The Customer Service Revolution: Building Fin, with Eoghan McCabe & Fergal Reid of Intercom

Today Eoghan McCabe and Fergal Reid of Intercom join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building their AI customer service agent Fin, exploring how they achieved a 65% resolution rate through rigorous optimization and custom model training rather than relying on base model improvements, while pioneering outcome-based pricing at $0.99 per resolution.

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Sponsors:

Linear:

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AGNTCY:

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Shopify:

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CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:43) Keeping Up With AI

(09:56) Evaluating Models and Evals

(13:04) Incumbents vs. Startups

(18:54) Product Risk and Judgment (Part 1)

(19:00) Sponsors: Linear | AGNTCY

(21:34) Product Risk and Judgment (Part 2)

(23:42) The Klarna Layoff Story (Part 1)

(32:11) Sponsors: Claude | Shopify

(36:13) The Klarna Layoff Story (Part 2)

(36:14) Driving Resolution Rate

(45:00) Intelligence Isn't the Bottleneck

(50:10) Closing the Automation Gap

(56:20) Human vs. AI Accuracy

(01:01:03) The Nuance of Speed

(01:04:48) Considering Paradigm Changes

(01:09:31) Outcome-Based Pricing Model

(01:19:12) Casual Hacking and Insights

(01:26:05) AI Adoption and Ambition

(01:36:00) Outro