Eoghan McCabe: evaluation

Transcript context

…So, ChatGPT launches, was it just like this is it, we got to go all in on this thing? Was it like, hmm, let's watch this thing? How quickly was it clear that this is the future, this isn't working what we're doing? We and I were very lucky and that we had an AI group already. We were in the customer communication business, chiefly doing customer service. We were building bots, but they were rudimentary AI. We had a bunch of our own machine learning that did Q&A for customer service, but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy. But we had a number of AI engineers in the company already, and so when GPT 3.5 came out, they said, this is different and it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service. And it started where we imagined that this was going to just wreck everyone selling seats, everyone in the conventional SaaS game. And we believed that was quite possible for some couple years after that moment. But we were only six weeks into the launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Fin. I got a text from Des, my co-founder, a week or so after the launch of GPT 3.5 and he said, "The AI team have something interesting and they actually think we could make a product out of this." And this was long before there's now no doubt 100 service agents. We had something very early working and part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base 300, sorry, 30,000 paying customers, hundreds of thousands of active users, millions of their users, billions of data points. So, we had a lot to play with and so we jumped on it. Now obviously it's fun to tell that once again to the idea of this brave Maverick move, and I won't discount the fact that we were brave, but we were coming from a point of having nothing to lose. So, we certainly are unique. I don't know a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to AI and being as successful as we have been, but we also previously were screwed. We were in a really tough spot, so had no choice. So, I'll take the kudos and credit, but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as in as much trouble as we were, and so try to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new AI stuff. Something I heard from someone that worked at Intercom, correct me if this is not correct, you've always been very anti-bot in the customer support business because you didn't like how impersonal it was. It just didn't feel like the way you wanted to build a business, and then now that's what you do. Talk about just that transition.…

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