Support Stack Field Notes 001: What happened at Fin’s Pioneer 2026?
Fin’s Pioneer 2026 in San Francisco packed a lot into one day: a rebrand, the Salesforce acquisition, and a pile of new features. If you run support on Fin, it’s hard to know which bits actually matter. So for the first Support Stack Field Notes, I asked someone who was in the room.
Alan Gleeson, Chief Commercial Officer at Otonomee, shares what it was like on the ground: the Apple-launch energy, the excitement (with a fair bit of fear of missing out), and the big theme of AI and humans working together. He tried Fin Voice in a demo booth, and has a great airport story about why reaching a human should always be easy. Then I walk through the four product changes I’d look at first: Fin Skills, Fin for Success, the new Apex models, and Human in the Loop for email replies.
If you run Fin, own a help centre, or you’re an Intercom admin trying to keep up with how fast this is all moving, this is a quick, practical catch-up on Pioneer 2026.
🔗 Resources mentioned:
Ask a teammate for help with email replies (Human in the Loop)
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Episode transcript
Conor Pendergrast (00:00)
Hello, I’m Conor Pendergrast, and welcome to Support Stack. So we have a, I would say, a special edition of Support Stack this week. We’re joined by Alan Gleeson who is Chief Commercial Officer from Otonomee, which is a premium remote first CX and technical support partner. Alan, you are here because you were on the ground. Boots on the ground, reporting slightly less live. You were at Fin’s Pioneer event last week in San Francisco. Tell me, like. How did you find it overall? What was your first impressions of the whole event?
Alan (00:31)
Yeah, Conor. So thanks for having me on, firstly. Look, first of all, the venue was just stunning, right? They picked a real beauty. Very much a neoclassical design, over a hundred years old, the Regency Ballroom, proper attention to detail. It was actually a former Masonic Lodge, I believe. So it was a very unusual building. Yes, that’s one for Wikipedia, Conor. We were a partner of Fin for the event, a sponsorship partner, so there kind of booths for people down there. So all in all, you know, a great event. I haven’t been to an Apple launch event, but it had that kind of vibe about it as well.
Conor Pendergrast (01:03)
Had that kind of vibe. So tell me, like, what were your overall impressions like once you started to hear from the event? Like what was your flavor overall of the event, I guess?
Alan (01:14)
Yeah, look, excited, I guess, is the key theme and but also fear of missing out, right? AI is taking off and like we’re in the outsourcing space, but we’re leaning heavily into AI, right? I think there was definitely a feeling that, you know, it’s very early, right? The event theme is pioneer, right? So they’re very clearly signalling this is early and, you know, there’s no doubt it’s transforming certain industries, right? And CX is definitely one. Software engineering is another. So when you look at both of those, they both impact the world that you and I occupy, right? So I guess I was energized was one, right? There was a really great vibe there. You know, the structure was quite interesting. They had Eoghan started off with a keynote, very bullish, very upbeat. Like track record for the last year, Conor, is kind of off the charts right. So not only were they talking about sort of a year on from the last Pioneer and with all the product releases, but they’re talking about a rebrand and a Salesforce acquisition. It just kind of came one after the other. You know.
Conor Pendergrast (02:12)
Yeah. I would say the company’s been very busy, it seems like, in the last year. They’ve packed a lot in. That’s like five years worth of work of most of the time, and they did it all in one year.
Alan (02:20)
Well, this is it. This is it, right. And sort of as kind of a C suite attendee that’s not in the weeds as much or not as much of a practitioner, you know it’s hard to keep up between Apex and Operator and Fin Voice. And look, all very bullish and optimistic. But look, I came away, glad we went, most definitely, positive about the future. And we’ll come into that in a minute around the kind of marriage of AI and human, right? I’m definitely positive on the direction of travel in a CX context in terms of AI and human together. So overall, you know, very well produced, very upbeat, nice energy around the place. You know, I know Sierra had an event in town, I didn’t get to that, so it’ll be interesting to see how that one played out.
