HubSpot Spotlight Live from UNBOUND 2026

Unbound is not a destination.

안녕하세요.

진오브레.

Hey.

Hola todo mundo.

Dinkwit, as they say in Ireland.

I've been going to Unbound for the last.

10 years. 5th time.

10th time.

Surprise!

We've never attended Unbound before. We have no idea what to expect, but we are so excited.

Unbound means seeing beyond limits.

Unbound is unlearning, letting go of ideas that I had picked up early.

Unqualified. I want to find out that I'm wrong about a lot of stuff. The one idea I learned Unbound changed the business and we ended up building a $10 million plus business.

Unbound means believing that we are unbreakable.

Let's have the real conversations.

How do we adopt AI?

What's actually working?

In an AI world, it is time for us all to get a lot more unbound.

It is unexpected connections, unleashed potential, and unmatched opportunity.

Unbound is moving beyond old playbooks.

Unbound means unleashing your imagination.

Unbound might even We can get a little unhinged. We're definitely unhinged over here.

What does Unbound mean to you?

Unbound means uncovered.

Don't use that.

Unbound means predicting what's next. I love the un, and it gets me going.

Unlimited.

Unmatched.

Unafraid.

Unstoppable.

Unbound means unlocking our full potential.

Welcome, welcome to the very first Unbound. I am Yamini, and I work at HubSpot, and I've been waiting to say this— Unbound. 15 years of brand equity Really? One letter? I assure you it was a very strategic decision. At least that's what I choose to believe. Now, in all seriousness, the way we grow has just fundamentally changed. New channels, new playbooks, new technology, and we needed a name that matches how we all want to feel right now Unconstrained. Unafraid. Unstoppable. Unbound felt right. It is a big change. But what has not changed is this community. The people here in this room. How are you? The people joining us online.

High five!

Thank you. The high fives that we see each other give in the hallways. And you know the moments when we connect and we say, you are dealing with that too? You know, those moments of connection, that is what we love. That is what we build on every single year. Now, speaking of great connections, a few weeks back I hopped on a call with one of the marketing leaders that I I absolutely love. I've known her for many years and I just enjoy talking to her. She's sharp, she's curious, she always has a point of view. So I show up with a long list of my questions. But this time when she joined the call, I knew something felt off. You know, her shoulders were slumped, her eyes were tired. And I said, how are you? And she just sighed, one of those long sighs that says, put away your questions, Yamini, we're not going to be doing that today. So I put away the questions and I just waited. And then it all came out. And she said, you know, I thought my job was going to get easier, but my work has actually tripled with AI. You know, I spend hours writing out my think Creating the prompts, validating the results, refining and iterating. And then when my day is finally done, it feels like I have a second full-time job. Hurry up and learn more AI. And no matter how hard I try, I feel behind. Now, as I sat there listening to her, it just really hit me that she's not the only one, right? Many of us feel this way. I wake up early every day and I catch up on all my emails and I have a bunch of AI newsletters that I catch up and then I check social media and the floodgates just open up. A dozen new posts about 4 new models, many of them from Dharmesh. Thank you, Dharmesh. And a podcast that I have to listen at 2x speed because apparently 4 more agents are just changing the world. And a long thread from a self-proclaimed AI guru who's got it all figured out. Stop doing this, do that. If you don't do it my way, you are toast. You know, so much AI theater. All before breakfast. I think you know what I'm talking about, right? Because many of us in this room have asked ourselves this question in the last year: Am I behind? And we are trying to fight it by doing the exact same thing—doing more, more tools, more agents, more use cases. More spaces, more tokens, more. And no one wants to admit it, but I'm just going to say it. Working more is not working. And this moment, it actually has a name. The maxing phase. Now, if you are Gen Zs— any Gen Zs out here in the room?

Yeah.

