, ongoing support and enablement, clear and frequent communication, and cementing alignment on the ultimate vision and goals.
Angelo spoke in depth about how Lightspeed navigated this period of change. By bringing the whole company on the AI journey with them, Lightspeed’s support team were able to generate a ton of excitement across the company. As Angelo put it, “It’s building a bit of a cult following of people that are saying, ‘This has done some pretty great stuff. How do we tap into this now?’”
The great stuff in question? Resolution rates of up to 65% and 31% more conversations closed daily by agents. So it’s easy to see why there’s such company-wide excitement.
You can catch up on our full conversation with Angelo here.
Synthesia
A 690% increase in customer contact in just four months is almost hard to imagine, but that’s exactly what Constantina and her team at Synthesia faced this year. Instead of 40,000 customers seeking support each month, they were suddenly seeing 316,000.
When that happened, Constantina’s priority was to leverage AI and automation to help her team manage that spike – which (spoiler alert) they did, with great success.
As Constantina said, “Without the level of automation we have with Fin and Intercom, I’d have needed a team of 150 people to manage that.” But by leaning on these tools, they empowered a whopping 98.3% of the 316,000 customers seeking support to resolve their query themselves. In other words, only 1.7% of those customers needed to speak with the team.
So not only were they able to scale support to tackle an enormous spike, they actually freed up time for support agents to deal with meaningful conversations on a daily basis, and even explore other exciting opportunities to create impact – like what “premium support” could look like, and how they could offer support as a service.
You can dig into the details of our chat with Constantina here.
Nuuly
With support volume on the rise, Natalie expected to have to significantly grow her team to keep up with demand. Natalie explained that for her, around 50 associates is a sweet spot for a support team; anything larger makes her feel disconnected from each individual employee.
So therein lay the challenge for Nuuly: how could the team meet increasing demand without dramatically adding headcount?
The answer? (One more spoiler alert) Fin.
Since adding Fin to the team and embracing a human-AI approach to support, Natalie has been able to free up her support associates to handle queries that require human empathy and judgment, and spend more time building strong relationships with their customers and teammates. The combination of Fin and other Intercom automation features have also enabled Natalie to slow projected staff growth by 40%, which lets Nuuly’s tight-knit support team maintain their team size and culture.
You can check out our chat with Natalie here.
