A few days ago Ebb attended a meet up focusing on software and growth. One of the speakers was Monterro, an investor in B2B Saas companies. As they took the stage one of their slides made the room pause. The headline asked the question that has been keeping the CEO’s in the room from sleeping at night.

”Will this company still exist in 10 years?”

They go on. Yes, from an investor stand point the KPIs matter exactly as much as before. But when anyone can build with AI, the first question is no longer how good the numbers are.

The question is ”why you still will be here.”

That ”why” is far beyond branding, culture or making the pitch deck better. It’s about moats, switching costs, and the longevity of your business. It’s about products, pricing and change.

For the CEO’s in the room, change isn’t an option. It is the way forward. And they know it, most companies are not standing still. They implement. Invest. Launch. Recruit. Change pricing.

Monterro continued. In its 2026 study of more than 230 Nordic B2B software companies, only 9% said their AI efforts had led to significant monetisation or become a core source of revenue.

The value simply isn’t being captured.

Perhaps thats why Monterro also state that positioning, differentiation and pricing are quickly becoming bigger strategic issues as AI are lowering the table stakes.

The situation does raises the question – what if the problem isn't whether a company is changing – but where the change gets stuck? Is there a possibility that there are gaps in the value creation?

We think so. Four value gaps to be specific, and we found a business story that illustrates them all.

Intercom® filled in the gaps and became Fin®

You might have heard of Intercom, you might not. They’re a great example not because they’re a unicorn, or a stock market darling, but because their transformation is telling. It covers the big issues most companies are facing – category shifts, disruptive tech, tracking progress and revenue. In 2023 Intercom were like most Saas-companies. Product was working fine, they had a product-market-fit since long, along with hundreds of millions in recurring revenue.

But by CEO Eoghan McCabes own statement – the companies product still worked, but the growth engine did not.

So what did they do?
Well four things.

They adressed four types of value gaps that can be found across any industry. Value gaps is not a term unique to Ebb. What is specific is how we use it.

At Ebb, a Value Gap is the distance between the value a company could create or capture and the value its current reality allows it to realise.

We look for that distance in four places: between the company and reality, between insight and execution, between the company and the market’s perception of it, and between today’s business and what the company could become.

And thus, we named the gaps Reality, Capability, Narrative and Possibility.

1. Reality Gap - the world changed before the company did

In 2023 Intercom promised ”better customer experience across support, marketing, and sales”. They were a customer communications platform, and the business model as well as pricing reflected that. They sold access: seats, features, licenses and usage. And as AI made its way into tech stacks Intercom created their AI-assistant to add on top of products.

It’s as this point that the first value gap reveals itself. Intercom realizes that the old Saas-logic hasn’t just got a new feature called AI, but the full differentiator is eroding.

That is a reality gap – a situationen where the market has changed what it rewards, before the company changes what it was built around.

In other words, you’re organized to access a value that no longer isn’t there. It’s on the move.

Which brings us to the second gap.

2. The Capability Gap – seeing vs being able to act

Intercom acted. But they did more than add an AI-assistant on top of the product. The company allocated capital on building operations around the new tech. In 2023 they launched Fin the tool – ”the only AI customer service solution you need”.

Thats the difference between seeing and acting.

The same gap shows up more broadly. In PwC’s 2026 CEO Survey, only 12% of CEOs say AI has delivered both cost and revenue gains, while 56% say they have seen no significant financial benefit at all.

Thats a capability gap in numbers, when it comes to AI and Saas that is. But acting on change is only one part of it.

A company can move quite far internally before the outside world notices anything at all.

3. Narrative Gap – the company changed more than the picture of it.

The third gap is a narrative one – how the company is read by the markets.

Intercom’s product had changed. The business had changed. What the company was going after had changed. But much of the company was still designed around the value it had been built to capture before.

A narrative is not just what a company says about itself. It shapes what customers expect from it, what markets compare it to, what talent joins it for and, ultimately, what territory the company is allowed to occupy.

A is the most visible sign of that gap.

Intercom was a name built around communication software. Fin was becoming something broader: a company built around AI agents and the outcomes they could create.

On May 12, 2026, the company changed its name to Fin. CEO Eoghan McCabe described the reason in similar terms: the distance between what the company was known as and what it had become had simply grown too wide.

The narrative had to catch up, because it is what houses the value a company can credibly sell.

4. Possibility Gap – the business is smaller than the potential inside it

The fourth and final gap is the possibility gap: the distance between the business a company has built and the value it could potentially capture.

For Fin, the new narrative was not just describing a different company. It was making room for a different kind of value.

Traditional SaaS, to a large extent, sells access: seats, features, licenses and usage. Fin started charging for outcomes instead – initially $0.99 when a customer issue was successfully resolved.

By 2026, the model had expanded from charging for resolutions to charging for outcomes – such as qualified leads, disqualifications and completed processes.

This is what we at Ebb refer to as Value Expansion: the shift from “how do we sell more customer-service software?” to “what value is the customer really paying us for?”

When the answer moves from software access to resolved customer problems, a larger territory opens up. New offers become possible. The addressable market expands. The company can occupy a broader category – and potentially be valued against a different future.

Fin now describes itself not simply as a support agent, but as a Customer Agent that can work across service, sales and e-com.

The business had become bigger than the product it started with.

The end.

Epilogue

So how does the story end? In March 2026, Fin was approaching $100m ARR. In June, Salesforce agreed to acquire the company for approximately $3.6bn. On September 10, the acquisition was completed.

It would be too simple to say that four Value Gaps created that valuation. But the journey can be read through all four:

• Reality – reality changed faster than the company.

• Capability – the company saw the opportunity and built the ability to act on it.

• Narrative – the company changed more than the picture of it.

• Possibility – there was more potential in the company than the existing business made visible.

Closing a Value Gap does not mean fixing the brand, the product or the organisation in isolation.

It means finding where value is getting stuck – and redesigning the company so more of it can move through.