Well, if you are Gen Zs or if you have teenage kids like I do, you'll know there's protein maxing and looks maxing right now. My 17-year-old son, he is trying to jaw max. You know, he's got these strange facial exercises he calls mewing. I'm like, no, why can't you just play video games like a typical teen, son? Anyway, long before these silly fads of maxing, there was tech maxing. Every transformative technology just goes through this phase. It's the moment after the discovery, after the wonder, when everybody rushes to do more before anybody figures out what it is for. Let me give you an example. Has anyone seen one of these things before? Anybody? It is a shoe-fitting fluoroscope, an X-ray for your feet. Back in the 1950s, thousands of shoe stores had them. You would step in, you would see the bones on your feet, and you would get a great fit for your shoes, but less great, a side dose of radiation. Not so good. Back then, X-rays were the cutting-edge new tech, so we applied it to every problem, even when it caused more harm than good. The same thing happened with mobile apps. You remember the time when every household item had an app of its own? There was this $70 smart egg tray with an app to tell you how many eggs you had left. Because apparently opening the fridge was just too much to ask. You know, everybody used to say, we have an app for that. Few had the courage to ask why. And now we're maxing on AI. Agent maxing, pilot maxing, token maxing. Well, how's it working out for us? We've all spent money on tokens, but the real question we have to ask is, are we achieving something truly great? Here's the thing, most of the companies are not, but a handful of companies are achieving something great. So we got curious and we wanted to find out, and we surveyed 6,000 6,000 customers and prospects across multiple industries, and we looked at the data. Here's what we found. We found that AI is ubiquitous. Of course, 90% of the companies that we surveyed are using AI. But look at this, only 6% are seeing transformational results. Isn't that surprising? That's such a huge gap, 6%. And those 6% of companies, they are 4 times more likely to get to their revenue targets, 3 times more likely to get to their efficiency targets. Well, I want that result. You want that result. All of us want that result, right? What are they doing? Are they just maxing to the max, or are they doing something completely different? Well, after nearly three years of watching AI play out, after talking to hundreds of customers, looking at thousands of lines of survey results, here's what I believe: I believe transformation. Transformation will not happen in the maxing phase. It never has. Not with X-rays, not with egg trays. Transformation will happen when we stop asking what technology can do and start asking what it should do. So how does it work like in practice? Well, it starts with all of us taking a deep breath. and focusing and making some choices with purpose. That's what transformational companies are doing. And they're actually doing 3 things differently. Just 3 things. First, transformational companies are solving for outcomes, not optics. And in the case of go-to-market, the outcomes that we want have been exactly the same thing. It is build demand, win deals, and delight customers. That's it. In marketing, you fill the top of the funnel and you drive awareness to your products and your solutions, and you build demand. In sales, you take the demand, you qualify that into a pipeline, you make your sales reps really productive and you win deals. And after the sale is done, you add value with your product and your company. You delight your customers and you retain them. These outcomes have not changed for the last decade, and they're actually not going to change for the next decade. And transformational companies, they get this, and they start with AI exactly these outcomes in mind, and that changes everything about how they use AI. Now, here's the thing that really surprised us. Transformational companies are doing fewer use cases, not more. We actually tracked 50 AI use cases across the entire customer journey, and these best-performing companies are on average doing 4 or 5 use cases. That's it. But really well. On average, they're doing 4 out of 17 use cases to build demand, 5 out of 18 to win deals, and 4 out of 15 to delight customers. Just less. Not more. So then we got really curious about which one of these use cases is driving the highest impact for them, right? Very few of us are asking about AI's impact, and all of us should. So this is what we did. We actually plotted these 50-something use cases into a scatter plot. I love scatter plots. I love scatter plots. Fun. Now, on the x-axis is how popular these use cases are, and on the y-axis is how much impact they're driving. Okay, everybody with me so far? So then we wanted to find out that mostly popular use cases should be driving high impact, right? Let's actually look at some of the popular use cases here. Producing content. Well, many of us do it. It's popular, but it's kind of low in impact. Let's look at another one here. Sending emails with AI. How many of us do that? I think all of us do that. That's why it's popular, but it is also low in impact. Okay, one more here. Preparing for meetings with AI. Many of us do it, but it is low in impact. low in impact. In fact, if we actually draw a trend line from the least popular use cases to the most popular use cases, what do we get? We get this beautiful slope moving in the exact wrong direction, away from impact. Wow, this actually blew our minds. What does this actually mean? It means that many of the popular use cases without the right context are actually driving low value. Let's look at the full list of all the low-value use cases. Creating content, sending emails. Well, these are generative tasks, right? You type a few prompts in and you get a piece of content or you get an email. Now, they're easy, they're super fast, but without context, there's just no difference. There's actually nothing here that your competitor, without a few prompts of their own, they can generate. And that is precisely why many of these use cases are not driving the value, even though they're popular. So then the question becomes, what are the high-impact use cases, right? You all want to find out what the high-impact use cases are? We want it too. We absolutely want it too. So let's go back to that scatter plot and let's actually look at some of the top use cases that we found. Analyze campaigns with AI. Not many of us are doing it, but it is driving high impact. How about another one here, which is prioritize pipeline with AI? Again, super high impact. And there's one more use case that we found, which is analyze customer feedback with AI. One of the highest, most impactful use cases if you do it and you take action based on it. Now, what do you think that these use cases have in common? What do they have in common? Okay, they all require information about your business. That's it. Turns out high-value use cases are actually rich in context and data. If you look at the full list of the high-value use cases that we found across marketing, sales, and service— analyze campaigns. You cannot analyze campaigns without without your campaign data. You cannot analyze your sales pipeline without your sales and deal data. And you cannot analyze your customer feedback without— yeah, your customer data. These don't work without knowledge about your business, which means your competitors cannot copy them. It is your data. It is your context, and therefore it is your advantage. Now that brings us to the second thing that these transformational companies are doing. They are building foundation first, and that foundation starts with context. Now context is one of those overused terms in AI, right? Right up there with tokens and harness. What is it? It is the dynamic knowledge about your business, your customers, and your team. That's it. It's pretty simple. And we all know this intuitively because this is the information that we need in order to do our jobs really well. Now imagine that this is your first week as a sales rep. What you don't need is a database or a spreadsheet with all of your customer data. What are you going to do with that? What you need is your manager to sit down with you, talk to you about the business, talk to you about the customers, talk to you about your team, who buys what and why do they buy it, and how your team works, what you can do, what you need approvals for, and what the best salespeople do. And when you have all of this rich information, you are set up to be the best sales rep. That is context. And AI is no different. You just cannot dump raw data at AI and say, go find me some great new leads. What you'll get is slop. Instead, what What you need is good context that is deep, specific, up-to-date, and you need it in every layer of your business. Now, it starts with business context, of course, right? What you do, everything that makes your company just uniquely yours, your brand, your voice, your product, your positioning. And you need customer context. All of the conversations that you have with your customers across multiple channels, the ideal customer profile, intent and buying signals. And then lastly, you need the team context. And team context is just who you are, your team's roles and goals, process approvals, methodology. When AI has all of this rich context, it stops acting like a generic assistant and starts acting like a genius expert of your business. And transformational companies, they get this. They start with exactly this foundation of context. So then the question becomes, if they are building this context, is it actually driving impact? Impact? Is it actually driving measurable results? Absolutely, and measurably. This is what we found, okay? We found that good context actually drives great outcomes. When AI understands the customer, the company, and the history, you can see that it is impacting every one of the key metrics in marketing, sales, and service. MQLs generated Up over 200%. Deals closed won, up. Number of customer meetings booked, up. When was the last time you saw these metrics go up this significantly? Well, the pattern is just incredibly consistent. The magic is not within the models. It is actually with the context of your business. But here's the part that completely blew our minds. Okay, what blew our minds is that AI with bad context is worse than no AI. Let me say that one more time. Bad context is actually worse than having no AI at all. And you can see this in every one of these metrics getting worse with bad context. Now again, intuitively this actually makes sense because as humans, we control for this bad context. We know how to do that, but AI does not. It might recommend a product that is not in your product catalog anymore. It might actually do a pipeline analysis with the wrong definition of ARR. I've gotten that before. And it might route an approval to a manager who just changed roles last week. Now that is just sloppier than slop. And that is why transformational companies are really focused on methodically building this foundation of accurate data and rich context that can drive all of the outcomes. And that brings us to the final thing that these companies are doing. These companies are purposeful about their people. Now, they are creating new roles. Of course, AEO specialists, go-to-market engineers, governance experts. In fact, the AI-generated roles, or the AI roles, are growing at 3x to 5x every single year. But let's just be honest, every major tech cycle creates new roles, right? The internet gave us web developers and SEOs. Specialists, and mobile gave us app developers. Cloud gave us DevOps, SREs. New technology, new roles. Old pattern. But this time, something feels different. Just as the internet democratized access to information, and anybody who had access to a browser was able to research, publish, and and reach the world. AI is democratizing access to building. That is what feels fundamentally different this time. The distance between idea and prototype has just collapsed. That means if it used to take your teams like weeks to build something, they can do it now in a week or maybe even a weekend. And that changes who gets to build. Marketeers in this room, you are all builders now. Salespeople in this room, you're builders too. And service leaders here, you are builders too. You just don't need to wait in line for the next engineering sprint. You can ship an artifact, automate a workflow, You can go create an agent all by yourself. But let's sit with this. Just because anybody can build anything does not mean everybody should be building everything. Because we know that more is not more. Building whatever, shipping anything, mistaking activity for progress. We know that that does not work. But here's the thing. The floor on building has come down, but the ceiling on thinking has actually gone up. The hard part is not building anymore. It is actually deciding what to build, is knowing whether it's any good, and asking if that confident response that you get back from the model is actually the right thing for your business. And that That takes judgment. It takes creativity. And it takes critical thinking. Here's the biggest irony. In the age of artificial intelligence, human intelligence has never mattered more. And transformational companies, they get this. They're not picking sides between AI and people. They're actually combining the strengths of both and creating leverage that neither could create by themselves. More of us get to build and all of us get to think harder. And that is the biggest exciting part of the AI journey. Okay. To bring this all together, when we look at the companies that are driving the most impact, they are completely out of the maxing phase. And they are in the outcomes era. They're not chasing, they're choosing. And they're choosing to focus on outcomes, not tokens, not tools, not the number of trials that they're doing. They are choosing to build the right foundation with context data and a platform that can drive impact with AI. And they're choosing to invest in AI and people, not one instead of the other, but both together. And every one of us in this room, we can do the same thing too. So when you go back to work on Monday after giving yourselves the weekend to recover from this magical Unbound and you get hit with a full inbox and a flood of social posts telling you that you are behind, take a deep breath. In fact, take one now. Remember that the answer is not doing more of everything, and instead ask yourself 3 simple questions. Do I know what outcomes that I want to drive Do I have the right foundation of context and data to build it? And do I have the right people who can think and build with AI? And if you can just stay focused on those 3 questions, you're not going to catch up from behind. You are going to lead in the AI and outcomes era that lies ahead. Thank you, everybody, and enjoy Unbound. Please welcome Chief Customer Officer, HubSpot, John Dick, and Chief Marketing Officer, HubSpot, Kip Vodnar.

