Darragh Curran, CTO at Intercom Bet the Company on AI — and Won

Be sure to check out Fin, Intercom's AI agent for all of your customer service at fin.ai

What happens when a product-led growth pioneer bets everything on AI?

In this episode, Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom, shares how his team rebuilt one of SaaS’s most iconic products around artificial intelligence — and why “going all in” was the only choice.

From leading through 13 years of hypergrowth to launching Intercom’s AI agent Fin, Darragh opens up about building distributed teams, balancing speed with quality, and how engineering leadership itself is changing in the age of AI.

What you'll learn:

From builder to CTO: How Darragh’s mindset evolved from coding to leading global teams.

Intercom’s PLG engine: The cultural DNA that powered one of SaaS’s biggest product-led growth stories.

AI at scale: How Intercom rebuilt itself around Fin — and why most incumbents will struggle.

Build vs. buy: How to decide when to leverage large models vs. train your own.

Distributed teams: Lessons from scaling R&D across Dublin, London, and San Francisco.

Hiring in the AI era: Why curiosity and adaptability now trump narrow specialization.

Leadership in waves: What every CTO should learn from the shifts from cloud to mobile to AI.

Key takeaways

The hardest shift for new leaders: from talking to computers to talking to humans.

AI success comes from conviction, experimentation, and culture — not hype.

Don’t outsource curiosity: the best leaders still get hands-on with new tech.

Pragmatism beats purism — build where you differentiate, borrow where you don’t.

Quality and understanding still matter; AI can’t fix slop code.

About our guest

Darragh Curran is Chief Technology Officer at Intercom, where he’s helped scale the company from startup to global SaaS leader. He’s led engineering through every wave of change — from mobile and cloud to the new era of AI-first software.

About the show