What is Intercom's Fin ChatBot?
Is the next era of customer service finally here? GPT-4 shines a way forward.
Hey Everyone,
This is going to sound like a Sponsored post, without me actually getting paid for it š, thatās how optimistic I am about this solution. Because I think it illustrates how fast companies need to pivot who might be impacted by this Generative A.I. wave.
Let me try to elaborate, and A.I. in customer service is not a niche I have looked into very closely in quite some time.
Itās not so long ago chatbots used to be mostly about customer service. That was before LLMs. That era of chatbots on the web, on mobile and of speaker assistants, more or less failed.
Around the middle of March, 2023 Intercom had mentioned their new customer service agent Fin. At the time, I didnāt really pay attention. Yet another OpenAI partnership (I thought).
Iām fairly interested in companies who are āearly adoptersā in how they partnered with OpenAI for GPT-3.5 access. I seems like Intercom might have been one of them. Intercom, the āonly AI-powered, complete customer service solutionā, announced it has built a breakthrough AI customer service bot called Fin, powered by OpenAIās GPT-4 and Intercomās proprietary machine learning technology.
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Adding AI to your support team can be daunting. Our advice? Youāve got this [link]
"We believe the advances made in Large Language Models (LLM), spearheaded by OpenAI and that have manifested in ChatGPT, will be the most significant change the customer service industry has experienced in decades. It's a massive step towards a world where customer service is automation-first, a future we've been working towards for a few years," said Des Traynor, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom. (January, 2023)
A.I . was already starting to disrupt and impact customer service at scale, but how about in the ChatGPT era, I havenāt read much about it. But Iām glad itās happening. Customer success and customer service needs to get better across the globe.
Questions about our new AI chatbot, Fin? Hereās everything you need to know [link]
Here is a Twitter thread by Intercom about Fin.
Lo and behold, thereās even YouTube Shorts about Fin. Which by the way is a name I can actually like more than 90% of the names of these things and ChatGPT spin-offs.
Zero Training or Setup Required
Fin works with zero setups or training required, unlike most bots where responses need to be curated manually by a human. With the simple toggle of an on-off switch, Fin will start resolving queries instantly, learning everything it needs from companiesā existing support articles and only providing answers based on that content.
Maybe Intercom is more like an A.I. enabled customer service company at this point. Historically Intercom, Inc. is a software company that specializes in business messaging, providing businesses with a way to chat with their customers.
Meet Fin. Intercomās breakthrough AI bot for your support team, powered by GPT-4.
Fin can resolve up to 50% of your support questions instantly, solving complex problems and providing safer, more accurate answers than any other AI bot. Simply pair Fin with your help center to learn your written history and hold natural conversations with your customers.
Now it looks like they have access to GPT-4, and I wonder about how this elevates the game.
Letās look at their YouTube Promo:
āAI Support you can Trustā
So overall I really like the branding Intercom has done around Fin. Now I wish you could interact with a demo of the version on the Poe app (by Quora).
A company like Intercom has to embrace Generative A.I, and itās not surprising it went with OpenAI here rather early. I donāt know their ecosystem or their competitors but Intercom has been around a while. They were founded way back when in 2011.
Itās very interesting to see them talk more about automation and A.I. Iām listening.
Intercom is Irish and Fin Must be a Leprechaun
Irish-founded customer service unicorn Intercom has announced its first AI customer service bot, Fin, and Iām sorry I ignored it in March, itās May now and Iām satisfied this is a pretty decent application of Generative A.I. for a company right in the thick of things with customer service.
These are the front lines.
Fin is specifically built to be effective and ready for customer service teams, using both GPT-4 and the ChatGPT API in parallel to optimize for accuracy and cost-effectiveness.
I donāt know how Fin is performing for teams around the world, but itās somewhat interesting to track.
Less Hallucinations, More Automation
Intercom says it is committed to ābringing the latest in AI and automation to customer service teamsā and now leverages GPT systems across its platform, including recently released features within the Intercom Inbox and Articles products. These features, which debuted in January, are now available to all customers.
Described by Intercom as a "breakthrough in customer service bots," Fin was built with the GPT-4 and ChatGPT API technologies to optimise for accuracy and reduce "hallucinations," ie made-up or inaccurate answers, a major pitfall of GPT-3.5.
So my self-induced sponsored post is over, what did you think?
With all the hype around various applications of LLMs, Iām damn curious how they perform in the real world. Iām thinking customer service will be some of the front lines to keep an eye on.