Hey, Unbound, how we doing?

Hello, Unbound.

Thank you, Yamini. That is a great way to kick off Unbound, John.

And we are just getting going. We are about to get a bunch of insight into the new products and features available to all of us. I know that's why a lot of you are here.

Not to oversell it, John, but we've got some great technology company— we got some really great technology coming. And you know what?

I think it's even going to be able to read our minds. And we mean that. We mean that literally. Like we have some technology that can actually read your minds. Sounds unbelievable, right? It does. Well, we're gonna prove it to you right now. Who wants to see it in action? All right, yeah, okay, let's give it a try. Let's give it a try here.

All right, I got to find somebody who looks like an open book. All right, over there in the San Francisco Giants hat.

Wait, I thought we were in San Francisco.

Maybe I shouldn't have worn this hat.

Oh no, no, no, this is Red Sox territory. We're back in Boston. Park the car in Harvard Yard. How about them apples? Yankees up!

Hey, hey, hey, calm down.

All right, all right, all right, you get the point. But we couldn't be more excited to be home here in Boston, everybody. Good to see y'all. Good to be back.

But we got to, we got to keep testing this out, John. Let's see if we can find somebody else in the audience.

Um, over there.

Oh, yikes. I think they took a wrong turn. Not the Odyssey.

No, no, this is definitely the wrong place. This is not the Odyssey.

No, I know the keynote is long, John.

It's not that long.

It's definitely not 20 years long. And plus, uh, you do not want to see the two of us in 70mm. That is absolutely for sure. No way. So, uh, Kip, yeah, maybe The tech isn't quite working, right?

Maybe not quite ready yet.

I don't know if it's quite reading people's minds. Maybe we should give it one more shot.

One shot, one shot.

Okay, we'll give it one more shot.

Okay, right, let's see. Let's see. Oh, a viewing party!

Oh nice, it's a Spotlight viewing party and they look pretty pumped. What are they thinking?

Oh, I hope Duncan Lennox is about to walk on stage and announce Bree's assistant will do my job for me.

Maybe the technology does work. Okay, we really did read their minds. All right, so should we give them what they want?

We absolutely should do that.

Okay. He's the Chief Product and Technology Officer at HubSpot, and he's here to give us some absolutely incredible insight into the latest and greatest.

Everyone at Unbound, please welcome Duncan Lennox.

Hello, Unbound!

I'm Duncan, and I work on the product team at HubSpot, and this is my first Unbound. Although actually, come to think of it, it's everybody's first Unbound, so I guess I'm in good company. And I have to be honest with you, I have been waiting for this moment like an embarrassing amount amount, but it's for good reason. What we're going to show you today will change the way you work. It's one of those moments where years from now there'll be a before Unbound 2026 and an after Unbound 2026, and you'll be saying, can you believe we used to work like that? But before we get into it, let me tell you why I'm here. This is me, the proud son of a small business owner. Growing up in Ireland, my dad had a gas station, or a filling station as we call it. My first job was cleaning gas station bathrooms, pumping gas, and working the register. And that's where I learned the importance of obsessing about customers. I got a front row seat to it all watching my dad. His days were long. He was always tinkering, trying new things to figure out what worked and what didn't. Neither of us knew it at the time, but he was a one-person go-to-market team. This is why I'm here. Marketing, sales, customer service— it's the lifeblood of every business, and I have a real appreciation for the roles you all play. And I know these jobs are harder than they've ever been. You can feel that, right? More pressure, more noise, more demand to show ROI on everything. I get it. But there's something I need you all to know. You are the connection point between a business and its customers. customers. In a world drowning in automation and noise, you are what makes it human. And that's not a small thing. It's everything. And we want to make sure you have what you need to do your jobs well. Which brings me to trust. Another important lesson I learned watching my dad. Every single thing we build at HubSpot comes down to one question: will our customers trust it? Trust that it works? Trust that your data is safe? Trust that you are in control? It's a responsibility that we take seriously, really seriously. Now, trust me when I tell you we have been hard at work making your lives easier. For the past year, the team has been heads down, building things I can't wait to show you. Yamini talked about the outcomes era. Now, I want to show you how to win in that era. Are you ready? Come on, I know you want to win more than that. I said, are you ready?

Okay.

