Intercom uses OpenAI’s technology in new services

Intercom has introduced new automated features using the same technology as ChatGPT, the company has announced.

t says this represents one of the “first practical and immediate applications” of the latest AI technology to the customer service industry.

The new features allow customer service reps to shorthand customer responses into the Intercom inbox and “let the AI ​​generate a full suggested message” with its extension and restatement capabilities.

Company agents can use the Make More Formal and Make More Friendly buttons to change the tone of the message to be more casual and cheerful or more formal.

The buttons should allow businesses to spend less time composing messages to customers, according to Intercom.

Other new AI-powered features make it possible to summarize conversations between agents and customers for routing to subsequent support agents, and to generate long articles from summaries.

“We believe the advances in large language models, spearheaded by OpenAI and manifested in ChatGPT, will be the most significant shift the customer service industry has seen in decades,” said Des Traynor, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Intercom. “This is a huge step towards a world where customer service comes first, a future we have been working toward for a number of years.”

According to Intercom, over 25,000 global customers including Atlassian, Amazon and Lyft Business use its services for customer service. The company says it’s used to send over 500 million messages per month with interactions with over 600 million monthly active end users.

“We’ve followed all projects in this area over the years, but when we experimented with the latest GPT version we realized that we’ve crossed a perception cliff here and that a tectonic shift was beginning,” Mr Traynor said. “We quickly built and shipped many prototypes internally to ensure we learned and iterated from user feedback with each round, and we 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 only scratching the surface of what’s possible with this technology. We believe the capabilities will not just be point solutions, but will create technology that spans our entire customer service platform. We are actively investigating what comes next.”