P.S. from Attacat – Inbound Special (Oct 25)

In this edition

• Conference Review: HubSpot sets out its vision for your human/AI hybrid team – How HubSpot sees AI agents and assistants as your new co-workers and what you need to do to begin embracing this brave new world.
• HubSpot updates
  • Customer Agent can now handle any type of enquiry
  • New: Company Research Agent
  • New: Data Agent
  • New: Internal FAQ Assistant
  • Two new AI features in Sales Workspace

HubSpot sets out its vision for your human/AI hybrid team

This year’s conference was, of course, all about AI. We wouldn’t expect anything less, but behind the hype was HubSpot’s clearest vision yet for how customer communications, and with it, the HubSpot product, are changing with AI.

The core idea is your human-led team delivering increasingly personalised communications with the assistance of AI co-workers handling most of the grunt and scale.

HubSpot sees itself both as your data store and the provider of these AI co-workers to carry out tasks for you such as:

• Cleansing your customer data;
• Enhancing it with publicly available information and insights from your emails, chats, meeting notes, and calls;
• Responding to customers through chats and emails;
• Creating campaign assets such as landing pages and ads at a previously unimagined speed and quantity;
• Buying media;
• Surfacing performance insights.

Reality or vision?

HubSpot is already rolling out many AI co-workers for you in the form of assistants and agents so this future is to some extent already here – clients are seeing early wins.  

But let’s not pretend that everything will work for everybody immediately. Indeed, one of the calls to action from the conference was to keep experimenting: try something today, if it doesn’t work, try it again in a few months as the technology will have moved on again.

So it’s both a genuinely exciting prospect and a practical means for companies to meaningfully adopt AI today.

Humans in control

I was relieved and impressed by HubSpot’s emphasis on human control, rather than the common tech industry assumption that AI always knows best. So there’s lots of emphasis on AI making suggestions or generating drafts, with you approving or tweaking.

More with less?

These tools will undoubtedly deliver what customer-focused teams do today much more efficiently. On the flip side, changing customer expectations will force customer teams to deliver more and better. So we may or may not see smaller customer-facing teams.

We can, however, safely bet on the need for skills in these teams (including creative teams) to become less siloed and change quite dramatically.  People who are curious and like finding better ways of doing things will see their value rise at the expense of those who prefer to simply crank the handle of a process. 

The need for data quality and brand clarity

Technology is one part of the equation; being in a position to use it effectively is the other.

HubSpot presented its latest overarching marketing metaphor of “The Loop” – a continuous iteration process.  Companies input their brand voice, ideal customer profile and campaign brief, and the AI handles the bulk of the campaign production and delivery.  This enables targeting of increasingly smaller micro-audiences, making the long-discussed ideal of near 1-to-1 communication at scale feel closer to reality.  

However, to make a success of this (or any other automated communications) these are the less sexy essentials that every AI strategy must invest in:

1. High-quality and complete customer data in one system – HubSpot announced several tools to help you enhance the quality and quantity of your customer data within its platform. Broadly, they cover:
   • Making all the unstructured information captured in your emails, calls, tickets, and chat interactions usable by AIs;
   • Automatically enriching customer data (by researching and monitoring customers on the web, and analysing their communications);
   • Easier connectivity with your other systems holding customer data;
   • Improved data cleansing tools.
2. Clear brand and value proposition – Many companies struggle with this, yet it’s never been more essential for success. Just as it gets all your human employees rowing in the same direction, your AI employees also need a clearly defined brand and value proposition. It might be helpful to think of your brand’s tone of voice, ideal customer profile and value proposition as the prompt for your company’s marketing, sales and service GPT. We know ChatGPT’s outputs improve with better prompts; the same applies here.

Agents and assistants

AI agents are the topic of the moment, yet like the word “AI” itself, “AI agent” means pretty much whatever the person saying it wants it to mean! It gets even harder when trying to differentiate between AI assistants and AI agents.

However they are defined though, these are the new “employees” joining your team. HubSpot are rolling out:

• Default agents and assistants;
• A marketplace (like an app store) for agents which you can add to HubSpot;
• “Breeze Studio”, allowing you to customise existing agents or create your own without code. Think of it as the training ground for these new employees.

AI tools for a world being turned upside down by AI

While HubSpot embraces AI to empower businesses with new tools to reach customers, customer behaviour is also rapidly evolving.

