INBOUND 2024: AI, Agents, and Agent.AI

I attended HubSpot ’s INBOUND conference last week in Boston. As you would guess, much of the discussion focused on AI, Agents, and business transformation driven by AI. I will cover CEO Yamini Rangan's keynote next week.

A few of the highlights:

• HubSpot employs Breeze to brand its AI services and agents. Rangan emphasized in her keynote that HubSpot is easy, fast, and unified. The breeze branding is in line with Rangan’s platform positioning.
• The Clearbit database has been natively integrated into HubSpot and powers three new capabilities called Breeze Intelligence: real-time data Enrichment, buyer intent (visitor intelligence), and form enrichment. Clearbit was acquired late last year and includes global company and contact data sets.? Breeze Intelligence is priced for companies of all sizes, beginning at $30 per month for 100 enrichment credits (i.e., $0.30 for either a company or contact record, with volume discounts bringing records under ten cents)
• Breeze Copilot is available in beta across the HubSpot Hubs.

Like Salesforce, HubSpot is infusing its products with AI and building a set of agents. They launched Breeze, its embedded AI, and four agents: Breeze Content Manager, Breeze Social Media Agent, Breeze Prospecting Agent (research and email messaging, not list building), and Breeze Customer Agent.

“You’ve heard AI has the power to improve how you do business. We think it’s time to show you how. Introducing Breeze: HubSpot’s AI engine. It’s connected to all your data, powers every product across the customer platform, and makes work an absolute breeze. The best part? It’s easy to use and quick to deliver value for your business.”

Agent.AI

Finally, Co-founder Dharmesh Shah runs his own lab for the company. Last year, he released the progenitor to Breeze Copilot, and this year launched Agent.ai, a marketplace for AI agents. Users start with 100 free credits towards running the agents.

There are 41 agents on the marketplace (26 for hire and 15 that are in training), including Company Research Agent, Competitor Analyst, Web Page Copy Editor, Tech Stack Lookup, Earnings Call Analyzer, Prospect Extractor, SEO Content Optimizer, Sales Lead Qualifier, and Customer Persona Builder. However, there is an Agent Builder, so the number of agents is likely to grow rapidly.

Dharmesh has noted that agents can call other agents. Thus, an agent could be built to process steps sequentially with agent A feeding agent B or in parallel with agent A calling best-of-breed agents B through K that have very well-defined prompts.

One gap I’m seeing is attribution. If funding data is being gathered from Crunchbase, Owler, or other services, those firms should receive attribution and linkbacks.

Another is consistency. When multiple calls are being made (prompts, API calls, Agent Calls), they are often pulling against different data sources. For example, a Company Research Agent, correctly identified Manny Medina as the Chair of Outreach in the news and founders section, but listed him as CEO in the executive section.

Timeliness is also potentially an issue.? If events are listed but not dated, then reps (or an agent calling a news agent) can list old news and build messaging based on historical vs. recent events. For example, an earnings summary gave Q1 results for ZoomInfo, even though Q2 was released a month ago.

Yes, this sounds like quibbling, and Dharmesh was clear that these are all beta agents acting as proofs of concept, but it demonstrates the great potential for agents and areas where they need refinement. I would, however, recommend that every Product Manager check out these tools and view them as a demonstration lab. Remember that your RevTech products likely have additional assets (Firmographics, Contacts, Opportunities, Intent, Engagement Data, Conversational Intelligence, etc.) that can be infused into these solutions creating a unique offering of first and third-party grounded agents.

Shah is looking to build off of Steve Job’s vision of apps. “There’s an agent for that” updates the Apple mantra, “there’s an app for that.” Thus, “agents are the new apps.”

Shah argued that the future workplace will be hybrid, with humans and agents working together. This ability to think about agents as teammates will be key to unlocking the full potential of AI Agents.

“If we think of agents as tools, we will get wonderful tools,” remarked Shah. “But if we think of agents as teammates, we will get wondrous transformation.”

Agents will be partners but will not replace humans. AI does not have human experiences. It is faster and potentially smarter, but not experiential.

“Humans are more than the sum of the tasks they do. There is an inexplicable magic from the experiences we have,” stated Shah.

“AI models are getting bigger, they’re getting better faster,” HubSpot CTO Shah says. “This means we can have agents that take on much more significant roles than we could even a week ago.”

Moreover, the improvement rate is much faster than Moore’s Law (Intel co-founder Gordon Moore postulated in 1965 that processing power would double every year and updated his law to every two years in 1975), but AI models are doubling every six months.

Building agents will not require coding skills, so customizing agents for specific needs will be straightforward. Both Agent.ai and Salesforce Agentforce offer agent builders. SFDC describes its agent builder as “low code.”

Initial registrants receive 100 credits towards agent execution.

App Market Ecosystem

While Agent.ai is a new marketplace, HubSpot’s App Marketplace has reached 1,700 app partners and continues to grow rapidly. It has grown 10X over the past five years.

“Partners sponsoring our event and showing off the powerful and creative integrations they've built for our platform,” posted HubSpot VP Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker on LinkedIn. “As of this month we have over 1,700 App Partners in our ecosystem, 10X growth over just the past 5 years. More importantly, our customers are leveraging these ‘better together’ combinations to grow their businesses in the fast-changing world of #martech and #salestech. Customers have over 2,000,000+ currently active installs of these apps on our platform. Our average Pro or Enterprise customer has 8+ connected apps. Some have 2X or 3X more. And thanks to our partners, they all work harmoniously together.”