Winning in the outcomes era comes down to 3 things. That's it. But when you put them together, that's when the magic happens. The first is the foundation: the CRM and your context, the engine behind everything. The second is knowing where to focus. Because HubSpot knows your business, it can tell you the use cases to focus. on, the ones that matter for outcomes. And the third, and this is my favorite part, a new way to work. One tool that connects your foundation to those use cases and just makes it go. Now, I'm biased. I'll say that right up front. But I really think this is going to make it easier and faster to get outcomes. All right, let's see these 3 pieces in action, shall we? We'll start with the foundation, your CRM and context engine. A dozen years ago, HubSpot changed what a CRM could be. You've built remarkable businesses on it, and it's been absolutely incredible to watch. But here's the truth, something has always been stopping A CRM only knows what someone remembers to tell it. This is a huge issue with every CRM on the market. Yes, every CRM, even the vibe-coded ones. Notes live in someone's head. Deal updates are all wrong. Activity never makes it in at all. But we're at Unbound, and we want you to be unstoppable. The CRM is the foundation of your go-to-market. There should be a better way. So we thought deeply about this and what would get you value faster. The outcomes that Yamini described. And for us, it all came down to one question. Instead of you updating the CRM, what if the CRM updated you? Meet your new self-updating CRM. Every call, every email, every meeting captured automatically. No one had to remember, no one had to be asked, it just happened. Your data is current and clean, and you barely had to lift a finger. Incredible, right? You can just trust that everything works. Contacts added, deal stages updated, next steps laid out. But that's not all. We're in the outcomes era, so your CRM has to do more. And to do more, it has to know more. It needs to know your business, your teams, and your customers. And we call that combination growth context. It's a core component of making the self-updating CRM work. We brought your customer records together with everything that makes your business unique. This is the foundation that will help you in the outcomes era. But remember what I told you— we obsess over earning your trust, and one of the most important elements of that is control. So we built one central place where that puts you in the driver's seat to see and manage it all. This is your new Context Home. Think of it as your bird's-eye view on your customer data, plus everything else that makes you, you. Context Home scores how complete your growth context is, finds gaps you need to fill, because the quality of your context determines the quality of your outcomes. You can dive into each layer. Business holds your positioning, company profile, and product list. Customer holds your personas, your ICP insights that make every interaction relevant, and even your team's way of working. But what I really love are the recommendations. As work happens across your business, meeting notes get added, new transcripts come in, HubSpot looks at it all and surfaces insights on what to update. But you stay in control. You decide what's in your context, what gets updated. That context drives insights across the platform, helping you decide what's most important. And finally, you get transparency on how the context is used. We only act on what you give us permission to use. So this means when a rep opens a deal, they're not starting from scratch. Or when you draft an email, it's tailored and personal. Let me show you what I mean. This is Sarah. She's a sales rep trying to keep a warm lead moving. Here's a generic email from a generic tool that doesn't know anything about her business. I'll save you the trouble, it's not worth reading. You can tell from the jump, blah blah blah. If Sarah sent this, I doubt she'd ever hear from this lead again, and I'd also bet you that she'd lose trust in the system. Now here's what happens when she uses her rich growth context in HubSpot. It's a completely different email more relevant, more personal, more authentic. It knows Sarah's business, like the product that was trialed, how it's positioned against the competitor, and the Gartner rating to show that comparison. It knows how Sarah and her team work, how she typically follows up after a trial, her own tone of voice, even that Unbound was the right moment to meet. And it knows the customer, their particular usability and price concerns, that Deanna is the right person to loop in for next steps, that per-seat pricing is relevant to their company size. Every sentence in that email earned its place. This is the foundation at work, a CRM that keeps itself up to date, Growth Context that understands her business, and Context Home to manage it all. Now, as someone who grew up around cars, I can tell you one thing: this engine is powerful. But we can't just strap a jet engine to an old jalopy. We wanted to build you a jet. We promised you a completely new way to work. And while building it, we asked ourselves a simple question. Instead of needing a million tools to do one thing, what if you had one tool to do a million things? And I think you'll love the answer. This is the all-new Breeze Assistant. And when I say all new, I mean all new. If you've used Breeze If you've used Breeze before, what you're seeing is not an upgrade, it's a rebuild. It's not just going to help you summarize a deal or prep for a meeting. That's all useful, of course, but we had bigger plans. My daughters who are here are going to kill me for saying this, but we gave Breeze Assistant a glow-up. The new Breeze takes action. All you have to do is tell Breeze Assistant what you're It knows what you're trying to get done. It understands, pulls in the right tools to get to work. The possibilities are endless. It builds custom tools, creates beautiful reports and rich artifacts. It takes the things that used to take days and helps you do it in minutes. Seriously. And you can type or talk to Breeze just like you would your best team member. It can do this This because it's built on the foundation of growth context. This is the new way to work in HubSpot— one tool to manage them all. I told you this is a turning point, and I've been chomping at the bit to show it to you. But rather than walk through it feature by feature, let's go on a journey together. By the time we're done, you'll see how to use Breeze Assistant to achieve outcomes I know everyone in this room cares about— building demand and winning deals. And along the way, I'll show you some other things we've purpose-built for marketing and sales teams. Marketers, this first part is for you. Where are my marketers at? All right, let's talk about using Breeze Assistant to build demand. And I know what you might be thinking. Duncan, do you know how hard it's been to build demand? Well, I might not live in it every day like you, but I talk to marketers almost every day, and I know the questions I hear are things like, how do I actually drive more leads? How do I fill the pipeline? And how do I know if any of this is actually working? I also know So these aren't new questions, they've just gotten way harder. That's exactly where we find Jane. She's a marketer who just walked out of a tough sales meeting. Organic traffic is way down, the pipeline is thin, and she needs an easy and fast way to turn it around. So we looked at Jane's problem and asked, Instead of running around between tools, what if we were running campaigns from one place? And now she can. This is the all-new Marketing Studio. Think of Marketing Studio as Jane's home for building demand. It's where she works with Bree's assistant to build a full campaign in minutes. Let's take a look. Jane Jane opens Marketing Studio right from the meeting. She pulls up the Insights panel and spots the problem immediately. Her visibility in LLMs is way down. Marketing Studio surfaces a recommendation, and she wants to act on it fast. Jane tells Breeze Assistant to reference the transcript from the sales meeting she just came from so it knows the latest context from the field. Great. Breeze has the whole picture and a strategy ready to go. She feels confident and says yes. And just like that, it's time for the campaign. Okay, pause for a second here. I can't go further without calling out how incredible this is. I want you all to put yourself in Jane's shoes for a second. If you left a meeting under stress to fix a pipeline problem, Just think about all the things you would need to do just to figure it out. Now think about what Jane did. One thing— chat with Bree's assistant right in Marketing Studio. The insight, recommendation, and action plan were all there. Are you kidding me? She saved many anxious days and some sleepless nights. That was the first step in Jane's journey. Spot the opportunity. Now let's help her take advantage of it. In Marketing Studio, Breeze takes the inputs it already knows, like her company's brand segments and campaign history, and builds a full strategy. It includes a narrative, KPIs, and a complete asset plan across channels. Breeze even suggested 3 automations to route leads to the right people. Everything looks right to her. Jane approves the plan, and the assets get added to the Studio canvas where her whole team can collaborate on them in real time. Breaking the fourth wall again here for a minute. Think about what just happened. Jane got her insight, chatted with Breeze again, and now she has a plan. That's the new way of working I talked about. Instead of spending hours researching, building a channel plan, and switching between different tools, Jane just chatted with Breeze and her strategy was complete. That was step 2. Now let's create the content. For Jane's team, asset production is usually the bottleneck, especially for a campaign this extensive. But Breeze just asked Breeze asks, do you want to build all the assets at once? With her team in the loop to review and edit, she says go for it. A few moments later, everything is ready and on brand. Jane can edit directly or ask Breeze to do it for her. She makes a few tweaks to the landing page, assigns the social and ads to her team, and they're notified automatically. She's just completed another step on her journey, creating the assets. Now she's ready to launch the campaign across every channel like TikTok and ChatGPT, a new landing page, and email. For marketing