How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
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What was the state of Intercom before deciding to pivot to AI?
You don't have a choice. AI is gonna disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.
You have very successfully shifted late stage SaaS business to an AI-first agent-based business.
Finn is our AI agent. We'll pass a hundred million air ore with Finn in less than three quarters. Let's talk about how you made this actually happen. We were about to hit like zero dollars in that new Air Or, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. So ChatGPT launches, was it just like, this is it? We gotta go all in on this thing? I said we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead. I jumped hard on AI. But I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave hard decisions and own the results.
What percentage of the employees kind of turned over during this period? Ultimately like forty percent.
You said there was a a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? Today, my guest is Owen McCabe. This is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade plus old business. So many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI. And my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt your. Before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Fin is incredible. Their traditional business was valued as billions of dollars, was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, but growth started to plateau and was even about to go negative.
Six weeks after GPT 3.5 came out, they had a working prototype of what is now Fin, and Owen and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today Finn is growing like crazy. At 8 digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Owen gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now, what he had to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt, what he believes people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI, and so much more. If you enjoy this Podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bold, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, D Script, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier D, and Mobbin.
Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Owen McCain. This episode This episode is brought to you by Great Question, the all-in-one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit, and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is: I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just don't have the time or the tools. That's exactly the gap Great Question fills. Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers, to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes, and then Then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What was the state of Intercom before deciding to pivot to AI?
0:00–13:34
2
Why did Intercom decide to become an AI‑first company and how did the ChatGPT launch influence that decision?
13:34–25:52
3
How did the team build the first prototype of Fin in just six weeks?
25:52–37:08
4
What cultural and organizational changes were required to support the AI transformation?
37:08–50:19
5
How did Intercom redesign its pricing model to $0.99 per resolved ticket and why?
50:19–1:02:34
6
What were the growth results after launching Fin and how does Intercom compare to other public SaaS companies?
1:02:34–1:12:59
7
What lessons does Eoghan share for founders trying to navigate a late‑stage AI pivot?
1:12:59–1:22:24
8
Where can listeners learn more about Fin and follow Eoghan’s future work?
1:22:24–1:23:16
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