Fin Sunday Edition #10
The real work speaks the loudest
This week stretched across stages, meetups, and hard truths. Everywhere we looked, one theme kept returning: nothing cuts through like real work.
Here’s what we’ve been sharing and learning out in the world.
‘There’s no universal ROI for AI agents’
Karen Church, our VP of Research and Data Science, said the quiet part out loud.
Everyone wants a single number:
What’s the uplift? What’s the average? How fast does ROI land?
Karen’s answer is simple and sharp: ROI is contextual.
Company size, structure, conversation complexity, team readiness, implementation depth — context determines whether AI acts as a multiplier or a mirror.
She closed with the truth most vendors won’t say:
“You don’t buy ROI. You grow it.”
It’s the clearest articulation of how we think about outcomes, readiness, and long-term compounding value. A good one to read (and re-read).
Support is becoming a diagnostic layer
At the Fin × Jam × Vercel meetup in San Francisco, something clicked. Support and engineering aren’t moving closer together, they’re starting to share a boundary line.
AI now surfaces root causes while they’re still forming. Engineers see the problem before it becomes a ticket. Support becomes a feed of what’s happening in production, not a post-mortem of it.
The throughline is this: when you bring real customer signals closer to where decisions get made, the work gets more honest — and more effective.
If you want in on these conversations, our Luma calendar has everything lined up.
The Hollywood demo problem
On the Intercom Blog, our Senior Product Marketing Manager Francesca Conde tackled a growing tension: the widening gap between Hollywood demos and reality.
Emmet Connolly shared the piece with his own reflection: we’ve entered a strange territory in tech where funding announcements and promo videos are more common than product releases.
He pointed to MKBHD’s recent critique of over-produced demos and contrasted it with what happened at Pioneer, when Paul Adams dialed a real phone number on stage and talked to Fin Voice live.
A video would have been safer, but a real demo tells the truth.
“You have to be able to show your damn product.”
Francesca’s piece captures why this matters — and why real demos have become an act of clarity and credibility in an era of cinematic promises.
Foundations > features
Des was in Lisbon this week for two back-to-back talks at Web Summit — one on what it means to re-found your company for the AI era, and another on how agents change how software is built.
Across both sessions, the thread was clear: building with AI starts with foundations, not features.
Agents demand new engineering rhythms, new product instincts, and new design expectations — the kind of deep changes that happen inside a company before they show up in the product.
Three builders walk into GTM...
While in Lisbon for Web Summit, Des joined Arvind Jain (Glean) and Timothy Young (Jasper) for a conversation about how AI is changing the foundations of go-to-market.
The headline was simple: GTM is becoming a learning system. Not a sequence, a network.
A few themes sat at the heart of the discussion:
Shared intelligence making every function smarter.
Taste and trust resurfacing as differentiators.
AI raising the bar on judgment.
Doubling down on the real stuff
Continuing the tour through the new GTM reality, Paul shared how we’re rethinking the way we market Intercom and Fin.
He introduced a new full stack marketer role, and explained why the old rhythm of marketing doesn’t match a world where products evolve weekly and demos matter more than narratives.
A version of the same theme: real work over performance.
Europe’s AI moment
On Thursday, Des joined the ETN tech show (skip to 37:16) to talk about the story of Fin, the state of AI startups in Europe, and the question on everyone’s mind:
Can Europe’s early strength in the app layer translate upward?
ETN streams live on X and YouTube — a good one to follow if you’re tracking the pulse of Europe’s tech scene.
Our parting thought
From the craft behind real demos to the realities of ROI, this week offered a simple reminder:
The work speaks loudest when it’s real.
Real timing, conversations, and outcomes. Everything else is just production.
See you next Sunday.