Announcing major updates to Procedures and Simulations: Enabling Fin to handle complex queries - The Intercom Blog

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Announcing major updates to Procedures and Simulations: Enabling Fin to handle complex queries

See the latest updates to Procedures and Simulations, the foundation of how Fin handles complex work.

Procedures: Define exactly how Fin handles complex work

Simulations: Test complex workflows at scale before they reach customers

Today, we’re announcing 12 big updates to Fin’s Procedures and Simulations capabilities; the foundation of how Fin handles complex work, and how teams stay in control of the customer experience.

Procedures make it easy to combine three things – natural language instructions, deterministic controls, and fully agentic behavior – to enable Fin to act like a human when tackling complex queries, but with the reliability of software. Simulations allow teams to test complex Procedures at scale before they reach customers, so they can deploy with confidence.

Together, they make Fin self-manageable, transparent, and capable of handling genuinely complex work.

We’ve made Procedures easier to build and maintain: Draft Procedures with AI by simply outlining your process in natural language, break complex workflows into reusable Sub-procedures, improve instruction authoring, and track when Procedures trigger, resolve, or hand off, all natively within the Procedures UI.

Improved deterministic controls: Follow explicit rules to switch Procedures under defined conditions, instruct Fin to read specific content in certain scenarios, and include internal notes for smoother human handoffs.

Improved agentic behaviour: Fin can automatically switch Procedures when intent changes and extract structured data directly from uploaded PDFs and images, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.

More powerful Simulations: Generate AI-suggested Simulations from your Procedures, upload images for richer testing, and gain clearer visibility into Fin’s reasoning so you can deploy complex Procedures with confidence.

Teams that see early AI gains in speed, coverage, and cost to serve often hit a ceiling. They restrict AI to simple automation and information retrieval instead of setting it up to handle the kind of complex work that teams reflexively entrust to humans.

They hit that ceiling because they feel they’re not ready to set AI Agents up to tackle greater complexity, and manage them once it is running. We built Procedures and Simulations to make that setup and ongoing management far easier.

They needed to be easily able to connect data to let Fin reliably and safely check customer status or eligibility and then take action.

They didn’t want to route through engineering teams to create or amend logic for their AI Agents to make mid-conversation decisions.

Procedures combines natural language instructions and intuitive data connector setups. You tell Fin in your own words how you want it to behave, and you’ll be guided through creating conditional steps so Fin will react consistently, with the option to add in any code snippets for circumstances where absolute precision is required. Once you build one Procedure, we believe you’ll want to build several, so Fin will constantly read the conversation it’s in to ensure it’s following the most relevant Procedure, and jump to a more relevant one if the user intent changes.

We know that the moment you set something like this live for the first time is a leap of faith, so we built in Simulations to allow you to test your Procedures, find edge cases, and be ready for launch with maximum confidence.

Reaching mature deployment takes a deliberate, ongoing commitment to training workflows, validating them before deployment, measuring performance in production, and refining them over time. At Intercom, we call this the Fin Flywheel: train, test, deploy, analyze. Procedures form the foundation of the train stage, and Simulations make the test stage reliable at scale. Together, they enable Fin to handle complex work, and teams to stay in control of it.

Procedures: Define exactly how Fin handles complex work

Procedures enable you to set Fin up to resolve your complex, time-consuming queries that require multiple steps or business logic. You can train Fin to follow your standard operating procedures carefully and exercise experience and judgment, just like your human team would, so it can handle even your most complicated queries in a controllable, predictable way.

Procedures does this by combining three powerful things:

You write a Procedure in plain language, just like documenting a process for a new teammate. You can paste in your existing SOPs, write from scratch, or let AI draft them for you, then iterate yourself.

Share an outline of your process and Fin drafts a complete Procedure using your conversation history, knowledge hub content, and relevant data. If additional context is needed, it prompts you with clarifying questions to make sure the Procedure is thorough and tailored to your use case, significantly reducing setup time.

For example: if you’re creating a refund workflow, the system can draft conditional paths for eligibility, approval thresholds, and verification steps based on your historical cases and policies.

Write a process once and reference it across multiple Procedures by breaking it down into reusable steps, called Sub-procedures. This makes workflows easier to read, faster to build, and simpler to maintain as things change.

