At the Berkeley Haas AI Conference, I sat in on a panel with go-to-market leaders from Intercom, Perplexity, and OpenAI. The Intercom story stood out as one of the most dramatic examples of a company pivoting to AI-first — not over months of deliberation, but in a single weekend.
The Weekend That Changed Everything
When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Intercom's leadership team gathered that same weekend. Their conclusion was immediate and unambiguous: this technology would be completely game-changing to their company. What happened next was remarkable — they didn't form a committee or commission a strategy review. They ripped everything up.
The roadmap. The company strategy. The metrics. The organizational structure. Even the company values. As their go-to-market leader put it: "We kind of restarted the company."
Why Most Incumbents Can't Do This
The speaker was candid about why this is nearly impossible for most companies. Intercom had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from their existing product. That's a machine that's working, generating real money. The natural instinct is to protect that machine — to keep making more money from what you've already built.
But their CEO, Owen, made the counterintuitive call: if you look 3-5 years ahead, the world will be fundamentally different. The short-term pain of disrupting yourself is nothing compared to the existential risk of being disrupted by someone else. They had to invest now.
The Startup-Within-a-Startup (But Actually Done Right)
Everyone talks about building a startup within a startup. Intercom actually did it in a way I haven't seen before. They created a completely self-contained, self-functioning team. This team sat in a different part of the office. They weren't burdened by any existing red tape. While the rest of the company went through transformation, this team had one mandate: just build.
The key difference from typical innovation theaters: this wasn't a side project or a 20% time experiment. This was the company's future. They gave the team real autonomy, real resources, and real urgency. Once the product reached escape velocity, they merged it back into the main company.
The Market Validation
The results speak for themselves. One year ago, Intercom's biggest go-to-market challenge was convincing prospects they even needed an AI agent for customer service. Today, that question literally never comes up anymore. The new question is: "How do I know your AI agent is the best one?"
In traditional SaaS, a shift like that would take three years of market education. In the AI era, it happened in six months.
The Pricing Revolution
Perhaps the boldest move was shifting to outcome-based pricing. Instead of charging per seat (the standard SaaS model), Intercom charges per resolution — they make money when their AI actually solves a customer's problem. This aligns incentives perfectly but requires massive customer education, especially for support leaders who've only ever bought seat-based products.
What This Means for Product Leaders
Three takeaways I keep coming back to:
1. Speed of decision > quality of decision. Intercom didn't have a perfect plan that weekend. They had conviction that the world was changing and that standing still was the riskiest option.
2. Real autonomy means real separation. The startup-within-a-startup only works if the team is genuinely free from the parent company's processes, politics, and pace. Different office. Different rules. Different urgency.
3. Your pricing model is a product decision. Moving from seats to outcomes isn't just a finance change — it fundamentally shapes how the product is built, measured, and sold. It forces you to optimize for customer value, not headcount.
The AI era rewards companies that can move with startup speed while leveraging enterprise scale. Intercom showed that incumbents can do this — but it requires the willingness to tear down what's working today to build what will work tomorrow.