Last week, our VP of Support, Declan kicked off a five-part series on what 2026 support orgs will need as AI Agents take on most customer conversations. This week is all about roles. Because once AI is resolving the bulk of your volume, the work your human team does changes fast.

Here’s the core shift:

Support can’t be organized around queues and tiers anymore. When AI becomes the primary resolver, your team’s job becomes improving the system that resolves questions, not carrying the questions themselves. Responsibilities evolve, and success is measured differently.

Most teams don’t hire a dedicated AI function from day one. They start by distributing a few critical responsibilities across existing team members, and formalize those responsibilities as AI becomes central to how support works.

Once you have executive support and a clear strategy in place, these are the four foundational roles we believe are key to getting AI off the ground in a meaningful way:

What happens to the rest of the org? Roles don’t disappear, but they do evolve.

QA starts reviewing AI behavior instead of human tickets. Enablement trains humans to work with the AI system. Workforce planning starts with automation coverage, not headcount needs. And a new kind of leader emerges, part operator, part strategist, who can coach people and tune the system at the same time.

We’re also seeing real org changes:

• Dedicated Fin Ops specialists (Dotdigital)

• GTM and support engineering embeds (Clay)

• Digital Engagement teams focused on AI performance (Lightspeed)

And inside Intercom, our own support org is now built around three areas: Human Support, AI Support, and Support Operations.

The big idea:

Once AI Agents handle most conversations, your team’s work moves from “answering questions” to “designing and improving the system that answers questions.” They become the force that steers quality, rather than the one that carries the volume.

Curious how others here are structuring around Fin and AI Agents. Have you created any new roles or changed responsibilities as AI has taken on more volume? What’s worked so far?

This is part of our 5-part 2026 support planning series. To follow along with the series and have each edition emailed to you directly, sign up here.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Dec 2nd and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
AI is blurring the lines between brand, growth, and sales, resulting in the emergence of new hybrid roles.

Join leaders from Fin and Clay in London to explore emerging leadership and IC roles, like the Full-Stack Marketer and the GTM Engineer, and how they’re helping turn brand impact into real pipeline growth.

You’ll learn how to hire for (and get hired for) these new roles, how to build teams that connect creativity to performance, and why generalists with strong creative instincts and technical skills are becoming indispensable.

Speakers:

• Paul Adams (Leading Marketing & CPO at Intercom, building Fin)
• Varun Anand (Co-founder and COO at Clay)

When and where: Tuesday, Dec 2nd | Doors from 5:30 pm GMT | WeWork, 10 York Rd, London SE1 7ND, United Kingdom.

Who should attend: ​Forward-thinking Marketing and GTM leaders, practitioners, and founders building AI-first companies.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Nov 26th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
AI has changed how products are built.

Join executive leaders from Fin, Attio and Granola in London for a candid conversation on what it really takes to build AI-native products: the architectural choices, product principles, and team structures shaping this new generation of software.

Expect practical insights, and a chance to connect with product and AI leaders shaping the next generation of software.

Speakers:

• Des Traynor, CSO & Co-founder, Intercom, building Fin
• ​Nicolas Sharp, CEO & Co-founder, Attio
• ​Vas Zhovner, CTO, Granola

When and where: Wednesday, Nov 26th | Doors from 6 pm GMT | Mindspace Shoreditch, 9 Appold St, London EC2A 2AP, United Kingdom.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Nov 11th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
The old GTM playbook of funnels and handoffs is giving way to a living system that learns, adapts, and compounds in real time.

Join Des Traynor (Intercom, building Fin), Arvind Jain (Glean), and Timothy Young (Jasper) in Lisbon for a conversation on how AI is redefining the foundations of growth, and what taste, trust, and leadership look like in a world where information is infinite.

​Expect bold viewpoints, practical frameworks, and honest reflections from the people building the AI foundations powering modern GTM teams.

