Eoghan McCabe
speaker
119 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Eoghan McCabe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So there is definitely a lot of revenue that's driven by just excitement, people kicking tires. But there are AI businesses out there where they retain customers. Those customers have totally changed the way they've worked. They're expanding on the product. They're not going anywhere. They've forever changed.
Well, I have no choice but to say that that's a terrible fucking idea. And just like Intercom is eventually fucked by AGI, we'd also be fucked by companies building their own AI systems. The reality is, hand on heart, independent of my association with Intercom, I
I think that building your own AI agent platforms is going to be as smart as in the previous generation, building your own SaaS workflow tools. These things are super deep. Like I said, with Finn, our AI agent, it's the product of over 100 different experiments, many patented parts. We've got 30 ML engineers and counting, 100 other engineers working on all the application components.
You're just not going to build a highly performant, rich AI agent on the side. not going to be done. And I think any attempt to do so may yield some short-term excitement, but even Klarna long-term, I'm pretty sure it will move on to a professional purpose-built system.
technology is deflationary technology gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper over time look at these statistics where they show the real prices of various products and goods and even as currency inflates the price of say tvs flat screen tvs goes down and so these ai agents will be way cheaper than humans while they're also better that said
What you're going to see people do is augment their savings they make in their budgets or use the savings they make in their human budgets to spend on as much AI as they can until they're now totally over-serving their customer. I think people are going to start to find that if...
If, for example, in our e-commerce story, these companies can generate substantially better sales through providing these epic AI assistants, they'll happily spend more money for them. But when those themselves become commodities, then it'll get cheaper over time too.
Valuable businesses have got smaller with technology. The size of Google or Facebook, when they were worth $100 billion in employee size, was substantially smaller than General Electric or Ford. The long arc of technology and automation requires less humans. So it'll perpetuate that arc. You're not going to see mass layoffs.
At Intercom, for example, we've been using this AI agent, Finn, for nearly two years. And we've not let anyone go, but we've stopped growing the size of our support team. I think any future growth is going to be catered to by the AI agents. The AI agents will first do a lot of low-level and simpler work. And the humans will do the higher level work.
Now, when we hire for customer service, we're hiring a more talented, experienced person who can do the creative things that the AI agents can't. Eventually, as these teams get smaller and through attrition, the AI will be doing more and more of them. And there just will be less humans in the mix.
There must be some loss.
certain use cases where the distribution of the types of questions is really tight rather than this big long normal distribution of so many different types of questions we'll be able to create these tight custom experiences if you're a clarinet for example you might only get three questions that cover 80 percent three types of questions that cover 80 percent of your inbound
And therefore, you can actually create AI or AI-ish experiences to do big swaths of your customer service. Most businesses are not like that.
Again, in the fullness of time, if they manage to become ever closer to something we call AGI, they will. Storytellers and visionaries are very different from builders and business people. These are just different types of disciplines and different individuals.
And so the people that tell these big visionary stories about how LLM companies or AGI is going to crush all of software, they're not actual business people. They're not actual builders. And they don't realize that businesses, consumers have real practical problems that need solving. And it takes them a really, really long time to adopt these technologies.
I think we're going to see a giant rise of robotics in many different areas. A lot of blue-collar work will probably be done by robotics. The one thing that's important to say while I'm celebrating this human work being done is that technology has always put humans out of work when the work has been dangerous shit and demeaning.
Whether it's individuals on factory floors where they lose limbs, humans dying in mines, So much of these types of work that humans fucking hated, that actually killed them, has been replaced by technology. And all the while, the population of the world has increased, GDP has increased, longevity has increased. We have no reason to believe that we're not still on that same trajectory.
They'll learn new things over time. When I got into the technology industry, I was making crappy websites, writing HTML by hand. Now we have so many different ways to generate websites. You certainly have seen so much web designer work disrupted by Wix and Squarespace and Shopify and all of these tools and technologies and frameworks. But actually, these people were never put out of work.
The demand, the greater demand that these people could not serve was catered to. And those people got more specialized. That's going to continue to be the case.
There is no such thing. There's no such thing. Even Apple don't have it. Apple very famously championed their patented iPhone technologies. And yet Samsung came and actually beat them on many different criteria. Technology is a cat and mouse game. It's about who builds it first and brings it to market, helps customers understand and adopt it. Always been the case.
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