leaders in the room, I want to call out 2 things. First, the hidden coordination cost that eats into your team's productivity. Breeze helped Jane build the assets She reviewed, and it automatically routed them to the right teams, all without leaving the studio. Second, most tools weren't built with collaboration in mind. Marketing Studio was built for multiplayer mode. It gives teams one space to collaborate live on the entire campaign. Okay, back to Jane. We know building demand isn't just about launching a campaign, of course. As leads come in, Jane can also build nurture sequences that help move them through the funnel. And as the campaign progresses, she can check how it's performing, all from Marketing Studio. And yes, you guessed it, just by asking Breeze. But we're not done yet. Every business runs differently. And we build for the majority of use cases on HubSpot, but we know that sometimes you might need something very specific. This is where Jane finds herself now. From talking to sales, she notices another opportunity to build pipeline. She wants to tap into the learnings that come from lost deals. Jane just needs a way to surface those insights and use them to make her campaigns better. So we gave her a way to build exactly what she needs. This is Agent Builder. In Breeze Assistant, Jane just describes the agent she wants to build. It summarizes the plan, makes a few suggestions for Jane to review. She approves, and that's it. The agent is ready. Now, of course, to use it, all she has to do is ask Breeze to call @closedlostdealagent, and that's it. She just tags it in like a teammate. The custom tool gets to work, analyzes the deals, flags the patterns. Then all Jane has to do is tell Breeze to build a campaign based on the brief, and she's ready to go again, right back in Marketing Studio. Let's zoom out on Jane's journey. She starts with a problem she didn't fully understand. In Marketing Studio, she worked with Breeze to spot the opportunity, build a strategy, create the assets, launch the campaign across channels, nurture the leads, and we can't forget she deployed her own custom agent to make her campaigns even smarter. This is what we are giving all of you to build demand, and all of it is available today, and I can't wait to see what you do with it. All right, that's the marketing story. Now let's talk sales. If you're in sales, give me a woo. That was a little quiet, but I guess I'll take it. I know reps are busy right now closing out the quarter, which is the only excuse If there's one thing I know about sales, it's this: every single activity— the research, the prospecting, the discovery, the prep, the follow-ups, the contracts— it all comes back to one thing: winning deals. You can't afford distractions. You need to stay focused on what moves the deal forward. And that's why we're here. So we made it our mission to eliminate every friction point in your day. Seriously, every friction point. And I want to show you how. Remember Sarah? We updated her email earlier, so we know her foundation is in place and working. Well, now it's Monday morning and she's blocked off some time to prospect. She's re-energized after the weekend And she wants to finally break into a big account that she's been trying to land. Let's help her do it with Breeze Assistant. Sarah opens Breeze and types, help me break into Northgate Solutions. Breeze pulls everything HubSpot already knows, like deal history, existing contacts, emails, notes from her team. In just a few seconds, it assembles a Breeze asks her who she wants to talk to first and what she wants to lead with. The messages come back reading like Sarah wrote them herself. She tweaks a line and hits send. Back for my narrations again. I can't help it, I really am this excited about this stuff. Sarah would have normally spent hours of work just to figure out who to target and draft emails. emails for one account. And last time I checked, not many reps were meeting quota with one account. Breeze helped her identify the buying committee in minutes. Now Sarah got what she wanted. The prospect wants to meet face-to-face. For my daughters and those their age, it's what we call IRL. Sarah's on her way to winning the deal. Deal, so she uses Breeze to help her prep and leads the discovery meeting with confidence. On her way back, Sarah's got 45 minutes before her next call. In the old way, this might have involved her pulling out her laptop, digging through the CRM, and trying to leave her notes. Meanwhile, the deal stage gets missed, notes are cryptic, and new contacts don't get at it at all. That isn't a Sarah problem. It's just what happens. Reps have to keep moving, and every rep we talk to tells us the same thing. They hate updating the CRM, and by the time they do get to it, half the detail is gone. But now Sarah doesn't have to worry about that. She uses HubSpot's mobile note-taker to dictate everything while it's still fresh. Her notes, next steps, thoughts on where the deal stands, all by voice. And guess where it all goes? Right into her CRM. This is thanks to Deal Progression. It's like having a second brain that joined the call with you, and I want to show you how it works. During the meeting, the prospect referred to lots of different things. Things, budget details, looping in another contact, expanding the scope. Notetaker captures all of it, and deal progression makes it actionable. It looks at all the meetings, including the one Sarah just had, plus calls and emails to suggest next best actions and CRM updates. Sarah approves each with a click. A day later, the buyer reaches out saying they're evaluating a competitor. Deal Progression reads the email and flags it to Sarah, and she asks Breeze Assistant to pull everything HubSpot knows about the competitor. She reviews it, and Breeze helps her draft a thoughtful response. Before, updating the CRM would have meant 6 different tabs, 4 different docs, and an hour that could have been spent selling. Now it's just one ask. And at the end of it all, she did it. Sarah won the deal. And that's a big deal. But sales teams, you know this feeling all too well. The celebration is a short one. Your job is never done. Especially when you have weekly one-on-ones where your manager wants to know which prospects you'll tackle next. But we got your back, Sarah. She just asks Breeze to pull her open deals and build a report organized by value and stage. Her pipeline is healthy since Jane and the marketing team have been killing it, but she needs to know where she's going to focus next and be able to show her manager. So she asks Breeze to build a report as a ranked table, but then the magic happens. Sarah can turn the report into a polished artifact formatted exactly the way her boss likes to see it. Think about what building that report used to look like— exporting, reformatting, sorting, formatting again, re-exporting. That's an hour of work that has absolutely nothing to do with winning deals. Sarah did it all with Breeze Assistant. Here's the thing I want you to take away. Winning more deals means having fewer distractions. Let me recap what that looked like for Sarah. She used Breeze to identify the buying committee and draft outreach in minutes. Note-Taker captured the details from her calls. Deal progression updated the CRM automatically. She created a pipeline report and a custom artifact for her manager just by chatting with Breeze. Okay, everybody. Wow. We just ran complete marketing and sales motions for Jane and Sarah. All of it delivered outcomes because it was powered by a CRM rich with growth context. And she had Breeze as her trusted assistant every step of the way. Unbound, believe it or not, that was just a taste. There is so much more to explore. Just a few of my personal favorites are things like our new revenue agent that makes getting paid without chasing payment easy. And something I'm so excited about, HubSpot is the first CRM CRM to integrate with ChatGPT ads. Go find it all at the demo stations or check it out on our fall spotlight. We're excited for you to see it. But I do actually have one more thing. As you know, HubSpot's mission has always been helping millions of businesses grow better. And part of that mission means making technology more accessible. I just told you we were the first CRM to integrate with ChatGPT Ads. This is a big deal. ChatGPT is where people are going to make decisions, and so you need to show up there. But showing up is just the first step. By connecting with HubSpot's deep context, your ads become more powerful and you get attribution that's only possible by integrating your CRM. We believe so deeply in this combination that we worked with OpenAI to deliver you something I'm so excited to show you. Grab your phones, you're going to need them. We partnered to create the new AI Growth Bundle. Starting today, you can get all of this— HubSpot Starter and Starter credits for less than half the cost, a free ChatGPT Business seat when you buy one, and of course you can activate the number one CRM plugin, which is HubSpot. And finally, to get started with ChatGPT ads, we're offering an ad spend match up to $750 for a limited time. So go check it out. This is how HubSpot and OpenAI are working together to help scaling companies transform their go-to-market with AI. Before I let you go, let me bring it back to where I started. You need 3 things to win in the outcomes era. The right foundation: growth context powering every interaction, a CRM that keeps itself current, and context home to control it all. The right use cases: a platform that knows your business well enough to tell you where to focus and gives you the tools you need to build demand and win deals. And a new way to work. One tool that launches the rest. You talk to Breeze, it taps into the foundation, tackles the use cases, and helps deliver the outcome, while you have control over every tool that's being used. Jane and Sarah showed you what that looks like end to end. Now, my dad didn't have any of this. He kept his customer context in his head, and he still managed to build something that people trusted because he showed up every day and did the work. That's what we're giving you, a platform that shows up every day and does the work so you can focus on the outcomes. That's why we build what we build, and I can't wait to see what you do with it. Unbound, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Please welcome back Chief Customer Officer, HubSpot, John Dick, and Academy Evangelist, HubSpot, Kyle Jepson.