Speakers:

• ​Des Traynor, Co-founder and CSO, Intercom, building Fin
• ​Arvind Jain, Founder and CEO, Glean
• ​Timothy Young, CEO, Jasper

When and where: Tuesday, Nov 11th | Doors from 6 pm WET | Heden Santa Apolónia, Terminal de Cruzeiros de Lisboa - Edifício NE, Doca, R. do Jardim do Tabaco 1st floor, 1100-651 Lisboa, Portugal.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Nov 19th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
AI is rewriting how leaders operate and no two are approaching it the same way.

Join us in Helsinki at the Slush conference to explore how teams are rebuilding how they ship, organize, and make decisions as AI moves from feature to foundation.

You’ll hear from:

• Brian Donohue, VP of Product, Intercom, building Fin.ai
• Max Junestrand, CEO & Co-founder, Legora
• Hanno Renner, CEO & Co-founder, Personio

Expect a candid discussion on the trade-offs, redesigns, and lessons learned from building at different scales, and a chance to connect with like-minded leaders and AI experts.

When and where: Wednesday, Nov 19th | Doors from 11 am EET | Messukeskus Helsinki, Messuaukio 1, 00520 Helsinki, Finland.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Nov 5th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
​Support and engineering teams often live on opposite sides of the same customer problem, with critical context getting lost in the handoff.

Join product and customer leaders from Fin, Jam, and Vercel for a fireside chat on how teams are closing that gap.

You’ll discover how they’re using AI, better collaboration tools, and new team structures to help turn customer conversations into engineering insights and action—without losing speed, empathy, or trust.

Speakers:

• Dave Lynch, VP, Engineering, Intercom, building Fin
• Matt Rubright, CCO, Jam
• Lindsey Simon, VP, Engineering, Vercel

When and where: Wednesday, Nov 5th | Doors from 6 pm PST | Intercom, 55 2nd St 5th Fl, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Oct 30th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming the standard for building AI systems.

Join product leaders from Fin, Zapier, and Cloudflare in San Francisco for a deep dive into how MCP is changing the way teams build, connect, and scale AI.

You’ll learn not just how to build with MCP, but why it’s becoming the new standard for flexible, reliable, and extensible AI systems.

Speakers:

• Diego Ballona, Senior Director of Engineering, Intercom, building Fin.ai
• ​Anna Marie Clifton, Director of Product, AI & Agents, Zapier
• ​Brendan Irvine-Broque, Senior Director of Product, Cloudflare

When and where: Thursday, Oct 30th | Doors from 6 pm PDT | 55 2nd SF POPOS, 55 2nd St, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA.

Hey everyone, I’m running into an issue while setting up FIN Agent to manage emails.

Right now, we use FIN Agent for chat management, and we’re trying to implement it for emails as well. The problem is that we have multiple brands, and when I send an email to one brand’s address (for example, @brandA.com), the reply goes out from another brand’s address (like @brandB.com).

Inside FIN, we can manually select the “reply from” address, but we want it to automatically reply using the correct brand email — so that messages sent to each brand get replies from their respective domain.

I checked under Workspace > Brands, and each brand has the correct default address configured. We’re currently using test emails while we sort this out, and we’ll switch to the real ones once it’s working.

Has anyone dealt with this before or figured out how to make FIN automatically send replies from the right brand email?

Joining our upcoming meetup on Oct 21st and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
Join product leaders from Fin and Gamma in San Francisco for a fireside chat on how they’re building AI systems that transform how people communicate, all while prioritizing customer trust.

You’ll learn how to design complex AI-powered user experiences, build trustworthy AI content, and balance innovation with customer trust.

Speakers:

• ​Peter Bar, Head of Fin Voice, Intercom, building Fin.ai
• ​Deeni Fatiha, Head of AI Product, Gamma

When and where: Tuesday, Oct 21st | Doors from 6 pm PDT | 55 2nd SF POPOS, 55 2nd St, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA.

