Brian Scanlan

Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom in Dublin, working on Intercom’s platform group across reliability, cost management, performance, and developer productivity. He has publicly presented and discussed Intercom’s AI-first engineering transformation, including its use of Claude Code, AI agents, telemetry, and skills to increase R&D throughput.

Intercom Doubled Engineering Throughput by Standardizing on Claude Code

Brian Scanlan, a senior principal engineer at Intercom, argues that the company doubled engineering throughput by treating AI coding as an internal platform strategy rather than an individual productivity tool. In his account, Intercom standardized on Claude Code, encoded recurring engineering work into agent-usable skills, connected agents to internal systems under existing controls, and made AI adoption an explicit expectation across R&D. The reported result was a doubling of pull-request throughput, including 17.6% of merged PRs approved by Claude, alongside new bottlenecks in review and CI.

AI EngineerMay 15, 202613 min read