Fin Doubles Intercom's Growth Rate

Intercom's Transformation from Plateauing SaaS to AI-First Agent Business

Intercom's pivot to AI through their agent product Fin represents one of the most dramatic and successful transformations of an established SaaS business in recent years. When Owen McCabe returned as CEO, the company was facing a crisis - after five consecutive quarters of declining net new ARR, they were approaching zero growth and risking negative territory. Six weeks after ChatGPT's release, they had a working prototype of what would become Fin, their AI customer service agent.

The transformation began with a clear-eyed assessment of their situation. Despite being a multi-hundred-million dollar ARR business valued at multiple billions, growth had stalled. McCabe made several decisive moves:

Strategic focus: They narrowed their sprawling product strategy to focus specifically on customer service, seeing an opportunity as Zendesk had been acquired and was "strategically, energetically, culturally dead."
Aggressive cost-cutting: They eliminated unnecessary expenses and canceled projects that weren't aligned with the new direction.
Cultural reset: McCabe rewrote the company values to create what he called "a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that wouldn't be effective." He implemented quarterly performance processes that scored employees not just on goals but on behavior against values, with a formula that removed people who scored below certain thresholds.
Massive investment in AI: They allocated nearly $100 million of their own cash to develop Fin, leveraging their existing AI team and massive customer data assets.
Simplified pricing: They moved to outcome-based pricing (99¢ per resolved ticket), aligning their revenue directly with the value they provide to customers. This was a dramatic shift from their previously complex and widely criticized pricing model.

The results have been remarkable. Fin is growing at over 300%, reaching solid mid-eight-digit ARR in just over a year. They project Fin will pass $100 million ARR in less than three quarters. Overall, Intercom has doubled its growth rate, moving from low single digits to the fifteenth percentile among all public software companies.

What made this transformation possible was the combination of having existing AI talent, a large customer base with billions of data points, and most importantly, the willingness to make hard decisions. McCabe describes taking a "very authoritarian, top-down, aggressive, founder-first approach" that was deeply unpopular with many employees. Ultimately, about 40% of employees turned over during this period.

The key insight for other companies facing disruption is that half-measures won't work. As McCabe puts it: "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." Companies need actual AI talent, must be willing to work as hard as the young AI startups (which McCabe describes as working "twelve hours a day, literally 365 days a year"), and need leadership willing to make unpopular decisions.

For Intercom, this transformation wasn't just about adding AI features to an existing product - it was about fundamentally reimagining their business around what AI makes possible. The irony is that a company whose mission was to "make internet business personal" is now leading with AI agents, but McCabe argues that providing "a highly engaged, instantly available, expert, consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly, personal agent" is actually more personal than making customers wait days for human responses.