Des Traynor is a Co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom and sits on Intercom’s board of directors. Des has led many teams within the company, including Product, Marketing, Customer Support, and Content, and has been directly responsible for building out even more functions within Intercom as well. Today, Des oversees Intercom's R&D team, based in the Dublin and London offices.
Before being part of Intercom’s founding team, he was a UX consultant, a university lecturer in computer science, and also a Ph.D. researcher studying how to improve the quality of computer science education. Des also previously co-founded Exceptional.
Des is an author and speaker on the topics of starting a startup, scaling a business, creating a product strategy and more. He shares his ideas and expertise in books, podcasts, and conference presentations. He also invests in many startups, some of which include Stripe, Miro, Notion, and Hopin.
Upcoming Talks
28 May 2026
To survive and thrive in an AI-first world, Intercom made the deliberate decision to abandon every aspect of how it built software, something the company is well known for. When organisations talk about implementing AI, there’s a temptation to look for the minimum necessary adaptations or to focus on the changes that are the most fun, but that is not even table stakes.
Building real AI products demands rewriting the entire approach to software at a fundamental level. At Intercom, that meant rethinking everything including its processes, speed and roles. For example, software development operated less like a factory and more like a lab, the pace moved faster with timelines and even team sizes cut in half, and roles transformed across the company as designers and product managers became AI coders and builders.
In this talk, Intercom’s Chief Strategy Officer, Des Traynor, details the necessary messy chaos of rebuilding the plane while it’s flying. He’ll explore how this radical shift ultimately led to the creation of Fin, Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, and what it taught Intercom about building products that can actually win in the AI era.