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I’m exploring how to implement AI in businesses and today I’m looking at Intercom’s AI strategy.

Intercom — a leading customer support platform — is sharpening its focus, quickly becoming an AI-first company.

While Intercom has been integrating AI in its products for several years, since GPT-3’s release, they have started radically changing many aspects of the organisation.

This analysis provides a glimpse into how Intercom is positioning itself as an AI company, by focusing on 4 key areas:

• Product

• Pricing

• People

• Content

Here’s a brief timeline of their AI adoption:

December 2017

Fergal, a machine learning strategist turned VP of AI at Intercom, spoke about the product implications of AI, noting:

October 2020

Resolution Bot was born.

December 9th, 2022

Des and Fergal discuss ChatGPT (launched on 30th November) and its implications for customer support.

January 31st, 2023

Intercom unveils its first experiment with generative AI—powering Intercom Inbox with GPT 3.5.

It normally takes 3 minutes to write a summary, but with this new feature, it takes ~10 seconds.

February 2nd, 2023

Fergal and Des hosted another podcast discussing ChatGPT's impact on their industry and its benefits.

They mentioned they were prototyping some new big features.

March 14th, 2023

Fin was announced.

April 2023 onwards

They produced more content about the impact of AI on customer support roles.

They produced a report on AI trends in the support industry (and have since released a 2024 version¹⁰⁶)

• 67% of leaders plan to invest more in AI the year ahead

• 71% of support leaders believe that customers will expect AI-assisted customer service in the next five years

• 71% of customer support leaders believe AI gives companies a competitive advantage

Since then, they’ve released a lot of content on building AI products, AI's impact on customer support and its benefits, and industry surveys for insights.

They’ve cemented themselves as an AI-first product company, sharing their learnings and helping their industry.

Let’s see how they’ve done it by focusing on product, pricing, people, and content.

Product

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