Conor Pendergrast (03:05)
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. That’s really interesting to hear. It certainly seemed, I mean I know I have a very, very filtered and Fin heavy LinkedIn feed. Because I do like, I connect with most people who talk about Fin, and I talk about Fin, so then LinkedIn’s like, Hey, you should hear from everyone who’s going to Pioneer. But it seemed like there were a lot of people going to Pioneer, and I had people reaching out to me and saying, like, hey, are you gonna be there? And I thought, mm, and not for a one day event. Otonomee, you guys were sponsoring. That makes sense for you to be there. I’m not, I don’t, I’m sorry I don’t have the bucks to throw around to sponsor a Fin event. Not yet. Clients keep paying me the big dollars and I’ll end up there and sponsoring. All right, so let’s think, if you’re, so you talked about like the marrying of human support teams, human CX teams, and AI. Is that like one of the themes that was coming out of the event for you, is that something that you were hearing quite a bit about?
Alan (04:00)
Yeah, like it was obviously very bullish on AI, right? But it was also careful to be reflecting and recognizing that we’re in a period of profound change. And it’s a phrase I have difficulty with, Conor, right? Because it seems with SaaS not so long ago we had profound change. Like it seems to be a constant, but there was definitely a kind of a sense that this time is different. I mean Eoghan in his opening keynote talked about resolution rates in the kind of 76 degrees or sort of 76 percentage, I think was the figure he mentioned. Des Traynor in his keynote talked about sort of the change of roles and nature of the stuff that we do, right? So it was very much, you know, the AI is taking off, but also humans will need to be very involved, but in a slightly different sort of format. And I guess it’s also consistent with, Conor, with kind of this kind of weird thing that’s going on right, and I think it’s called Jevons paradox essentially, which is kind of that the pie is actually growing right, that actually as AI gets better, you know, it becomes a better substitute. So people stop looking at FAI, or sorry, FAQs, they’re probably going to go to AI. And of course they’re going to put more stuff through AI and maybe you know get over and back, over and back, over and back, and then looking for escalations. But also there was a kind of a sense that, sorry, also there was a sense of, you know, that people’s choice is also important here. Human choice is important, right? And, you know, we might be pioneers. We’re on the kind of cutting edge of this, but there’s also people that want to talk to humans and really want to speak to humans. And in fact that we should make it easy to get to humans, right? That we shouldn’t be putting up all this press one, press two, press three nonsense that there is. And look, there was a case when I was flying back from San Francisco, which was, you know, quite amusing in some ways. There was a gentleman quite distressed at the gate trying to get on the flight back to Ireland and they weren’t letting him board, right? So, you know, it was some ticket mix up with United or one of the airlines, and he was verbally on his phone in front of everybody, an elderly gentleman on speaker phone, you know, emergency speak to human, emergency speak to human was very much what he was saying into the phone because it was obviously replying to him with a bot and he was like, Clearly, it’s ten minutes to board here. I need to talk someone urgently. So there was a bit of that around making sure that, you know, there’s always complexity. With AI, the basic stuff will get dealt with well, the harder stuff, the more empathetic stuff, the more time pressure, the more, hey, my bank has this unusual transaction. You know, don’t start routing me through people. I need to talk to someone pretty quickly. So that was definitely a theme. And like linked to that as well, Conor, they had Fin Voice, right, which they were pushing hard as an upgrade. Right. So I went into a booth to role play one of the scenarios that they had prepared. I have an accent, as do you. So I thought it might be difficult.
Conor Pendergrast (06:51)
Yeah, everyone has an accent, but I’d be definitely curious to hear. My, so my, just a little aside, my wife is from Portlaoise in Ireland and has a classic, has actually quite a gentle Laois accent, and Siri does not work for her unless she puts on this awful British accent. That’s the only time it works. I’d be curious, so how was your Fin Voice experience?
