Software Firms Rebrand as A.I. to Avoid Obsolescence

When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, Eoghan McCabe was about a month into his second stint as C.E.O. of Intercom, the customer service software company he had co-founded a decade earlier. Growth had ground to a near halt, and McCabe foresaw an existential crisis: If chatbots could answer customer queries, and if they replaced customer service agents, companies “wouldn’t need help desks — they wouldn’t need the software anymore.” He decided that Intercom needed to become an artificial intelligence company, or risk becoming obsolete.

More than three years later, similar realizations about the potential for A.I. to disrupt software are rippling through public markets and wreaking havoc on the industry. That existential crisis has spawned an identity crisis: software companies at every stage have been working hard to be seen as A.I.

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chatgpt, intercom, eoghan mccabe, chatbots, customer service, help desks, artificial intelligence, software companies, rebranding, public markets