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aurareturnHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

I built an AI support agent in one week

… I built an AI support agent in one week. It hooks into our knowledge base, app API, runs tests, and then finally sends a Yes|No|Other option to a real human to send back to the customer. It was surprisingly easy to build. The hardest part was the knowledge of how to help the customer, which Fin can't do for me anyway. I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. There is no model training needed. It's all context. Anyone who is training a Qwen model for their customer support is doing it wrong. Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there. The technical stuff is really easy to build.

Original discussionSalesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6BN241 source comments · at import
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AI
ai_fry_ur_brainHN

Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin? This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product. SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.

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SP
spwa4HN

> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. The value, of course, is that there is a website with a chatbox that some MBA can type in "never give any refunds anymore for any reason", and it just updates the AI support agent and sends an automated "I deserve a promotion and a raise" to their boss.

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DO
DoingSomeThingsHN

"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.

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WH
whstlHN

Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive. Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage. Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?

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RT
rtpgHN

> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. Y'all really over indexing on the "AI"-ness of intercom. Intercom is a chat box and help pages. Those are nice to have and nice to not have to build yourself (you can build your own help pages... great, now you're managing content and have to have an admin to update the docs etc!) People here really forgetting the notion of "core competency".

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