Questions about our new AI agent, Fin? Here's everything you need to know

It’s been more than a month since we released Fin, our new AI agent, to the world.

The idea of an AI chatbot answering your customers’ questions is incredibly exciting, but it’s also new, and maybe a little scary. So when we hosted our recent webinar to discuss the application of ChatGPT in customer service—and introduce Fin to some more people—we weren’t surprised to receive lots of thoughtful and important questions during our Q&A session.

Catch up with the webinar recording here

This area is brand new, and evolving rapidly, so naturally there are still lots of unknowns that we’re working on. What we do know is that Fin is an incredibly powerful tool, even in its current early state. To tell you a little more about where we’re at and what you can expect from Fin, we wanted to share some of the most important questions we received during the webinar – and the answers we offered.

Top questions from the webinar

Fin’s capabilities

Q: How does Fin answer customer questions?

A: Fin uses the latest AI models powered by GPT-4 to understand the customer question, search for relevant content in your help center and provide accurate answers to customers based on those articles. This reduces hallucinations, misleading answers, and off-brand topics.

Answers are conversational in nature and Fin will ask clarifying questions to ensure that the best possible answers are delivered. Where no answer can be delivered, Fin will seamlessly hand off the conversation to your human support team.

You can also create bespoke answers to your most important questions using Custom Answers, and Fin will prioritize them over its AI-generated Answers.

Q: Which content sources are supported by Fin?

A: Fin can be powered by content from Intercom Articles, Zendesk Help Center (via Zendesk sync), or any public URL.

“We’re developing an Inbox view so you can monitor conversations Fin is having with your customers”

Q: Can Fin ingest multiple support content sources simultaneously?

A: Yes! At launch, Fin will be able to consume a single external content source alongside articles, and then we are aiming for a very fast follow of consuming multiple external sources.

Q: How does Fin handle product changes or updates to support content?

A: Intercom Articles updates happen in near real time. Content from public URLs and other help centers can be synced manually by teammates or scheduled for sync at intervals.

Q: Can I see the conversations that Fin is having with customers?

A: We’re developing an Inbox view so you can monitor conversations Fin is having with your customers. There will also be performance and usage reporting available at launch so you can better understand ROI and effectiveness.

Q: Can it help with complex products or support content?

A: Yes, absolutely. We’ve tested Fin a lot on Intercom, and it’s performing really well. You’ll be able to test it on Intercom soon and judge for yourself.

Q: We have distinct customer profiles, is Fin able to distinguish between user types and answer according to the correct help center articles?

A: If you’re using Intercom Articles, Fin respects audience targeting and knows who the user is, and can match to only give relevant articles to the relevant user. For other help centers and public URLs, Fin cannot distinguish between user types at launch.

Q: Can you have multiple Fins? E.g. one for general support and one for developer docs.

A: Yes. Settings will allow you to create Fins that target different audiences.

Q: Will Fin know when to disengage?

A: Yes, we think a strong suit of Fin is that it knows when to say “I can’t answer that”, and will seamlessly hand the conversation off to your support team. This blog post explains more.

Q: Will Fin only be able to pull information from published articles, or also from macros and past conversations?

A: At launch, Fin will be able to pull information from any public URL. Macros and conversations are under active exploration as future content sources.

Q: Will Fin be omnichannel at launch?

A: Fin will be supported across Intercom Messenger (on web, iOS, and Android), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and SMS.

“The best practice is to have your content be as comprehensive as possible”

Q: Will Fin simply repeat the content of the help article if a customer has a follow-up question or will it be able to be conversational, like a live chat with a support member?

A: It will be conversational, like a human, and summarize or synthesize an answer from the article itself – not just paraphrase it. It will link back to the original content so that customers can read it in full too.

Q: How does Fin handle multimedia (images/video)?

A: Fin won’t be able to answer questions with multimedia content at launch, unless there is multimedia included in a Custom Answer. It can link out to articles that host multimedia content with no trouble at all.

Q: Can it be jailbroken?

