At INBOUND 2024, HubSpot enhanced its AI capabilities by introducing four specialized AI agents. According to the company, these are not just tools but new digital colleagues capable of handling specific tasks. Why should your company hire these colleagues at HubSpot?

During HubSpot’s keynote at INBOUND 2024, we weren’t surprised by the announcement of AI agents for the platform. This was partly due to the pre-briefing given to journalists in attendance, but mainly because many tech companies had launched their own AI agents throughout September.

Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of HubSpot, was given the difficult task of profiling his company’s announcement in the face of the wave of AI innovations. To do this, he relied on the company’s relationship with Apple’s vision. “When the iPhone was introduced, Apple threw an important thought into the world beyond the device: ‘There’s an app for that.’ At HubSpot, we started working with this idea and the thought: “There is an agent for that.”

Shah emphasizes that our perspective on AI agents should move from seeing them as mere tools to seeing them as colleagues. While these agents are not intended to replace humans, they nevertheless become colleagues who take tasks from us and complete them independently.

Loyalty to marketers

By announcing AI Agents, HubSpot is staying true to what it excels at: marketing. The company recognizes that marketers often face tool overload when creating campaigns. On average, a marketer would use five tools to launch a marketing campaign on different sites and in different formats.

The number of tools should decrease by giving tasks to AI agents, which we will call the new colleagues, according to Shah’s perception. These colleagues have a very specific set of tasks that they can take on. While human colleagues generally need flexibility and often expand their roles, these AI colleagues maintain focused specializations.

Half of the AI ​​agents announced are here to tackle all of marketers’ tasks. They are launching under the names Breeze Content Agent and Breeze Social Media Agent. One to help write blogs and one who can write articles for social media.

HubSpot manages to break the marketing narrative with AI agents. Two more AI Agents have been announced for sales and customer service, but marketing clearly remains one of its main focuses with two assistants.

A more comprehensive overview of the four launched AI agents and their features can be found in this article: HubSpot deploys specialized AI agents on the platform

AI sometimes takes center stage

The new customer service colleague, Customer Agent, is the only AI agent to interact with customers. Other AI tools work internally. The results may be publicly viewable, but a follower on LinkedIn should not notice that a new post was made by Breeze.

So why can a customer’s query be clearly solved by AI? This arises from the need for better responsiveness. After all, AI doesn’t just work during business hours and is easier to develop during peak periods. A new employee for customer service cannot be found in half a day. When given access to relevant business systems and autonomous reasoning capabilities, AI becomes a valuable asset in customer service operations.

In marketing circles, there is often hesitation to recognize AI-generated content. Marketers rarely post when ChatGPT contributes to their blog posts. However, we hear in conversation with Julia Pilkes, EMEA Senior Marketing Director, that this is going to change as successful marketers aren’t going to spend their time writing blogs or posting anyway. create podcasts in the years to come.

The time saved should be spent on building personal relationships with customers. Shah reinforces this point about job security: “Humans are more than the sum of their jobs. We bring emotions and personal stories that enable real human connections.

Value dependent on data connection

The world is therefore slowly evolving as AI takes an increasingly important place and invades professional life. This is the reality of every business, and it’s why HubSpot is just one of many companies offering AI agents. Do they have the resources to make their offerings truly distinctive?

The capabilities of these agents – blog writing, customer service assistance, lead generation – while attractive, are not revolutionary innovations. These use cases are already familiar in the AI ​​landscape.

Still, according to the company, there’s a reason why people use AI on the HubSpot platform and don’t search for the right AI tool for their needs themselves. HubSpot ensures that AI is integrated with company data, making the result more relevant to the user. With years of using HubSpot products, Breeze knows what corporate identity a social media post is formatted in, who the key customers are, which companies are the biggest challengers, and much more. The AI ​​colleague leverages these data sources in its decision-making process. This is where HubSpot provides value, as do other providers of this type of tool.

A key requirement is that the company offering the AI ​​agent has robust data and insight tools, something HubSpot addressed last year with the acquisition of Clearbit. According to CEO Yamini Rangan, the acquisition was necessary to make the collected data actionable.

HubSpot is responsible for connecting data sources to AI tools. They leave the development of tools to the most specialized AI companies. In this area, HubSpot does not want to get involved, says Matt Schnitt, senior director of products at HubSpot. “While other AI tools aim to appeal to a broad market, we have chosen specific focus areas where we can offer detailed, market-specific solutions.”

Schnitt says that’s why the company prefers not to waste time developing AI. “There is a wide range of well-developed LLMs available. This makes it less interesting to enter the field of AI development yourself. Breeze works on a combination of open source and commercial LLMs, selecting specific models based on user profiles and requirements. “This overall package that HubSpot has transformed into a conversational interface, because that’s what users are used to. »

In our opinion, Breeze’s presentation should still be seen as an extension of a possible acquisition by Alphabet. This option was considered several months ago, but ultimately failed. We know about Gemini’s rectangular asterisk, but Schnitt assures us it’s pure coincidence. Breeze offers a wide range of choices in the LLMs it relies on. Does OpenAI offer a more powerful version of GPT than what Google can offer with Gemini? HubSpot is then free to choose GPT as the LLM that works in Breeze.

“Easy, fast and unified”

Over the next few years, HubSpot’s roadmap will focus heavily on AI. In this area, the company will have to develop on its own after the abandonment of the acquisition by Alphabet. How will this strategy be shaped? Pilkes outlines his strategy: “We are going to move upmarket, but we don’t want to lose sight of small businesses in doing so. When creating our solutions, we always think about the customer. Our “simple, fast and unified” approach prioritizes the needs of customers of all business sizes.

This holistic market approach presents both opportunities and challenges. Enterprise customers with large budgets often seek cutting-edge solutions from vendors at the forefront of innovation. To conquer these markets, HubSpot’s capacity for innovation is in our opinion insufficient. We make this reflection based on the LLMs that Breeze runs on, for which the company itself does not do any development.

However, our conversation with Pilkes makes it clear that it’s just as important for HubSpot to be able to retain its current customer base. For these customers, there will be a supply of AI agents who can do a great job, but who are also happy to perform simple tasks like responding to an email.