Guest: Eoghan McCabe, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Intercom“We are not ready for the degree to which our world is going to change,” says Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe, “in insane and incredible ways.” When he co-founded the company in 2011, the Irish-born entrepreneur was making it easier for companies to offer human customer service to their customers. But Eoghan believes “every single type of knowledge work” will soon be done by AI, and Intercom is well on its way to that destination: 45 percent of all tickets are being answered by bots now, and he expects that number to climb to 70 percent by 2026. “The agents no longer have to do the repetitive, painful, boring work,” Eoghan says. “They can focus on the more human, creative, interesting work that requires their empathy and creativity.”In this episode, Eoghan and Joubin discuss fitting in, Archana Agrawal, authentic comms, taking risks, returning to the company you founded, politics at work, celebrating innovation, therapy for founders, and Ram Dass.
Chapters:
01:04 Insecurity and success
06:16 What Intercom does
08:20 Reinvention and “big company values”
15:50 Becoming an AI company
16:53 2011 vs. 2024 in San Francisco
21:03 AI for customer service — and more
25:07 “The shitty gift that being attacked brings”
30:25 Expectations vs. reality, part one
33:16 What success means now
36:08 Running away
39:56 Coming back
41:58 Being busy is BS
44:10 Expectations vs. reality, part two
45:44 Self-mastery
50:38 Sanding off the rough edges
55:08 Who Intercom is hiring and what “grit” means to Eoghan