A: Fin has been rigorously scenario tested by visitors to our landing page who’ve interacted with the demo and by our beta customers. A lot of people have tried to get Fin to exhibit unusual behaviour, and as far as we’re aware it hasn’t happened yet.

Privacy, security, and compliance

Q: How is the privacy of a customer’s conversation with Fin protected?

A: In order to serve the best answers our AI chatbot will process your entire help center through OpenAI. During each conversation with Fin, we will send customer questions and comments verbatim to OpenAI. OpenAI does not use the data to train their models, and only retain the data for a maximum of 30 days for abuse and misuse monitoring purposes, after which it will be deleted.

Q: I heard that this will not be available in the EU. Is that true?

A: Fin will be available worldwide at launch. However, there is no regional data hosting. All data sent to OpenAI by Fin will be processed in the US.

Powering Fin with your support content

Q: Does Intercom have any best practices for creating content that is optimized for AI?

A: The best practice is to make your content as comprehensive as possible. If your articles don’t have an answer, the AI chatbot can’t give it. You can find more tips on getting your content ready for Fin in this blog post.

Q: What is a strategy for testing if your knowledge base is ready for production?

A: At launch, Fin will allow you to preview the experience for customers within the product, and also share with small cohorts of customers before going live.

Q: Would you recommend creating articles in “ghost mode” that are not publicly accessible, but just for Fin to read?

A: This won’t be an option in the short term. Support content will have to be publicly available to a customer in order to be included in an answer by Fin. Remember that Fin respects audience targeting on Intercom Articles though, so that’s a great way of ensuring only the intended customers see specific help center articles.

Q: How large of a knowledge base does Fin need? If we have a small help desk, will it still work?

A: 20+ articles seems to be the sweet spot, but it depends heavily on your domain and the complexity of your articles. If most of the questions you get can be answered by a handful of articles, then there’s no reason why Fin wouldn’t work exactly as intended.

Q: Will Fin be able to crawl Zendesk help centers like Resolution Bot?

A: Yes, we have a Zendesk article sync, so this already works.

Q: Will we be able to change Fin’s name?

A: Yes, absolutely! You can change Fin’s name and icon. Fin will also carry over any legacy branding that customers already have for Operator.

The future of Fin

Q: Will the Intercom team switch 100% to Fin or keep Custom Bots? Or have a little bit of both?

A: We think there’s a powerful role for Fin to play alongside our other bots and will be ensuring these products work seamlessly together to create great experiences for teammates and for customers.

Q: When will the users on the waitlist get access to the AI chatbot? Do we need to have a specific Intercom plan to get access?

A: The AI bot is already in production, and we’re starting to gather feedback from customers. We’ll start gradually inviting more customers to join the beta in the next few weeks to gather additional feedback as we continue to develop. We anticipate a small beta for the next few weeks or so. And unlike the Inbox features, we don’t anticipate having an open beta (because of costs).

Pricing

Q: Any info about how Fin will be priced?

A: Taking part in the beta will be free of charge. As we’re still in development, we’re not able to provide exact details of future pricing at this time but we will share at general release. We do know that Fin will be priced per resolution, and will follow up with more details soon. If you’re in the beta, you will be notified of any future pricing and won’t be charged without your consent.

Q: Will customers be able to put guard rails on the number of resolutions they want to solve?

A: Customers will be able to set resolution limits within the product.

Q: Can Fin be bought standalone?

A: Yes, this will be possible. You can also use Fin to handoff conversations to your Zendesk or Freshdesk instance.

Reporting

Q: Are we going to have access to reports of all of the questions that our automated system was not able to respond to so we can use them to improve our help center?

A: We’re developing an Inbox view so you can monitor conversations Fin is having with your customers.

Q: Will there be new reports available with Fin?

A: Yes! We’ll focus on performance and usage metrics to start so you can understand throughput and ROI. We’ll be making continual improvements after launch as well. More questions? Catch up with our webinar or sign up to join the waitlist for the Fin beta.