Helping customers teach
AI what their business knows.
Fin at Intercom · Guided setup and assisted support for small businesses with knowledge that wasn’t fully documented.
- My role
- Lead Technical Product Manager
- Focus
- Customer discovery, proposals & validation
- Evidence
- ~50% less clarification time · 10-customer assisted pilot
Make missing knowledge easier to contribute, and give representatives a way to supply business judgment when the AI needs it.
01
The obstacle wasn’t always the answer.
Small businesses struggled to prepare Fin when important business knowledge lived in people’s heads or incomplete documents. They could upload what they had and still find gaps in the answers.
Working with customers helped me understand a practical problem: asking them to provide more documentation did not tell them which missing information mattered.
02
I proposed a more specific next step.
I proposed guided onboarding and testing after customers supplied their existing documentation. Directed questions, including multiple-choice interactions, made the missing business knowledge easier to clarify.
The product decision was to make the next action more concrete for the customer. Rather than leaving them to diagnose an entire knowledge base, the experience could ask about a particular gap.
The interface needed to help people contribute what they knew, not assume they had already written it all down.
03
I also worked on the moment human judgment was needed.
I connected the guided-setup learning with customer feedback about incorrect resolutions and proposed a similar assisted interaction for live support. Representatives could select, edit, or supply an answer when their business knowledge was needed.
I took the customer evidence directly to executives to make the case for investment, and worked with the AI PM and engineering team to develop the interaction. My contribution covered the product proposal, customer validation, and investment case; the core team owned the underlying AI behavior.
04
We validated the interaction with customers.
Guided questions reduced the time spent in the knowledge-clarification step by roughly 50%. This measurement covered that specific setup step, rather than the entire onboarding journey.
Separately, we tested the assisted-support interaction with ten existing customers, received positive feedback, and rolled that interaction out across the customer base.