Markham Nolan ☘️

So much of what we love lies within the margin of error

Earth's cryosphere and tropical biomes are collapsing. We're beginning to hit 1.65-1.75°C and rising. Scientists know of NO FASTER WARMING IN EARTH'S HISTORY.

It has been amazing to see this in development internally - lots of detail here from @fergal_reid on our first model.

Just like everybody else this week, we've also been experimenting with cli interfaces. You can now sign-up for Intercom, configure and install Fin and the messenger from inside your agent. npm install -g @intercom/cli It's wild how fast things are changing.

In AI "Rock, Paper, Scissors", an AI App beats a SaaS App, a Frontier Lab beats an AI App, but a SaaS App with an AI Vertical Model beats a Frontier Lab. It's hard to keep up. See update from @eoghan. Vertical model replacing Frontier Labs model. NOT a "save money" story but a "better results" story.

We've been building an internal Claude Code plugin system at Intercom with 13 plugins, 100+ skills, and hooks that turn Claude into a full-stack engineering platform. Lots done, more to do. Here's a thread of some highlights.

We’re hiring for the @Fin_ai AI/ML group at @intercom - fin.ai/careers

It is hens-teeth-rare to make something that is faster, better and cheaper than the competitive set, in any domain. AI models is a particularly tricky space, but the @fin_ai team pulled it off. Chief AI office @fergal_reid with the details of how they did it.

By far the biggest technology update in the history of service agents. And a significant development for AI applications and AI at large. Today we're sharing news about Apex, the world's first customer service model that beats all known models at this task.

As of last week, Fin (in English over chat and email) is using a custom model that Intercom built. At our scale and resolution rate, that's pretty impressive.

Intercom's new post-trained Fin Apex 1.0 beats GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 at customer service resolutions venturebeat.com/ai/intercoms-n…

🚨Huge day for @Fin_ai🚨 Our AI team have been quietly working on Apex for quite some time. It's extremely exciting to finally tell the world about it. More here 👇

Let's talk about Observability and Agents. Yesterday we launched Monitors for @Fin_ai . Monitors is a very powerful tool for measuring and improving the quality of your customer experience, fully AI powered, highly configurable, with 100% coverage of every single customer conversation. Together with Insights and Recommendations, Monitors gives our customers a full observability suite for Fin, and the most powerful in the market by a considerable distance. But why is observability so important? It is very clear that we will all have Agents in our lives, personal and professional, and many of us will manage Agents as a core part of our job. We will be asked to understand how they are working and how they behave, and to make them better. Whether you are managing Fin, or an agent for a different purpose, this will be a new skill for everyone to learn. To do that, we need to be able to open the black box and observe Agents in action. - See what they do. - Understand why they do what they do. - Make changes. Hence, observability. With Fin we believe in giving all our customers full control over their Agent experience. That's why we build the product to be fully self-servable and self-managable. Not one of our main competitors do this because it's harder to design and build this way. But we believe it's the right way, because everyone needs to learn by trying things themselves. If you're a Fin customer, Monitors is live in your workspace today. Try it out and send us feedback! If you're not yet a Fin customer, you can start a free trial and check everything out for yourself! Links in the comments to learn more :)

Yesterday, live from Fin Labs in Paris, our CPO Paul Adams shared a major @Fin_ai product announcement. Analyze is now a complete observability system. Now with Insights, newly launched Monitors, and Recommendations, you have everything you need to understand, measure, and improve your customer experience with complete confidence. Watch the keynote below ↓

Your AI Agent shouldn’t feel like it’s operating in a black box. Big reveal in Paris on new tools to help observe & control your Fin agent.

Hiring someone new always comes with a question: will they actually do great work? With Agents, that same “black box” problem applies. Teams want more visibility & control over what their Agents are actually doing and how well they're doing it. On March 24th, we’re unveiling new updates to @Fin_ai that deliver just that. Join us live in Paris or online from anywhere. Register at the link in the comments.

How we build software @intercom is unrecognisable vs 12 months ago. We're fully Claude Code pilled and seeing enormous productivity gains. Excellent thread here from Brian on some things we're doing.

The Metaverse was never going to be a thing. But honourable mention to @ballmatthew who managed to wring a very worthwhile & readable book out of the concept and sell >125,000 copies

@PGATOUR @McIlroyRory @TheMasters Blueprint for a great @OffMenuOfficial

Rory McIlroy explains why he made each selection for his 2026 Masters Champions Dinner menu: 𝗣𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 & 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗮 𝗙𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 “I wanted to try to bring a little bit of the local ingredients in. So I'm doing a Georgia peach and ricotta flatbread with hot honey. So hopefully that will go down well with the drinks.” 𝗥𝗼𝗰𝗸 𝗦𝗵𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗽 𝗧𝗲𝗺𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗮 “I think everyone likes rock shrimp tempura, so sort of a crowd pleaser with that one.” 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗼𝗻-𝗪𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 “My mum does these really, really nice dates stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in bacon … Thanks to Rosie for that one.” 𝗚𝗿𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗘𝗹𝗸 𝗦𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 “In the buildup to the Masters last year, I was eating a lot of elk ... I didn't want elk to be the main course because I didn't know if everyone would like that … So I'm doing grilled elk sliders which I think is fun.” 𝗬𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗳𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝘂𝗻𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝗿𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗼 “My wife, Erica and I, our favorite restaurant, or one of our favorite right now is in New York. It's called Le Bernardin. Eric Ripert is the chef there, and this is a dish from that restaurant. It's a yellowfin tuna carpaccio. It's a really thin slice of French baguette with a really thin slight of foie gras on top of that … So that's a fun one that the club worked with me on as well. They went up to the restaurant and worked with the chefs, and made sure; that they obviously wanted to get it right for the night, so that's really cool.” 𝗪𝗮𝗴𝘆𝘂 𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘁 𝗠𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝗻 “It's an amazing honor to be able to host it, but at the same time, I want everyone to enjoy it. I went for two different options for the main course, a wagyu filet mignon for people that want red meat, or a fillet of seared salmon; so depending on what you want.” 𝗦𝗶𝗱𝗲𝘀 “When I was a kid, I used to eat (Irish) champ by the bowlful … Some sauteed brussels sprouts. Glazed carrots with brown butter. And then trying to bring a little bit of that local flavor back in, some crispy Vidalia onion rings. Vidalia is not too far away from Augusta, about a two, two-and-a-half-hour drive.” 𝗦𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸𝘆 𝗧𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝘂𝗱𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 “I think very much a crowd-pleaser, sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream on warm toffee sauce.” 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 "My favorite part of the menu is you obviously get access to the wonderful wine cellar at Augusta National. We're starting off with a 2015 Salon Brut champagne. And then followed by a 2022. Domaine Leflaive Batard Montrachet. It's the first-ever white wine that I actually liked ... And then for the red wine we're receiving a 1990 Chateau Lafite Rothschild from Pauillac in Bordeaux. That is the wine that I drank the night that I won the Masters, so obviously brings back some great memories. Shane Lowry had a little bit to do with getting that wine, so I want to shout him out for that, too ... To finish off, we're going with a 1989 Chateau D'Yquem dessert wine from Sauternes in Bordeaux, as well. Obviously '89, my birth year, and I think every great meal deserved to be finished off with Chateau D'Yquem. It is like liquid gold. I wanted to be really intentional with the wines. It's something that I'm really into and passionate about and started to collect wine, probably over the past decade."