Would everybody give Duncan another round of applause? How sweet was that?

Hey friends, I'm here live at Unbound. Duncan just revealed some incredible new features about Breeze Assistant.

Kyle, Kyle, Kyle, Kyle, I'm so excited you're live streaming, but we have a live audience. We do.

Audience. Okay, bye friends, I'm gonna go hang out with John now. All right, great, let's get back to it. When you all came in, you had a chance to respond to some polling questions. You remember that? They were up on the screen. Uh, we have the results.

The data has been compiled and analyzed. We've crunched the numbers, and we are ready to reveal the winners. And what we are going to do is we are going to reveal for the very first time the MVP of Unbound. Ooh, could it be you?

The people with the most popular, the most correct, or frankly just our favorite answer will stay in the game. Everyone else is gonna sit down.

So it's kind of like our own version of like stand up, sit down. So yeah.

So everybody stand up. And you guys watching at home, you stand up too. Get off the couch. Come on, stand, stand, stand.

Stand up.

We're gonna do this. We're gonna do it live. And those of you from home, it's like your own workout video.

I hear a lot of cracks of knees. That's good. Okay, good. Let's get to it. Okay, so first question, did you participate in the poll. If not, sit down.

I mean, obviously, right? It's harsh, but it's fair.

It's harsh but fair. It's harsh but fair. If you didn't do the poll, you're not the MVP. Okay, now on to the actual first real question. How long did it take you to get to Unbound?

All right, we're gonna say everyone who chose between 1 and 5 hours, stay standing. Everyone else, sit on down.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're probably thinking we would give the MVP to somebody who traveled really, really, really, really far to Unbound, but we all know you actually are really tired and want to sit down. So that's cool. You can sit down.

Have a rest. All right, second question.

Who did you come to Unbound with? Hmm. Okay, everybody who answered riding solo stays standing. Everybody else sit down. Game with your. Coworkers? Not today. All right. Okay.

All right. All right. Are you a Kyle Cook stan?

This guy is. This guy's in. Okay.

Everybody who said lover boy, stay standing. Everyone else, you're out.

Okay.

Either way, Kyle nailed it with that DJ set. He was awesome.

I mean, I thought you were all going to say that, uh, who's a Kyle Jeppsen stan? But of course everybody would stand back up for that. I know that. So that's cool. Thanks, John. Okay, next up, what does un mean to you? Okay, those who picked Unbound, stay standing. Everybody else can sit down. I think UN General Assembly is funny.

It is un.

I mean, UN General Assembly is funny, but Unbound MVP is really where it's at.

Okay, what's your favorite Boston delicacy? Anyone get out and eat anything yet? Everyone who said Dunkin', stay standing. Everyone else, have to sit down. Sorry.

Come on, obviously everybody, it had to be Duncan. HubSpot runs on Duncan. Get it? Duncan Lennox?

Duncan, he just talked.

What a guy.

It's a joke.

Okay, we're towards the end. Who is still standing? If you're still standing, put a hand up. These lights are bright.

Not very many people.

Okay. All right. Okay. I'm looking. Anybody back there standing? I see people standing up. Okay, all right.

People are walking out.

Great.

How many Inbounds have you been to before this year? We would really love to see anyone who has been to all of them, but have we already eliminated you all?

Nope, right there. Somebody's standing. Give us a wave.

All right.

Right over there.

Okay, great. Awesome. So finally, last question. Last and final, for all the marbles, who is the biggest HubSpot fan here?

That's impossible to know, John.

You forget that I can read minds, Kyle. That's right, you just did. I can read minds. You proved it earlier. And the fact that I'm having a hard time seeing anybody else standing, I'm going to go to this man right here in the plaid shirt and declare him the Unbound MVP. Yes, I'm looking at you, sir. You're looking at me. Oh, I'm looking at you. Stand up, sir.

Come on.

Come on up here. I'm looking at you. Come on up. Michael, come on up, Michael.

Come on up.

Congratulations!

You win your very own bright orange bowler hat and this bag. And a sash. Yeah, you are the Unbound MVP.

What a guy.

You can wear this the rest of the week, the rest of your life if you want. Thank you. Give him a big hand. All right, thanks for playing along. Thanks for humoring us. Now it's time for 3 more MVPs who are about to sit down with our very own John Dick. Please welcome the CEO of IFS, Mark Moffett, founder and CEO of Hollywood Branded, Stacy Jones, and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at RevenueWell, Kim Cormier. All right, everybody.

So my favorite thing about this event, and I've been coming to it for 10 years, is you. It's all of you— sales, marketing, service, and ops leaders who are out doing the work and growing their businesses. And so I thought, who better to hear from to wrap up this spotlight than you yourselves? Because what we heard today is that it is harder than ever to do this job, but there's a path through it, and these 3 people are on that path and finding a way to get great outcomes right now. So could we please all introduce ourselves? Kim, could you start?

Sure. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kim Cormier. I'm Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at RevenueWell. We are approximately a $50 million software company serving over 11,000 dental practices in the United States and Canada. We offer patient acquisition solutions, things like website, AEO, SEO, and paid advertising, as well as patient engagement services, things like AI dental receptionists, marketing automation software, insurance verification, and payments. So we are truly an all-in-one growth platform for dental practices that are looking to acquire new patients and retain the ones they have.

Okay, so Kim is in the dental business, which means of course she has great data hygiene. That was a layup. That was a layup. Thanks for that one, Kim. I needed that today. Okay, Stacy, how about you?

Hi, y'all. I'm Stacy Jones. I'm the CEO and founder of Hollywood Branded. We are a pop culture marketing agency, which means that we work with brands of all sizes to put them into content with films, television, influencers, celebrities, and the like. We're a 30-person agency outside of Los Angeles, and for the last 20 years we've been building these partnerships and then evolving them into creating an operating system for Hollywood built on top of HubSpot.

That is so cool, Stacy. Tell us like the best placement that you have done recently of a brand into Hollywood.

Okay, well, have any of you guys seen F1 the movie? Something familiar?

F1.

Good movie? Well, to me, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. It has romance, it has action, it has speed, it has brands galore everywhere, and it has Brad Pitt, right? I bet a lot of you would like to be on his chest, and I do mean your brand, right? Logo. So we did the 2 title sponsors, the there with Peak and with— oh my goodness— Expensify. And Expensify was emblazoned on his chest, helmet, cars, everywhere that you can imagine.

Very cool.

Both of those brands saw a massive explosion. It was amazing.

Very cool. Very cool. And Mark, tell us about IFS.

Well, firstly, good morning. I've never been to Boston before. What a fabulous city.

First time in Boston, everybody.

Give him a warm welcome. Scottish people like Boston, I'm told.

