The AI Transformation at Intercom 🤖 — with Darragh Curran

Refactoring Podcast

Today's guest is Darragh Curran!

Darragh is the CTO of Intercom, which is one of the world's leading customer service products with more than 600 million users.

With Darragh, we talked about how AI poses at the same time an existential risk and an incredible opportunity for Intercom, and how this led them to the decision of creating a completely separate product and deflect most team resources to it.

Then we discussed how AI is being adopted inside Intercom itself to achieve Darragh's ambitious goal of doubling the team's productivity.

And finally, we explored Darragh's own role as CTO and what he believes he needs to get right to make all of this happen.

(00:00) Preview

(01:31) Introduction

(02:19) How Intercom changed with AI

(07:02) Intercom and Fin

(11:37) AI productivity gains

(16:36) Measuring productivity increase

(25:06) Experience and AI

(31:02) AI in large and legacy systems

(32:47) The CTO role in an AI framework

(38:56) Good for human = Good for AI

(42:03) Improving AI models: Fin's case

(45:03) How Fin improved so fast

(49:08) One big challenge

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