How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)

You don't have a choice. AI's 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 SAS business to an AI first agent based business. Finn is our AI agent will pass a hundred million error 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 N U AR, 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. If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, you may need to go hardcore founder mode. The way that greatness is created is that you find a C Yo, who's willing to make brave hard decisions and own the results. Ultimately like forty percent. You said there was a a soft coup, is there more you could share about that? Today my guest is Own 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 yourself before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Finn is incredible. Their traditional business was valued at 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 three point five came out. They had a working prototype of what is now Finn.

And Owen and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today Finn is growing like crazy, already at eight digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Own gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now. What do you have to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt? What do you believe 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.

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