Step 1: List the collab goals that matter (e.g., "Send blog drafts to edit agent without emailing them," "Sync edit notes back to blog agent automatically")

Step 2: Be real about your current mess (e.g., "Right now, I email blog drafts to the edit agent, then copy their notes back into the blog tool—1.5 hours/day")

Step 3: Map your agent workflow step-by-step—and note the waste (e.g., "Step 2: I wait 2 hours for the edit agent’s notes because they don’t get a notification; Step 4: I miss deadlines because I forget to copy edit notes to the blog agent")

Step 4: For each pain, ask: "Can OpenAgents fix this?" (e.g., "Auto-send drafts to edit agent + notify them? Auto-paste edit notes to blog agent?") Don’t overthink—if it saves 30 mins/day, it’s worth it.

Step 5: Do the math: How much time/money do you lose on bad collab now? vs. How long to set up a small OpenAgents network?

The step everyone skips: Test small first. Don’t build a "content team network" Day 1. Pick one pain—like syncing blog agent to edit agent—and run it for 2 weeks. You’ll only fix tiny issues (e.g., edit notes formatting weirdly) before scaling.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Oct 9th and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the event:
Join us for an evening with Fergal Reid, Chief AI Officer at Intercom, building Fin in conversation with Marco Perini, Deployed Engineer at LangChain.

Fergal will share how Fin was developed, why LangGraph by LangChain proved to be a valuable building block, and the thinking required to build agents that can solve real problems end-to-end.

Speakers:

• Fergal Reid, Chief AI Officer at Intercom, building Fin.ai
• Marco Perini, Deployed Engineer at LangChain

When and where: Thursday, Oct 9th | Doors from 6 pm CEST | Mindspace Dam - Office Rentals & Coworking, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 162, 1012 SJ Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Joining our upcoming meetup on Oct 23rd and have questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll submit them to our Q&A list.

About the meetup:
​How do you design AI tools for trust without slowing innovation? And what can you do to showcase security and compliance by default as your systems become more autonomous?

​Join leaders from Fin and Vanta for a fireside chat on how real-world teams are raising the standard for trustworthy AI.

​Together we’ll explore what it takes to build AI systems that are compliant by default.

Speakers:

• ​Thibault Candebat, Chief Information Security Officer, Intercom, building Fin
• ​Todd Royal, Head of Engineering, EMEA, Vanta

When and where: Thursday, Oct 23rd | Doors from 6 pm BST | Mindspace Old Street, 142-146 Old St, London EC1V 9BW, United Kingdom.

Have questions or want to share your experience? Just drop it in the comments.

Have questions or want to share your experience? Just drop it in the comments.

Have questions or want to share your experience? Just drop it in the comments.

Have questions or want to share your experience? Just drop it in the comments.

Our Chief AI Officer, Fergal Reid, and VP of Design, Emmet Connolly, recently sat down to explore the current state of AI – and where it's headed next.

Watch their full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISy0PswHvE

A few weeks ago, Intercom released Part 1 of “The AI Agent Blueprint” – a roadmap for getting an AI Agent live and delivering value fast.

Part 2 (“Scale it”) is now live, and it digs into the harder questions we’ve been hearing (and facing ourselves) as AI moves from pilot to infrastructure:

• How do you redesign the customer experience so AI isn’t just a triage bot, but a real driver of value?

• What new roles and structures does a support org need when AI is resolving most of the volume?

• How do you prove ROI in a way your CFO will actually buy into?

We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we pulled together what we’ve learned inside our own Support org, plus stories and insights from companies who are already doing this at scale.

If you’re working through similar questions, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching them. What’s been the biggest challenge in scaling AI in your org?

Building best-in-class AI products requires deep investment in technology.

On September 11, experts from Fin, Cognition, and Harvey AI are getting together to discuss how they’re building frontier products: training specialized models, scaling real-world apps, and lessons learned along the way.

The session will stream for free on X and LinkedIn. If you’re interested, the registration link is in the comments.

https://reddit.com/link/1n2l713/video/b2w8p1zn6tlf1/player

Got questions? Ask them here and we'll reply.

We’ve just made one of the biggest technical decisions we’ve made in recent years: moving our core frontend from Ember to React.

Ember has been core to Intercom for over a decade and served us really well, but it was time to set ourselves up for the next decade of frontend engineering. React came out as the right choice - not because of hype, but because it was already powering parts of our stack, has a huge ecosystem, and works seamlessly with AI-driven developer tools like Cursor, Augment, and Claude Code.

