INBOUND 2024: Growth, AI, & Transformation
Michael Levy
Marketing & Competitive Research Analyst focused on Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, ABM, and B2B DaaS.
HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan focused on AI agents and the infusion of AI across HubSpot’s platforms at last week’s INBOUND conference in Boston. The firm unveiled its Breeze branding for its Copilot, Agents, and Data Enrichment capabilities.
Rangan began by discussing how GenAI is already heading into the trough of disillusionment. In 2023, there were heady articles that bounced between a pending nirvana and AI destruction; this year, the headlines are more grounded and sound “a bit disappointed.”
Rangan argued that questions about whether AI is “false hype” or a “true revolution,” miss the point. Businesspeople aren’t focused on such “sweeping questions on the state of AI,” but “how do I drive growth?” as “it’s just been harder to grow.” Thus, the proper questions should be why is the growth formula broken, and how do we fix it?
Sales reps are also struggling, with the percentage meeting quota declining from 66% to 50% over the past two years.
“Search, Social, and all our Customer Channels” have changed. Search no longer serves up blue links and a few featured snippets but AI overviews that answer more questions without leaving search.
Gartner forecasts that search volume will drop 25% over the next two years.
Likewise, social platforms hold onto their customers longer and become stickier, closed platforms that deliver “way less reach” to companies and brands.
Furthermore, "People want to talk to people, not brands," with seven in ten customers trusting people over companies. “They trust funny people. They trust relatable people. They trust aspirational people. They just don’t trust you.”
Thus, prospects go to G2, Reddit, YouTube videos, and their peers, “and by the time they do get to your website, your customers know more about you than you know about them. So, when you connect with your customer, the bar is incredibly high. That conversation needs to be so tailored and insightful. And if it’s not, [your] conversion will go down.”
Likewise, support reps also have a higher bar to clear as support bots answer the easy questions. If support is unable to clear that bar, then retention will suffer.
However, “Technology is profound when it solves old problems in new ways,” and these problems will be solved through improved insights from AI.
In her conversations with customers, Rangan learned that they are “using AI for acceleration and soon they will be using it for transformation.” Acceleration is about making processes faster through automation. Examples include call summarization and email drafting.
Marketers are accelerating their content creation, content personalization, and content distribution processes with AI, but marketers are still necessary to take this content “from good to great with original, authentic creative insights.”
In short, “AI creates, people curate.” The goal isn’t to arm a spam cannon but create better content.
Transformation takes what is impossible and makes it possible. Businesses can reconceive their goals and “string together new tasks” as agents that “reimagine and accomplish multiple steps of the goals.”
Rangan unveiled a trio of marketing agents: Content Agent, Social Agent, and Campaign Agent.
Sales rep acceleration reduces the time spent conducting discovery and follow-up. HubSpot research found that using AI during discovery reduces time spent by 30%. AI summarization of calls speeds up post-call follow-up by 20%. It also identifies objections and “generates insightful responses.”
Sales transformation will be supported by HubSpot’s Prospecting Agent (lead messaging and meeting scheduling, not list building).
In sales, “AI offers context, people offer connections.” Reps can delegate research and summarization to AI, freeing time and ensuring they are better prepared for sales meetings.
Customer Service agents often act as “human band-aids,” solving problems too little and too late, but AI can help answer questions, particularly the basic stuff. Transformation will come from Support Agents that tap into support and product data to give precise, personalized support 24/7.
Coming soon is a Knowledgebase Agent that updates Knowledgebase articles, freeing time to focus on supporting customers.
In customer experience, “AI handles simplicity, and people handle subtlety.”
Thus, AI speeds up service on basic problems and allows reps to focus on the “tricky ones” that help increase retention and delighting the customer.
“The way to understand AI is not to underplay AI or to overhype AI. It is to understand AI and to co-create with AI, because co-creation is what can catalyze growth,” concluded Rangan. “The real way to think about AI is how it can power people and help us scale. That is the biggest unlock.”
To support this transformation, HubSpot will support both structured and unstructured data, including text, image, audio, and video content. It also is offering apps and agents that “work well together with the same context.”
HubSpot will support governance rules that allow customers to decide whether and when they wish to share their data.
While INBOUND focused on what will change, Rangan also set forth what will not change in its offerings.
“Customers will always want things to be easy. Two years from now, nobody is going to wish for things to be harder…You will want fast time-to-value. Five years from now, nobody is going to wish it took longer to realize value. That’s why we are laser-focused on immediate impact with every single use case. You’ll always want unified data. Ten years from now, nobody is going to be wishing for data to be in silos. We already know how painful that is.”
“Our mission is to help you grow. Our passion is to make it easy, fast, and unified,” concluded Rangan.
HubSpot also believes in keeping its messaging easy to understand. Salesforce and CEO Marc Benioff often use complex messaging when speaking to a tribe of partners and developers. It can be fun and even silly at Dreamforce, but it is still tech tribal. HubSpot speaks to its end users, who are often functional, not technical experts. You don’t get the geek-speak.
"It's easy, like AI should be," said HubSpot EVP Andrew Pitre before taking a dig at Salesforce. "After all, you don't need to be Einstein to use AI."
Note: all of the graphics are from HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan's Analyst presentation at INBOUND 2024.
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