Natural language is flexible, but some steps need to be exact. You can layer in deterministic controls where precision matters, starting with a fully natural language Procedure and introducing structure gradually where it adds value:

Conditional steps (branching logic) to handle decision points – for example, whether a refund should be approved – so Fin’s behavior is consistent and predictable.

Data connectors so Fin can pull information from your tools or take actions automatically.

Code snippets for when absolute accuracy is essential and you need to guarantee that the same inputs always produce the same outputs.

Checkpoints to pause for approval or hand off to a teammate.

Instruct Fin to read specific content from your knowledge hub

You can set clear rules for Fin to reference a specific policy or article from your knowledge hub in defined situations so Fin always surfaces the right context in a conversation.

Explicit Procedure switching under defined conditions

You can set rules that deterministically trigger a switch to a different Procedure, for example, escalating to a complaints Procedure if specific risk signals are detected mid-conversation.

When Fin hands off to a teammate, it can now include internal notes with relevant context so the person picking up the conversation knows exactly what happened and what needs to happen next.

Because real conversations rarely follow the “happy path,” Procedures are designed to let Fin reason through what’s happening and adapt – jumping to the right step, or switching Procedures entirely if a customer changes their mind or the issue turns out to be about something different.

If a customer starts in a billing workflow but then asks about cancelling their subscription, Fin transitions to the relevant Procedure without forcing the customer to restart.

Structured data extraction from uploaded files

Fin can now extract structured data directly from PDFs and images uploaded by customers – like invoices, forms, or receipts – and use that data within the conversation. Customers don’t have to copy and paste or repeat themselves.

“If a customer starts down one path but their issue turns out to be something else entirely, Fin adapts seamlessly – no more getting stuck in loops or forcing customers into the wrong workflow.”

The result is a conversation that feels fluid, but always follows your intended rules.

We’ve made it easier to write, edit, and structure Procedures, so building and updating them takes less time and requires less effort.

Reporting on when Procedures trigger, resolve, or hand off

You can now track how Procedures are performing directly within the Procedures UI, seeing exactly when they trigger, when they resolve, and when they hand off to a teammate. This gives teams the visibility they need to understand what’s working, spot issues early, and improve over time.

Simulations: Test complex workflows at scale before they reach customers

Simulations let you validate how Procedures will perform before anything goes live, and continuously revalidate them as things change.

Deploying complex AI for the first time is a leap of faith. Simulations are designed to remove that uncertainty, so teams can launch with confidence and keep iterating without risk.

For any Procedure, you can choose a user or customer segment and run a complete, multi-turn simulated conversation. You see every step Fin takes, how it applies your rules, reasons through decisions, and where it passes or fails, giving you the visibility to debug and fix issues before they reach customers.

Simulations now support image uploads, so you can test workflows that involve receipts, invoices, or forms – the same inputs your customers will actually send.

You can now see exactly how Fin is thinking through each step of a Simulation, making it easier to understand its behavior, catch unexpected decisions, and refine Procedures with confidence.

Writing test coverage manually doesn’t scale. Fin’s AI Assistant generates Simulations directly from your Procedures, suggesting realistic edge cases like partial refund disputes, missing invoice uploads, or no subscription found, so you can expand coverage without the overhead growing with it.

All the Simulations you create are stored in a central library. When a product changes, a policy updates, or a Procedure is edited, hit “run all” to instantly check whether anything has regressed. This applies the same rigor to AI automation that engineering teams bring to software testing.

You can now use AI to generate a full set of Simulations from any Procedure. The AI Assistant suggests realistic variations based on your workflow, so you can build comprehensive test coverage fast.

Procedures and Simulations are available now. If you’d like to see them in action, catch up on the latest Fin Product Announcement.

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Key Takeaways

For customers Meet your customers where they already are with the world’s best business messenger for chat, email, voice, social…
Ideas blog Product & Design thoughts from our leadership team
The Ticket podcast Conversations with future-focused leaders at the cutting edge of customer service
For customers Meet your customers where they already are with the world’s best business messenger for chat, email, voice, social…
Ideas blog Product & Design thoughts from our leadership team