How Intercom 2x’d their engineering velocity in 9 months with Claude Code | Brian Scanlan

About this episode

Brian Scanlan discusses how Intercom transformed its engineering processes to double R&D throughput using AI in just nine months.

Brian Scanlan is a senior principal engineer at Intercom, where he’s led the company’s transformation to AI-first engineering. In just nine months, Intercom doubled their R&D throughput while maintaining code quality, with 100% of engineers—plus designers, PMs, and TPMs—now shipping code via Claude Code. What you’ll learn: How Intercom doubled their merged PRs per R&D employee in just nine months using Claude Code The telemetry infrastructure they built to measure AI adoption and quality across hundreds of engineers Why they built a skills repository with hooks that enforce engineering standards automatically How they’re preparing their product for an agent-first world with CLIs, MCPs, and ephemeral APIs The permission and accountability framework that enabled rapid AI adoption Why backlog zero is now achievable and what that means for engineering culture — Brought to you by: Celigo —Intelligent automation built for AI Cursor —The best way to code with AI — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Brian Scanlan (02:40) Why Intercom went all-in on AI for both product and engineering (05:01) The breakthrough moment with Opus 4.6 and Christmas break 2025 (07:02)…

People in this episode

Host: Claire Vo

Guest: Brian Scanlan

Topics covered

• AI engineering
• R&D throughput
• engineering culture
• AI adoption
• telemetry infrastructure
• skills repository
• agent-first workflows

Keywords

• engineering velocity
• AI-first engineering
• merged PRs
• quality measurement
• backlog zero
• telemetry
• skills repository
• agent-first world

Sponsors

Celigo, Cursor

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Intercom

Products: Claude Code

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