Rolling out an AI Agent doesn’t just change how your team works – it changes who your team is.
That’s something we learned firsthand. Before we launched Fin publicly, our Support team became its first alpha/beta tester and we had to move fast. No roadmap. No step-by-step guide. Just a powerful new technology, and a steep learning curve.
That experience is exactly what led us to create The AI Agent Blueprint – a resource we wish we’d had when we were starting out, and one we hope will give other support teams a clearer path forward.
This post originally featured in our AI-first customer service newsletter,
The Ticket.
👉 Subscribe and join the 28K+ customer service professionals who receive industry news, tips, and career guidance directly on their LinkedIn feed.
Looking back, I won’t lie and say I was cool, calm, and confident about how to do this – I was nervous as hell. I had no idea how to implement an AI Agent and ensure it resulted in huge cost savings and stellar customer experiences.
We had older machine learning technology available to us (shout out to our first-gen chatbot, Resolution Bot), but as a complex software business, we really only used it for basic FAQs. In all honesty, we still had a way to go – both in using automation more effectively and in making the chatbot experience actually enjoyable for our customers.
So why the urgency?
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene nearly three (!!) years ago, Intercom’s Machine Learning team immediately spotted the opportunity and dived into building the world’s first (and objectively best) AI Customer Service Agent.
Suddenly, we were being asked to pilot this brand new technology with real customers and go all in ASAP. Because we were selling this powerful new functionality, we had to use it ourselves and show it off in the best possible light so customers would want to use it too. #nopressure
No playbook, just a lot to figure out
Nobody had done this before. There was no how-to guide. Just a lot of unanswered questions:
- How do we do a phased rollout, but scale very quickly?
- How do we QA Fin’s responses and make continuous improvements?
- How will we produce and manage all the content Fin needs?
- What will we do about all the outdated content we already have?
- What are the success metrics now? Should they be different to original Support KPIs?
- Who’s responsible for the success metrics? Who manages this newcomer to our team?
It was daunting. We had to take a brand new technology, figure out how to use it, build a team around it, and move at breakneck speed to implement every new feature that rolled out. It was ambiguous, fast-moving, and a massive lift.
But we got there and the results speak for themselves: Fin is now resolving over 75% of our inbound support volume.
How AI reshaped our team and roles
That success led to real change for me and my team: new roles, new responsibilities, and new career paths. I now run a whole new function that didn’t exist before: AI Support. We’ve created new and elevated roles like Conversation Designers and Knowledge Managers. Fin hasn’t just changed how we support customers – it’s transformed the structure of our team and the trajectory of our careers.
And now, we’re helping our customers do the same.
Helping others unlock success with AI
In all transparency, if I didn’t work at the company building Fin, I might have waited to see if all this generative AI Agent hype blew over, or how others got on with it first before carefully planning to incorporate it later. I might have waited for some form of instructions – a blueprint for how to deploy and scale an AI Agent. I wish I had something like that when we got started, or even later when we had a solid foundation but needed to scale our AI strategy.
How much less scary would it be to implement an AI Agent if something like that existed?
Whether you’re just getting started or already using AI in some way, we’re a lot further down this AI road now, you shouldn’t have to figure it all out alone.
That’s why we created The AI Agent Blueprint – a practical map for launching and scaling AI in support. It brings together everything we’ve learned from our own journey, and from working closely with our customers who are doing the same.
📩 Subscribe to The Ticket here – a regular LinkedIn newsletter delivering key insights for customer service professionals in this time of mind-blowing change.