“You can’t protect something that’s going to die”
How Intercom met the AI age
Despite having been around for 11 years, ChatGPT’s arrival in 2022 made it clear that Intercom and its helpdesk were under threat.
This was a moment of reckoning, a time for radical action. As Des puts it: “You can’t just fight to protect something that’s inevitably going to die”. Instead, the company moved to create a product fit to compete in the AI age, even if it meant changing everything about itself.
Des recently joined the Scaling Europe podcast to talk about this transformation, why great product leaders must think beyond customers’ immediate needs, and what he looks for in AI startups.
Here are the biggest takeaways:
Becoming an AI company takes sacrifice
Pivoting a company as large as Intercom required a decisive CEO who saw an inconvenient truth and embraced it. That looked like ripping up roadmaps, reallocating resources, buying a new domain, and pushing the entire brand in a new direction.
Being a private company helped. Telling investors you’re handing back revenue to pursue something unproven is a hard sell, and Des thinks that’s why public companies were slower to react. You also have to communicate your new goals with your team, otherwise they may try to delay or dilute them.
Now, companies reach out to Des to find out how the management team pulled it off. The conversation always follows the same pattern. Once he describes the pain, the cannibalization, the internal resistance, they ask: “Is there not an easier way? What’s the diet version?”
Unfortunately, there is no diet version.
Your customers are experts in their problems, not your solutions
When asked how do you balance the desires of customers and taking big bets on AI, Des reaches for a classic Henry Ford quote: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”
But then he reframes it. A great product leader hearing “faster horses” doesn’t write down “horse.” They write down “speed.” Then they ask: “what else?” And the customer might say comfort, reliability, warmth, being able to see at night. You end up with a list of requirements that has nothing to do with horses.
Customers are not there to solution for you. They’re not technical experts and they don’t know what’s possible. But they are experts in what they want. So you have to work both sides: what customers care about, and what technology is making possible.
In customer service, the signal was already there. Teams used macros (prewritten messages) because they were dealing with an overwhelming number of repetitive questions. Nobody was handcrafting artisanal responses to every query. Intercom built AI that could handle informational queries, showed it to customers, and the response was immediate. Then customers started asking for more: the ability to solve complex queries, automated refunds, and third-party integrations. Intercom went back to the lab, built it, came back, and each cycle reinforced the next.
As Des says, if we’d waited for customers to ask for AI, it would have been 2025, and we’d be dead.
Reality check for AI startups
Beyond his work at Intercom, Des is also a prolific angel investor. When it comes to AI startups, he looks for four characteristics:
Solving a real problem.
Differentiated AI.
Pricing power (not a thin wrapper on top of a frontier model).
Some margin or a clear path to it.
He’s also candid about how volatile the space still is. He has watched as Intercom’s engineering team has moved between coding tools multiple times – Cursor to Windsurf to Augment to Claude Code, and back again. At any given point, any one of them looked like the clear future of software development. He thinks we’re still in an experimental phase where everyone is trialing everything and prosumer churn is nasty – which is reinforced by the flood of VC money keeping prices artificially low, making it easy to buy and easy to leave.
What Des would do differently
Des is excited by the enthusiasm for Fin for Zendesk and Salesforce but looking back,
he wishes he’d launched Fin beyond our helpdesk sooner. However, what was most important in 2023 was building trust because customers were still dubious of AI’s abilities. It was a balancing act between conviction and credibility.
Today, the market context has changed and Des believes companies should move with ambition. Not to mention, the increased pace of technological development thanks to agentic coding tools. Adapting for new verticals or building features can now take weeks rather than quarters, so think big.
To hear Des’s thoughts on the state of European tech, the potential of Fin, and how to think about product direction in the AI era watch the full conversation on YouTube or Spotify.