39: Brian Donohue - How to handle the untameable beast of AI products at Intercom

This episode gave me a lot of peace of mind. Intercom is dealing with the exact same problems that we all have when building around and with AI.

Estimations are impossible and things that are feeling impossible are possible the day after. Brian sat together with me to talk about it all including Intercom’s coming-of-age story and how they look at customer service through this new distorting lense of AI and Machine learning that is rocking our boat.

It’s a great learning piece on anything product and leadership.

Season 3 of the ProducTea: We spill the tea on how to Go to Market through Product-led Sales and Product-led Growth in B2B and the realities of senior leadership.

Timestamps:
06:30 What makes Intercom so special, and why is good customer service so difficult?
11:50 Tieing business and technology together, while AI is making quantum leaps from unuseable to “this is really good”
18:19 We are all working in a playground of opportunities that is very hard to get under predictable control
25:30 I have no idea how long this entire project might take. Days or months. No idea
31:00 Unpredictability of your output in product, you only know when you have it
36:00 Outcome-driven goals when outcomes are impossible to define?
44:00 How to build an innovative product inside a large organization by creating an artificial micro-market
52:30 We still don’t know exactly what AI displaces and it won’t. Support vs. Replacement and the resulting uncertainty.

Brians’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-d-2450192/
Brians' Twitter: https://twitter.com/brian_donohue

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