HubSpot’s strength, when compared to its competitors, comes from being most interested in marketing, rather than tech for tech sake. As a result, the Inbound conference is always framed around helping businesses understand changing consumer behaviour. And likewise, their product development is always focused on consumer behaviour in a way that other CRMs fall short of.

Some key marketing trends to be aware of:

• Your prospects are no longer on your website. They are now everywhere else!  (Blogs are less read, while significant time is spent scrolling social media, listening to podcasts, and reading email newsletters);
• When they do arrive on your website, they are typically far more qualified, because…
• Searching is increasingly being replaced by asking questions, whether on Reddit, at industry meet-ups or in AI answer engines (such as Google AI mode, chatGPT etc).  However, SEO remains crucial for discoverability in these engines.

And the key changes you need to make:

• Embrace video and audio content, especially since AIs can now readily ‘digest’ it, unlike past search engines that primarily processed text.
• Tighten up your “bottom of funnel” website content (e.g. you vs competitor, pricing, industry-specific use cases) and reformat it into a question-and-answer format, including FAQs. This is where the tailored one-to-one conversations, powered by your new AI employees, comes in.
• Drive your industry’s, or better yet, your customers’ conversations, wherever it is they happen to be.

Getting started on your HubSpot AI journey

We discussed the importance of establishing your data and branding foundations above. Thereafter, the simple advice is to just ‘have a go!’. Choose a high-priority internal process and start experimenting. There are also many low-risk, but practical marketing use cases you can try, such as creating a landing page.

We’ve also highlighted one or two of the agents we are most excited about below in this month’s product updates.

It’s still early days for everyone, so please share your experiences with us and we’ll highlight what’s working well in future newsletters for the benefit of all clients.

HubSpot updates

Are these the problem solvers you’ve been waiting for?

These are our picks from all the AI launches and updates from Inbound. You’ll find the agents and assistants in the new Breeze Marketplace and you can fine tune them to your own needs in Breeze Studio. There’s a one-minute or a thirty-minute overview of Breeze Marketplace and Studio if you want to learn more.

Why should we care?

Agents and assistants represent an entirely new way of working that we all must grasp. Now is the time to start experimenting if you haven’t already.

Customer Agent can now handle any type of enquiry

This agent, in our view, is one everyone should test. We are seeing increasing numbers of successful rollouts of Breeze Customer Agent for autonomously handling support tickets. Its remit is now also expanding into sales and marketing with its ability to handle any enquiry whether that’s chat, email or even voice. It can create contacts and book meetings in addition to routine tasks such as order tracking and password resets.

AI is advancing at a much faster pace than we all realise, so if it isn’t working for you yet, is it because you haven’t got your foundations (see above) in place yet?

Also worth noting: Customer Agent’s early lead in the AI co-worker league is partly due to access to quality training data. Most human-resolved tickets were in a readily digestible text format. Now that calls, audio, and video content are increasingly ‘digestible’ by AIs, we can expect agents more reliant on these sources to make significant strides.

Why should we care?

HubSpot is claiming that it’s resolving 65% of conversations automatically. That is a lot of time saved!

New: Company Research Agent

Gathers information about a company from its HubSpot record and/or the web. If you typically review a prospect’s website to identify their customers, this agent automates that process. The output is a dynamic card, updating with recent company news, meeting summaries, etc.

New: Data Agent

While this agent can pull similar information to the Company Research Agent, its primary output is the automatic population of properties, ideal for initial record population. It can also power automations.

Internal FAQ Assistant

If you regularly field questions from your team despite well-developed documentation, this assistant is for you!  Create an AI assistant for your team to answer questions using your trusted documentation as the source.  

Two new AI features in Sales Workspace

1. Use HubSpot AI to help prepare for meetings – If you’ve synced your calendar, navigate to the Workspace ‘schedule’ tab, click into a meeting, and view the Info & Insights tab. Here, among other information, you’ll find customer pain points compiled by AI from recent emails, call notes, etc. (If your meeting is today, a quicker way to do this is to just click the AI assistant from anywhere in HubSpot and the meeting will pop up there)
2. The updated Deal Insights Card – it now has context from phone calls, emails, and notes etc to power the insights (find it in the Deals tab).

Why do we care?

If nothing else, the usefulness of the information or otherwise will be an indicator of how good your customer data foundation is.

Until next time!

The Attacats