“We said every designer is now shipping code to production. It is now part of your job. If you don't like that, We had a great run, but we should part ways and you should go somewhere where designers don't have to ship code.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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Insight
Adams: Companies must part ways with a third of staff for AI
“Like a third of your company, you need to part ways with them. They're not fit for this new world. They don't want to build the same way you want to build. They don't like fast, crazy fast pace. They don't like chaos.”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 12:39Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
Opinion
Adams: Traditional seat-based SaaS and CRUD GUIs make no sense post-AI
“Most SaaS companies sold seats. These are seats that humans sit in. Those humans use some kind of GUI, some CRUD type tasks to achieve some outcome. None of these things make sense anymore, right? None of these things make sense. There's no seats in a post AI …”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 16:13Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
Insight
Adams: Employees needing constant convincing during AI pivots become liabilities
“Culture runs really deep. So you have to be wary of the people you need to keep convincing because they're going to be a liability.”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 15:22Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
Insight
Adams: In AI products, building UI is easy while infrastructure is hard
“AI products don't look like this at all. It's actually the inverse. Building the UI is the easy part. That's the small part. The hard part is building great AI infrastructure, building products that actually truly work at scale.”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 24:02Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
Disclosure
Adams: Intercom abandoned its long-standing SaaS product principles for AI
“We had these principles at Intercom that evolved over years and they made us really good at building SaaS product... But, these principles were designed for the SaaS era. They were designed to build a SaaS product. We had to abandon all this shit.”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 24:51Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
Insight
Adams: AI Product Marketing Must Focus on Infrastructure, Not Features
“A lot of AI products do look the same. A lot of them are now AI agents. They all kind of look like some kind of chat interface. They all do different things, but they all kind of look the same. It's hard to tell them apart. Look at five competitors. They all k…”
Paul AdamsJan 28, 2026▶ 34:11Why Most SaaS Companies Will Fail at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom's CPO
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