Ep 25: Intercom Co-Founder Des Traynor on Building Winning AI Strategy and Where We Are in the AI Adoption Curve

Intercom is one of the earliest adopters of AI - its AI product Fin has generated over two million answers and been used by thousands of users since it was launched last March. On this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with Intercom Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor to talk about how AI is incorporated into Intercom, structuring its AI team, using RAG vs. fine-tuning techniques, where we are in the AI adoption curve, and his advice for startups building on top of AI. 

 

(0:00) intro 

(0:31) Intercom reaction to ChatGBT 

(3:18) how AI is incorporated into Intercom products 

(6:33) guardrails preventing hallucinations 9:49 exploration versus optimizing cost 

(19:00) structuring AI teams 

(31:17) fine-tuning for customers vs RAG 

(37:03) solving the 'actions' problem 

(38:38) lessons learned from transitioning into AI 

(44:28) over-hyped/under-hyped 

(45:53) companies that have implemented AI well/poorly 

(48:27) Jacob and Jordan debrief

 

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob is an AI investor at Redpoint Ventures. He's led Redpoint's investments in companies like Abridge, Physical Intelligence & Legora. Follow Jacob on Twitter (@jacobeffron).

On Unsupervised Learning we probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what's real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you're a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Subscribe to this show to stay up to date on our latest episodes.