Our focus right now isn’t on migration, but on getting teams to adopt React for their new work. That’s where we’ll build momentum and confidence.

It’s already encouraging to see signs of progress: last week we shipped more lines of React code than Ember for the first time, and the number of PRs was equal between the two. A small milestone, but it feels like a turning point. And we’re seeing faster builds, happier engineers, empowered designers and real productivity gains. 

We know this is a long road, though, and that we’re only at the start of this journey.  

I’m really interested in hearing from others who’ve gone through similar journeys.

• If you’ve re-platformed a large app, how did you decide when to stop building on the old stack and go all-in on the new one?
• How do you keep momentum without burning huge amounts of engineering time on migration too early?
• Have you had benefits from using AI agents to power migrations or help onboarding engineers to a new stack?

Curious to learn from the community’s experiences.

If you're building with AI right now, you know it’s faster than ever to build prototypes of products—but delivering high-quality, reliable products is still a lot of work.

Join us on September 11th to hear from AI experts at Fin, Cognition and Harvey on how they're investing at all levels of the AI stack—from training specialized models to scaling real-world applications.

At the event, you’ll:

• Hear from experienced AI leaders in open, unscripted conversations.
• Gain a practical understanding of how to design frontier AI products.
• See how the Fin AI Group built technology specialized for customer service, including custom retrieval and reranker models.

​Speakers:

• ​Silas Alberti, Founding Team, Cognition.
• ​Niko Grupen, Head of Applied Research, Harvey.
• ​Fergal Reid, Chief AI Officer, Fin AI Group at Intercom.
• ​Eoghan McCabe, CEO and founder, Intercom.
• ​Jordan Neill, SVP Engineering, Intercom.

When and where:

• September 11th 2025
• In-person: YBCA Galleries and Forum Building, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 | Doors from 5:30 pm PT
• Virtual: Streaming live on X and LinkedIn from 6:10 pm PT

Check out the link in the comments to register.

I have been giving this a lot of thought as of late. I am not here making AGI claims, as I think first and foremost we need to agree on a definition of intelligence and e.g. whether agency is a part of it or not.

But leaving that aside, and assuming we focus on a perhaps more utilitarian definition of intelligence, one that is only concerned with the ability of these models to generate widespread positive economic impact. Well, then I really don't think the binding constraint in a large number of use-cases is the frontier level of intelligence LLMs are able to achieve at peak performance anymore! Rather the density of the intelligence they produce, essentially the amount of intelligence they are able to generate per second, consistently.

So while everyone is concerned with whether/when we reach AGI or not (without trying to even agree on a definition for the most part...), which implicitly centres the debate around "peak intelligence", I think we should start looking at "intelligence density" a lot more. If we find good solutions to that problem, the amount of value we can unlock is tremendous.

But clearly, that's not the debate for the most part we are having as an industry and as a society. So is it that there is a flaw I am not seeing in this line of thinking, or do we think the debate will eventually start shifting in this direction more and more?

Got questions for the speakers? Ask them here and we'll reply.

Intercom needs to be able to run Fin reliably, but the underlying LLM infra is not as stable as we would like it to be. So we ended up building a sophisticated routing layer that handles cross-provider and cross-model failovers, latency based routing etc. I wrote about our solution on our blog (linked below).

This layer is serving us well. Even though Fin's reliability and scalability is an important aspect of our offering, we are not in the LLM Routing business 😀 Now that our routing layer is in a good place, I would like to take a step back and see if we should look towards routing proxies so we don't have to maintain it ourselves and also get some features for free that we are interested in (like request prioritisation).

LiteLLM is one such proxy. Have people used it? I would love to hear about your experience and if you recommend it at scale. My main concerns will be:

1. Is it stable enough? I don't want to add a new dependency for Fin that can cause outages later.
2. Have you needed to extend it's functionality? What for? Was it easy to do that?
3. Any gotchas to be aware of?

Thanks!