The company has built one of the first practical and immediate applications of the latest AI technology for the customer service industry

Intercom, the leading customer service platform for internet businesses, announced it has launched three new automation-first features built using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 technology, the same model that powers ChatGPT. Over one hundred customers are already using and testing the features within the Intercom Inbox and its Articles product in a limited Beta, with wider availability to come this year.

“We believe the advances made in Large Language Models (LLM), spearheaded by OpenAI and that have manifested in ChatGPT, will be the most significant change the customer service industry has experienced in decades. It’s a massive step towards a world where customer service is automation-first, a future we’ve been working towards for a few years,” said Des Traynor, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Intercom.

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The new features include:

• Composer AI: Support agents can write shorthand customer responses in the Intercom Inbox and let the AI generate a complete suggested message with the new Expand and Rephrase capabilities. Agents can also automatically change the tone of the message to more casual and happy or more formal with just one click of the Make More Formal and Make More Friendly buttons. This not only lets agents send faster and better quality responses to customers, but also reduces the time they spend composing messages.
• Conversation summarization: Support agents can view an AI-generated summary of a customer conversation within the Intercom Inbox, making handover between agents much quicker and easier. This new technology enables a level of automated summarization not possible before, enabling support agents to quickly pick up exactly where a previous agent left off—no need for a customer to repeat any information or for agents to spend time scrolling through a conversation.
• Article generator AI: When writing help center content with Intercom’s Articles, authors can paste a summary of the content they want to explain and use the AI to generate a full article version, which they can edit or update as required. This lets teams create more help content at a faster pace for customers.

“Intercom’s new expand feature is a game-changer for me and my team at Kala.Burdo Consulting. It allows us to quickly jot down notes during customer calls, which can then be expanded to full replies that we send as follow-up messages after the call. This saves us a ton of time and enables us to assist even more clients. It’s an essential tool for any business looking to streamline their communication and improve efficiency,” said Kala Burdo, Owner at Kala.Burdo Consulting.

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Intercom has long been at the forefront of building disruptive technology into its platform, starting with Resolution Bot, its hero AI-based product that debuted in 2018. With these new advancements in generative AI, Intercom will continue to experiment and shape the core technology to solve actual customer support team needs.

“We have been following all of the projects in this area over the years, but as we experimented with the most recent GPT release, we realized we have crossed a perceptual cliff here, and that a tectonic shift was beginning,” said Traynor. “We quickly built and shipped many prototypes internally, ensuring we learned and iterated with each round of user feedback, and we’ve released our first wave of features based on GPT-3.5. We’re excited to get this into the hands of our customers, but we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible with this technology. We believe the capabilities won’t just be point solutions, but will create a technology that will sit across our entire customer service platform. We’re actively exploring what comes next.”