John, you had a wonderful trip here as the Scots for the World Cup. Thanks for coming.

We did. We did. So thank you for having me. I run a company called IFS. We're about $1.7 billion in revenue, growing 25% a year, and we are serving the industrial sector. We're bringing in world-class AI and software to capture capital-intensive, asset-heavy businesses. Think telecommunications, manufacturing, aviation, utilities, you know, all industries right now that are under enormous pressure to deliver more. And the promise of what AI can deliver, physical AI can deliver, has never been more exciting. And of course, you're helping us with that.

Yeah. So, Mark, why don't you keep going? You are growing exceptionally fast right now. You're running a huge business, and yet still you decided to go through a large internal transformation, including your go-to-market teams. Like, what drove the decision and what were you trying to get right by kicking off this go-to-market transformation?

Yeah, there are so many attributes to why now. First and foremost, we're a scaling business growing at 25%, and that's only accelerating in this world of AI and what AI can do to the operations of our customers. There's a lot of noise out there. It's a very complex environment. So more than ever, we need a single view of the customer. Complex buying cycles are only becoming more complicated. And we really want to be getting to our customers the messages that really matter in terms of how we can deliver to their business. And we've always been a believer in partnering with world-class organizations. So we needed a world-class partner to help underpin the next phase of our growth from a customer journey perspective. And walk on, HubSpot. And that's exactly what you're doing for us. You're helping underpin the next chapter of our growth.

Thank you, Mark. Well, we are so proud to partner with you on it. Unified view of the customer. Stacy, Kim, is that something that resonates with you?

Yes, for sure. Yeah.

Kim, you are the VP or the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, a rare joint title that I see right now. How have you thought about getting the right foundation in place across multiple teams, and what journey have you been on at RevenueWell?

Sure. So Mark's in the enterprise space, I'm in SMB, which are 2 very different business models, but we still have the same foundational challenges. And if you want to have a successful successful go-to-market motion, you need to have go-to-market teams operating in the same systems. And for us, that meant removing a patchwork of different CRM systems. And to put that into perspective, I had 2 different CRMs for my sales organization and my marketing organization, which is never easy.

Never easy.

And we moved 100% to HubSpot.

Nice.

So 100% of our customer journey now, from marketing, sales, onboarding, success support, and billing all is within HubSpot today.

Yeah.

With a unified view of the customer, which is important.

Yeah.

And the one thing I would say is this is a step that I see a lot of organizations skipping, and I understand why. We just went through it. It was not easy. Everything from tearing out systems, change management, data governance, but it was worth it. And this is the first time we have a unified view of that customer, like I had said before. And before, we were looking to layer on AI solutions on top of dirty data in different CRMs. And all that did for us was kind of accelerate the problems that we already knew we had versus solving for any of the efficiencies that we were hoping to gain.

Yeah. Stacy, anything to add there in terms of having the right data and being able to have everybody operating off of the same system?

Sure. It's incredibly important for us. I mean, we have so many things that are always evolving and changing. You have release dates, you have productions, you have casting, and all of this actually comes down to will the marketing campaign come out in the right timeframe. And so that data is so important, and we too had many different systems. We consolidated a lot into HubSpot because it provides such a good tech stack to be able to actually work on but also build off of. because that's really where we've gotten supercharged with building out to create those customizations that allow us to keep you all as the central hub. Yeah, truly.

And keep the data clean before we are extending out to other worlds.

Yeah. And I mean, Kim, as you said, I mean, the problems just exacerbate themselves if you don't have the right data, especially as you get into AI here.

So can I, can I just build on that for a second? So I've got really practical experience that maybe brings this to life. I was I was with our BDR community in Chicago on Monday, and they're the first recipients of our new customer platform powered by HubSpot. And they were relaying their prior experience when they had shitty data, poor connections, and now they've got this single view of the customer. And what they were telling me, amongst other things, is that they find the HubSpot platform so intuitive, so easy to use, so engaging, that they just—

it's a culture change.

compounding flywheel. When you get the data right, as we've done through this process, and you've got everyone engaging with this platform in a common way, it just gets richer and better. And as they put it to me, like, a powerful platform that nobody used just compounds shitty data, and then AI's got absolutely no chance. So this is, you know, real-world experience from some of our people who are using this toolset, and they're so excited.

Yeah, it's an That's an incredible insight because there's multiple elements of having the right data. Of course, you've got to have all of your data consolidated in the same system, but then you need people to actually use the system so that the data continues to be updated. So amazing insight, thanks. Now, Kim, you set out to solve one of the challenges I hear from people in this room more than any other challenge, which is like, how do I scale pipeline without more headcount? Tell us what you did.

Yeah, and let me start with the headline first. We went from an 11% meeting booking rate to a 43% meeting booking rate year over year. And that is extremely important for our organization because greater than 70% of all of our bookings comes from inbound marketing attributed sources. And for us to be successful, we need to close hundreds of deals a month in SMB. So for us, the challenge never was having enough contacts in our CRM or leads in our CRM. was identifying which ones are looking to purchase software solutions like ours at that moment in time. So we treated everyone the same. And our solve for this always was historically hire more headcount, more SDRs or BDRs making cold calls or reps dropping people into sequences. But everyone in this room knows, or online, that the days of cold calling and activity metrics do not translate into more meaningful conversations that you're going to have. So for us, we deployed a kind of new strategy, and luckily I have a very talented group of individuals that helped me with this approach. And we did 3 different things. First, we started with HubSpot's buyer intent, which allowed us to identify which prospects are looking for software solutions like ours. Secondary, we took our data to us and built a custom engagement score based on the meaningful interactions our customers or prospects were having with us. And then lastly, plug that into HubSpot's prospecting agent. And what that did for us allowed for tailored, personalized messages to get to the right prospect at the right time with the right message. And that's how we got our meeting booking rate to go from 11% to 43%.

I mean, 43% meeting booking rate, by the way, is absolutely world-class. I talked to Customers every day. Congratulations on that, Kim. So impressive. Thank you. And like the thing that stands out to me is that you've yeah, you've built a new system, right? And it is powered by fit and intent and the right signals so that AI knows when to act and it keeps humans involved in it. And I wonder, Mark, you know, Kim had no choice. She's an SMB. She literally couldn't scale her business. What about you? You're an enterprise. How have you been thinking about you know? building a system like that? Are you just throwing more headcount at it, or—

Well, we're a victim of our own success. We've been growing sustainably at 25% a year for the last number of years. You know, 35% of our bookings every single year is net new logos. So we have to sustain, and we have to grow even faster in this unique market that we're in right now. So whether it be outbound, whether it be inbound, you know, the curation of how our sales organization, our marketing organization, engage with their customers has never been more important, particularly in this noisy market right now. And we're finding a number of the capabilities that are brought by HubSpot are allowing, you know, our people to be engaging only when there's intent, only when there's demand signals, only when it's clear what the customer needs to hear at every single point of their customer journey. And I think for us that's so important because we've never been about direct selling. We've been about making sure that our customers to understand what we can do, the value we can add to their business, and the selling becomes an outcome. So we're so happy with the early-stage results that HubSpot's delivering. And I'll give you one very quick example because it's factual. Early stage, from a top-of-the-funnel perspective, marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads, almost— we've kind of pared down the number of leads with a higher-quality outlook. And the result is we're seeing a 2.8x increase in conversion already in a few number of months.

