Pioneer 2025 was all about people
Recapping our annual AI event, the launch of Fin 3, and more
Thursday was one for the books.
Our annual event, Pioneer, held on October 9 in New York, brought together hundreds of customer service leaders, builders, and AI thinkers to see what’s ahead.
This year was about moving beyond the hype and getting real about what it takes to win with AI.
We announced Fin 3, the best-performing AI agent in the market, now capable of handling the most complex queries.
We talked about what’s ahead for Fin, and our vision of a single, broadly capable Customer Agent.
We brought together speakers from Anthropic, Toast, Gamma, and others to share how using Fin has changed orgs and career paths.
Running through everything was a theme about the value of people — what we have to offer, and what opportunities AI has to offer us if we can seize the moment and break free of old norms.
Every session, from the keynotes to the panel discussions, resounded with this theme. The past two years of transformation have been wild for both attendees and speakers. Pioneer helped them reflect on that, and look forward to what’s coming.
Fin 3 is here
Intercom Chief Product Officer Paul Adams kicked things off with the debut of Fin 3. Fin’s performance has continued to improve steadily over the past year, now delivering an average resolution rate of 66%, with a fifth of customers hitting closer to 80%. Now Fin 3 is capable of even more:.
“Fin can now handle the vast majority of your customer service queries, including complex ones, across many channels including Voice and Slack, all powered by our own cutting-edge in-house AI models”
To close that gap to reach the goal of 100%, Paul talked about Fin 3’s frontier: complexity.
Not all conversations are equal. A 30-second FAQ is not the same as a 30-minute billing dispute over the phone. So a new Procedures feature helps you train Fin to handle all complexity levels, end-to-end. Then its Simulations feature helps you test it all at scale.
It also works seamlessly across channels like Voice, Slack, Discord, and more. Fin Voice was a standout, closing out the keynote with an impressive live demo navigating intricate customer issues, making suggestions, and handling interruptions in natural, human-like voice conversations.
Paul left us with this thought about the impact Fin 3 will have on the people who take it on:
“Customer service teams are now product builders. We’re freeing people up to do higher value things.”
That could mean more time with VIP customers, or more time to think strategically about the customer, or to think about the customer across touchpoints other than service and support.
At the end of the day, the one thing every service leader cares about most is the customer experience.
During breaks, attendees were able to see this all themselves at stations in the event called Fin Labs, where they could try out the latest Fin builds and integrations.
A unified Agent for customer experience
Intercom CEO and Co-Founder Eoghan McCabe painted a picture of what’s ahead for Fin and Intercom.
He showed one friction-filled path for agentic customer experience: multiple Agents for different roles, each operating independently, and causing discombobulation for teams and customers. Then he painted a different picture: what if there were a single, unified Customer Agent that can do it all, stretching to the entire customer experience.
That unified agent, he said, is something we see Fin customers already doing, applying Fin to use cases outside its supposed wheelhouse, and seeing a ton of promise with tasks like qualifying leads and making product suggestions. Once more, the AI story is being led by human innovators, as he noted:
“We’re following where our customers are taking Fin.”
Getting into details, he talked about how this new direction is already on the move, and includes new prototypes beyond support:
A shopping assistant that knows your brand inside out.
An SDR agent for Fin that sells Fin.
The clear message from the event is that the industry is moving toward a unified Customer Agent, and it’s being built right now.
Read more about our vision for Customer Agents
“A generalist renaissance”
Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder Des Traynor closed the morning with a talk on the theme of convergence — how AI is collapsing the boundaries between products, roles, and skills.
Every tech wave changes the UI, he noted, from dashboards to the “big dopey text area” in all Agentic experiences (as well as in the co-pilots sitting neatly beside most SaaS projects). But in that text area, we’ve moved from ‘search for’ to ‘do’, he noted:
“People will expect AI to do everything.”
Because of this, apps will start to fold into one another. This, among other things, will change the tech landscape (it already is. But we shouldn’t fear this change or worry about job stability. A lot of jobs won’t disappear (though some unnecessary ones will). Instead, most roles will disperse and transform.
The opportunity ahead, he said, is not one of doom and gloom. Instead, he pushed the audience to see this as a renaissance for generalists. People who are equipped to adapt faster and operate across a wider spectrum than ever before will have new opportunities, and be far less boxed into limiting, specialist roles than they were before.
How roles are evolving
Continuing that theme, throughout the day we heard speakers like Nick Clark from Boston Consulting Group go deep on how human ingenuity is evolving with and because of AI, rather than being left behind. As Nick said:
“The more we automate, the more we need people thinking about the next step.”
Other sessions highlighted real-world Fin transformations powered by teams taking resolution rates up to new heights through fine-tuning and training, but also working in concert with Fin, with conversations moving back and forth between AI and human. This pattern, in the words of Shane McCarthy from Solidcore on another panel, is both high tech and high touch. As Fin gets faster and more adept, humans get more time to do deep work with the customer — and CSAT goes up on both sides.
The power of humans was also a theme in a discussion with Isabel Larrow, Product Support Operations Lead at Anthropic, who talked about how the whole Support team got involved in rolling out Fin and optimizing it through a “Support Hack Week”.
The future of support as a role looks less like scripts and repetitive conversations, and a lot more like a product role. Support pros are now becoming systems and automation specialists, knowledge managers, and AI operators.
Throughout these discussions, the livestream chat lit up with their own stories from Fin customers swapping notes, metrics, and anecdotes. One participant put it perfectly:
“Once customers use Fin, they love it — their AI agent hesitancy just disappears.”
We love to hear it.
That was Pioneer
A day of demos, debate, and glimpses of what comes next for Fin, and for every team building the future of customer experience.
We’ll be publishing deeper dives next week on Fin 3, why AI will lead to a convergent future, and why we believe in the potential of a unified Customer Agent.
Stay tuned!