Pedro Tabacof

Staff machine learning scientist at Intercom.

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

Can ChatGPT beat ML models on NLP tasks? In this post, I show that it does on the name classification task: https://t.co/FjsOim6b7B

[Fin @fin_ai]

Last week in Paris, we brought together the Fin and @MistralAI teams for an evening of candid conversation on one of the most underrated topics in AI: evaluation.

@PedroTabacof, Principal AI Scientist at Fin, and Henry Lagarde, Software Engineer at Mistral, walked a room full of engineers and AI builders through the hard-won lessons of shipping AI to production at scale.

From why vibe checks still matter, to why A/B testing is the only real gold standard for decision-making, and what happens when your LLM stops parsing end-of-sentence tokens and starts going full stream of consciousness.

Thank you to everyone who came out, asked great questions, and kept the conversations and demos going long after the onstage talks wrapped. Subscribe to our Luma calendar linked below and join a future meetup in a city near you!

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.

Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.

Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.

To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.

To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.

To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.

And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

https://t.co/I2Hf40EpIt

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

https://t.co/4bjaeYNcTP

[Mohit Hajarnis @HajarnisMohit]

One of the often slept-upon benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking SOSC 114 as a freshman.

Marx, writing during the Industrial Revolution, predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself: firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal cost, and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced - the contradiction between production and realization.

Citrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's "no natural brake." It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years, and makes the same errors Marx did.

Schumpeter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago: creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of. Everyone in the replies is already making this point, and I think they're right.

But the sharper rebuttal is Hayek's: prices are the brake Citrini says doesn't exist. Who funds $200bn / qtr in AI capex when equities are down 38%, private credit marks are in the 50s, and consumer demand has collapsed? Cost of capital rises. Incremental build-out becomes uneconomical. Capital gets destroyed and reallocated.

Citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petite bourgeoisie: the $180k PM driving Uber is textbook. But the article claims this collapses consumer demand, and that's where it breaks.

The top decile drives 50%+ of spending and their wealth is in equities, not W-2 income; they're long the hyperscalers posting records in Citrini's own model. Blue collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor, not physical.

The professional middle class gets crushed, but aggregate demand doesn't.

The spending class IS the capital-owning class. The K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing. In the stable aggregate demand, the petit bourgeoisie finds ways to reinvent itself.

I think the Citrini piece is excellent and worth reading. But history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices, more leisure, and higher quality of life. Marx's error wasn't diagnosing the disruption, it was underestimating the system's ability to adapt.

[Fin @fin_ai]

Some questions are just easier to answer visually.

@Fin_ai can now send screenshots and GIFs from your existing support content, giving customers step-by-step visual guidance exactly when they need it. This works automatically across channels, with no setup required.

@PedroTabacof shows how it works in practice, and why it’s such a powerful upgrade for customer clarity.

[Pratik Bothra @pratik60]

@Fin_ai (Intercom’s AI Customer Agent) has officially crossed 10 trillion tokens processed in production.

This excludes backtesting, development traffic, and custom model usage.

In @intercom, we split workloads across multiple vendors to optimize for cost, performance and reliability.

That’s millions of conversations, decisions, and instructions interpreted in natural language.

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@andrefrcastro @destraynor @Fin_ai @eoghan Interesting, thanks for the follow up!

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@andrefrcastro @destraynor @Fin_ai @eoghan Fin will take those attributes into account when crafting its answers. How much that will improve them needs some testing. Tbh, I haven't seen many applications like yours, but keen to hear about the results.

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@andrefrcastro @destraynor @Fin_ai @eoghan If you want to implement precise date instructions, you could try using Fin Tasks: https://t.co/e6btABi1rb

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@andrefrcastro @destraynor @Fin_ai @eoghan Hi André, I work with the AI side of Fin. Here are two tips: 1. Long Guidance with loads of attributes might be hard for Fin to follow, so I'd recommend breaking it down into smaller pieces. 2. LLMs are bad at date maths so they might not quite get what "date is near" means

[Paul Adams @Padday]

New Fin AI blog!

A few weeks ago we decided to build a lot more in public.

With AI, we're at the equivalent of 1999 for the internet, and most of the invention is yet to come. All of us have a lot to learn, and a lot to gain, by sharing what we know with each other.

Today we're launching a new AI research blog, written by our excellent AI team. It is really good work.

We're learning so much building Fin, so please share it with your teams building AI products. I bet they will find it valuable!

https://t.co/WdSN3M68iM

[Fabrício Carraro @fabriciocarraro]

No episódio de entrevistas dessa semana do podcast IA Sob Controle, tivemos como co-host um amigo do podcast, nosso caro Ahirton Lopes (@ahirtonlopes), e nós 3 conversamos com o Pedro Tabacof (@PedroTabacof), Staff Machine Learning Scientist na Intercom em Dublin, na Irlanda - uma empresa que vem adotando e apresentando soluções envolvendo IA e agentes em tarefas de atendimento e relacionamento com o cliente.

https://t.co/kLFcNwxPIb

[Ciaran Lee @ciaran_lee]

I spent 5 mins setting up Fin for @remarkablepaper, then asked it a few questions alongside their Agentforce setup.

One of these agents is doing a far better job than the other.

[Fin @fin_ai]

G2 just named us the #1 AI agent on the market – and it’s all thanks to real feedback from people who actually use Fin.

No fanfare. No empty promises. Just proof that AI is making a difference where it counts, helping CS teams do more, faster, and better.

And we’re not stopping here. We’ll keep building the best bots in the business so your support teams can keep winning.

[Fin @fin_ai]

"Working with @AnthropicAI keeps us at the forefront of AI, letting us explore the future and work on the bleeding edge, while delivering stable, reliable, and incredible results for our customers.” – @destraynor

https://t.co/hgAuug6heA

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@mayurc137 @intercom @Padday @destraynor Note that all the information Fin used, including the name Hoban Washburne, comes from that article I linked above.

We will see how we can improve such cases, as there was no need for Fin to search in the help center for such a simple question.

[Pedro Tabacof @PedroTabacof]

@mayurc137 @intercom @Padday @destraynor Hi @mayurc137, I am from the Fin AI team, thanks for reporting it: I looked into it and, while a bad response from Fin, there is no personal informational being leaked.

The information Fin used here comes from this developer article Fin has access to: https://t.co/Gk5LsIOsk6

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

Every other month, we package up all the new tech we've just built and bring our product leaders together to demo it to our customers and the world. We call these shows Built For You. The last one was chaotic and amazing. We had 5k people live in the comments, cracking jokes and sharing love. If you're an @intercom fan, or just Intercom curious, I think you'll enjoy. The next one in live on LinkedIn in two days! https://t.co/KZpsWyNnA4

[Steven Kaas @stevenkaas]

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".