The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors

SaaStr 839: Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO

31 snips

Jan 28, 2026

Paul Adams, Intercom's Chief Product Officer who led its AI-first pivot and launched the Finn agent, tells the raw story of transforming a SaaS company into an AI company. He covers refounding the org and product, the three-layer AI product model, hard personnel choices, shipping reliable AI at scale, new engineering and design practices, and how buyers and go-to-market change for AI.

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ANECDOTE

Betting The Company On AI

Paul Adams describes how Intercom bet the entire company on AI days after ChatGPT's arrival and launched Fin in March 2023.
Fin now resolves over 1M issues weekly with a 65% average resolution rate across 6,000+ customers.

INSIGHT

Refound Your Company For AI

Adams argues SaaS companies must 'refound' themselves for a post-AI world by changing org, product, metrics, pricing, and go-to-market.
He says incremental AI features are insufficient; culture and structure need full transformation.

INSIGHT

Three Layers Of A True AI Product

True AI companies have three layers: RAG (AI) layer, app layer, and a model layer with custom models and training.
Success requires mastering all three and compounding reliability across those components.

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SaaStr 839: Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO

The Brutal Truth About Transforming a SaaS Company into an AI Company

Intercom's Chief Product Officer, Paul Adams, shares the unfiltered story of how they transformed from a struggling SaaS company with 5 quarters of declining growth into an AI-first company with a breakthrough product (Fin) that now handles 1M+ customer resolutions per week.

What You'll Learn:

Why AI transformation requires "refounding" your entire company - not just adding AI features
The self-harming decisions you must make to win (including parting ways with ~33% of your team)
How to go from 0 to 6,000+ AI customers with 65% average resolution rate
Why demos ≠ products and the "marketing overhang" problem
The complete shift in how you build software (empirical evaluation vs. traditional product development)
Why designers now ship code to production at Intercom
How the buyer has changed (hint: it's no longer just the department head)

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