Alan (07:15)
Well, it was mixed, right? It was better than I had expected. So there was a dialogue that was good. I think I was being a little bit cheeky trying to, they had it set up as a bank type exercise and sort of I was role playing looking for a transaction query or my balance, which of course neither are scenarios that have access to the back end. So they were kinda in all instances kind of saying, Look, go to your app and go log into and it’s on this page. So, but I think they were very bullish, right? Again, the theme was that there’s advances being made in the technology. You know, voice remains very important. And I think they were hinting that with the latest advances that it’s going to become a more credible and popular tool. And obviously it’s kind of fallen down the chain a little bit because it’s perceived as obviously as real time, which brings in all sorts of issues around staffing and you know, you’re gonna have peaks and troughs, and then you’re gonna have, ultimately that it’s probably viewed as a more costly channel when you view it in real people. But I guess if it can be supported with AI, I suspect that we will begin to see a bit more of this moving forward, Conor.
Conor Pendergrast (08:18)
Voice is extremely challenging when you have to hook it up to a whole bunch of systems. Like getting the conversation dynamics right when Fin also needs to go off and pull your bank balance or query your account and, you know, filter those.
Alan (08:34)
It’s, look, it’s a great point, right? And it gets back to the human piece, right, and all of this. Like I do think there’s gonna be, look, a lot of demand for people like yourself, right? Practitioners that can kind of, you know, make the technology be effective, I guess is the best way of putting it. So it’s like you can have all the advances and feature releases in the world, but if it’s not set up properly in terms of implementation and not optimized, you’re not gonna have great results. And look, I do think there’s probably a macro here around the whole Salesforce, Agentforce, you know, kind of piece where I think resolution rates on that are historically a lot lower than Fin, right? So, you know, and it was even instructive. One of the people that was interviewed on stage had a title like an AI customer support agent or an AI support agent. So like very much a new role from a leading tech company in the US that literally would not have existed six months ago, Conor. Her role essentially was to sort of, you know, review how the AI was performing and make sure that it was, you know, pulling from the right databases and that, you know, was getting the latest product releases and intervening and kind of making sure the connectors were working. So like there’s definitely a sense that, you know, there’s change coming, no doubt. Almost impossible to predict how that change will play out, but that those of us that will sort of thrive in this year will be the ones that are comfortable with change, resilient, you know, willing to learn, adaptable, flexible. You know, a lot of the kind of traits and skills that aren’t learned necessarily in a classroom, but are representing, I think, an opportunity. And so that was one of the key themes again to bring it back. There was a quote from Des around, I think it was a Steve Jobs quote. I can’t actually recall it exactly, but it was essentially that when change comes you can kind of view it as an opportunity or a threat and it’s sort of very much those that lean in and are innovative and sort of are entrepreneurial will benefit in a period of change.
Conor Pendergrast (10:26)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, should we talk about the practical side of it as well? Like that’s, I think it’s really, that’s the sort of on the ground experience from your sort of C suite perspective, which is I think critically important. Practically, if you are a Fin customer already and you’re using Fin, I think there were like six things, but we’ll probably condense them down to like four top things for me. I think the first thing that I found really interesting was Fin Skills, actually. So it’s just for anyone who hasn’t used a Fin Procedure, it’s very structured, whereas Fin Skills is much more what you’d see in something like Claude, and it’s a lot looser. So I actually, I set one up myself. I’ve set, and it’s working really well. And I also just recorded an episode with Brian Branca from Fin, who is an AI conversation designer, and that was all about Fin Skills. So look out for another episode of that, about that. And I think another one though was Fin for Success, which is, I am personally very excited about as well, because it switches from that reactive customer service perspective and into the more proactive customer success perspective. When, I mean, how much did you hear when you were in the theater on Fin for Success and goals and, you know, getting customers using products and services better so they get more value out of them?
Alan (11:44)
Yeah, it wasn’t mentioned too much. Eoghan definitely mentioned it in his keynote. Obviously, voice was getting a bit of attention, as was Apex, and as was, like there was a lot of product information. But to be fair, they didn’t go too deep on it on the day. But I think what that’s a signal of is, you know, very much verticalization, which I think is really, because of course there’s generic models out there, right, that we’ve all used, Claude and Anthropic, whereas when you start going deep on verticals, you know, they’ve looked at obviously support, they’ve looked at sales, success is sort of the next one that I think to your point sounds exciting, Conor. And you know, they’re like, they seem to bring a lot of different things into play, right? When you look at the kind of leadership team, right? So like Des is very much, Des Traynor’s very much from a SaaS software background, I think, will be very strong on, you know, UI and UX, right? He’s always been a great person over the years to kind of listen to in terms of the state of the nation and sort of the direction travel of SaaS, right? So I think he’s always strong in that. Paul Adams, CPO, I don’t know him that well, but again, you know, had a keynote, Eoghan as the leader. So they definitely bring in a blend of, and there was plenty of others, by the way, that got airtime as well, Conor.
Conor Pendergrast (12:55)
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And then so I think you’ve mentioned the new Apex models as well. So just for anyone who doesn’t know, Apex is what powers most of the Fin interactions. So like you said, there are custom models that Fin, the company, has built. So they have Apex 2.0, which they say has higher confirmed resolutions. There’s Apex Flash 2.0, which is Fin Voice, powering Fin Voice, and it’s faster than Flash 1.0, which is good. And then interestingly, Apex for Procedures. Again they say better resolutions compared to the model that they were using before for procedures, which is good. And then the last, I think the last product thing that I’d mentioned today, I’ve done a sort of a more detailed summary of the product side of it from Pioneer. But the last one I think is Human in the Loop, which is really interesting because they’ve had it inside a procedure, but this is more, it’s tweaked to say, Okay, well, if you’ve got an email in front of you, Fin, and you are not confident in the answer, pass it to a human. And the human can do a couple of things, including give feedback to Fin, and then Fin acts on that and keeps the conversation, which I think is really interesting. It’s a good example of sort of bringing confidence into it and of pushing for quality and saying like, okay, listen, there are really good examples of when humans should be involved here. And it can be, it’s quite customizable. I’ve just set it up for a client. So I’m curious to see how it affects the quality of interactions. Because it by necessity slows down responses, but these are only gonna happen for emails. So I think it’s a good way of pushing for that improved support experience, which is what we’re aiming for here.
Alan (14:29)
Yeah, I need to look at that actually because I didn’t get a whole lot of airtime. But I’m always smiling when you talk there because again there was such an Apple feel, right? When you start hearing better, faster, you know, they’re hitting the areas that people in software are always looking for it to be hit and usability right. So I guess and the pace it changes is like, I think the phrase manic momentum was used by Des at one point, which it is right. It is, it all feels, it also feels so fast right and I go back to the point I made a minute ago, Conor. Like most one year Pioneer events, you might get a one product release right and a minor update, but you got, you know, new products, you know, a complete company rebrand, feature releases left, right and centre, an acquisition, and then sort of, you know, painting this picture for the future, which was again growth, improvements, lots more to come. So definitely a very upbeat, bullish sort of kind of narrative coming out from all the Fin people. And look, we got to meet lots of them there, which was great as well. There was a heavy kind of presence over from Ireland at it as well, which was great to see.
Conor Pendergrast (15:35)
That’s great. Yep. I mean, I have to say, even as someone, I work in Fin and improving Fin AI Agent for complex companies all the time. And like every day I discover something new or I find something that’s changed. I don’t think I feel overwhelmed, but that’s mostly because I spend all my weeks doing this. So it’s good. I, you know, Alan, we’ll have to get you back for Pioneer 2027, see what has changed and laugh about all these minor things that we were interested in and now look at the landscape and how it’s different now.
Alan (16:07)
Sounds wonderful, Con. Well hopefully you’ll make it there too, that you’ll get enough clients this year to fund your tickets.
Conor Pendergrast (16:11)
Absolutely. Remember clients, big bucks my way and I’ll fly and I’ll listen, I just for you, er clients, I will go business class as well. Just for you. Alan, where should people find you online? Is LinkedIn the best place to find you?
Alan (16:23)
Yeah, Alan Gleeson and it’s G-L-E-E-S-O-N, so definitely LinkedIn is a good spot to find me.
Conor Pendergrast (16:29)
Super. Well thank you very much for joining me and yeah, enjoy the rest of your week.
Alan (16:33)
Thanks so much, Conor. Thanks for having me on.
Conor Pendergrast (16:35)
See ya. Bye.