Okay, a 3x increase in conversion is also very, very impressive and world-class. So kudos to you, Mark, on your transformation. Stacy, I want to jump to you. We've been talking a lot about building pipeline, but, you know, the roots of this company and this event are marketing and inbound marketing in particular. How long have you been a HubSpot customer?

working with you all since 2014.

2014, okay, so, you know, a very long time, 12 years. And I think you're world-class at inbound marketing. You built an inbound marketing machine, thousands of like blog posts and hundreds of podcasts, and all of that has now changed. Tell us like what has changed in the world of being found online.

Sure, so the whole At the same time, the reason why we actually became a customer of HubSpot back in 2014 was specifically because it was a blog platform. I mean, you had that. You had so many other capabilities, I didn't really know what they were. I just signed up for the most expensive blog platform that existed in 2014 to just do that. And then I realized all the different things that you could do with that, with it, with the SEO. The whole reason for blogging, the whole point of actually creating content at that time and up till just a few years ago was to get registered on the first page of Google. We all tried. That's what we tried to do over and over. How many keywords can you possibly come up with? Time has changed now. Everything with AEO, it's not about keywords. It's not about how many people are coming to your website, how optimised your website is. It's still going back I think back to what I learned in 2012, which caused me in 2014 to start blogging and to get my entire team to start blogging, and the reason why I used HubSpot was it was easy for them to do and use. It was an easy tool. The benefit of them is that you keep on creating easy tools for people to use. The AEO that you've created, the whole system inside Marketing Studio right now, you guys You guys are needing to create content. You need to either get into other people's content or you need to create your own content so that you can have the answer engines out there actually answering questions that are pertinent to you, that are about you, that are about case studies you have done about your business, what's unique about you, because all that scraping of the internet that's going on, they don't need just general leadership garbage. They're looking for actual facts, stats, opinions. They're looking for being able to give 3 sources to whatever answer it creates and curates for you. So you're going to have to figure this out. You have to become a passionate, impassioned content marketer because it's there. It's going to always be there. Do videos, get transcripts from them. Do podcasts, get transcripts from them. Create content, Jump in someone else's content, become in the next F1 movie and get talked about all over the place. But you need to do these things for your brand to be able to become a legacy brand to AEO.

Yeah, it strikes me that it is just so hard to be a marketer today. It's part of why I loved what Duncan talked about and what we've built for marketers is just like we really are trying to help marketers do it all because they have no choice. but to do it all. And I wondered, Mark, you know, you were reflecting on like you've never been big at like hard selling. You have kind of like a very core like inbound philosophy behind your company. Want to talk to you about the problems. Are you seeing the same thing in marketing right now?

Yeah. I mean, I'm not a marketeer by background, but I think everyone in IFS are marketeers because everyone in IFS, it's their responsibility to be pushing the message out, to engage with their customers, to stand in what we believe. and the value that we can bring to our customers. But as I said a couple of times already, you know, it's a very noisy market right now. There's a lot of confusion about the capabilities that are available in this world of AI. So just getting very targeted and being very clear in what you're about and really doubling down on that, I think, is so important.

Thank you. So I want to wrap up by asking you all for one piece of advice for the whole Unbound audience on how to take your organization through an AI transformation. And Kim, I actually want to start with you.

Sure.

So for us, from the beginning, being a very lean organization, this has always been about maintaining the human element of AI and making sure that you have human oversight of AI. And for us, that meant initially making some mistakes. So we used the AI prospecting agent, and we targeted the wrong organizations, and we got leads that weren't qualified. I probably drove our success team a little bit crazy because we targeted customers that we might maybe shouldn't have at that point in time. And we found things that were outdated. That's what you were saying, even with AEO and our own database of just content that was not fresh. So it required training the AI agents just like a new hire your organization and making sure that it's growing along with you and your organization. So even from the beginning, we started using Prospecting Agent, but we had our SDRs review every email that went out. And that was short-lived. I would say it is a very good quality product that we learned that was providing the right content that we needed. But we've loosened up the reins a bit, but we've never taken kind of our hand Yeah, so human in the loop with AI.

It's important as you're starting to go down the AI path, keep humans involved for sure. Stacy, what's your final piece of advice?

Yeah, I'm going to keep on that keep humans involved, but I'm going to say that you in leadership and management early in your career, you all need to be working on enabling each other and your downlines in AI. This is not just so important for your customers, company. It is essential for their jobs and their future. There is so much resistance. It's hard. There's so many tools. No one signed up for this stuff, right? We did not say, oh my gosh, I want to learn, become a tech genius and figure out how to cobble all this stuff together. And I'm going to do all this stuff in cloud and oh, this stuff, ChatGPT is better over here for that.

Hmm.

Should I try something over here? How do I make this all speak together? Well, your team is sitting there, their heads are spinning, and a lot of them are not cutting it. And they're going to need you all to actually spend more time. You're going to need to spoon-feed them. You're going to need to set it up by example and show them over and over that it's actually here to make their lives easier. You're going to need to get them involved, have them start working with you on how to make a project that makes their daily lives easier. easier. Have them come up with it, work in group settings, talk about it out loud. As a leader, show them, demonstrate that you are there, you are doing it, and that you are struggling too.

Such a, such a good point, and it is on us as leaders to actually bring our teams through this and help show them. And so, Mark, why don't you take us home? What's your top advice?

Speed is life. That's the mantra that we have in IFS. Never has it been more important than today. We have a once-in-a-generational opportunity to capture and outsize share of our market. It doesn't matter what business we're in, that is the truth right now. But only if you act with urgency, with pace, and with speed, and if you work with partners who share that same ethos, all in service of the customer at the end of the day. So speed is life.

Speed is life, everybody. You heard it here. Unbound, please give these 3 a very warm round of applause. Thank you so much for your contributions. Thank you for being customers, and thank you for sharing with this group. And thank you all. Now I'm going to go to the audience for one more question. Let me see, who has a question? Hey, Yamini. Nice to see you.

What's up? What's up? That was great. What's going on?

Do you have a question?

Well, I don't have a question, but I have something for Mark, Stacy, and Kim. Thank you so much for being incredible leaders within go-to-market and across the industry. Thanks for being customers and thanks for being here. Have a great Unbound.

Thank you.

Welcome to the very first Unbound. And I've been waiting to say this. Unbound! It is your data. It is your context. And it's your advantage. Keep it. Good context drives great outcomes.

We believe this AI moment is a moment we can capture outside.

The ceiling on thinking has just gone on.

And we want to make sure you have what you need to do your jobs well.

You have a superpower. Like, we need human ingenuity. We need the creativity of outreach. and engagement from a top-of-the-funnel perspective.

Every technology cycle goes through this exact phase. But the real question is—

Are you ready?

Are you ready?

Come on now, I know you want to win more than that. I said, are you ready? Okay.

It's the moment after the discovery, after the wonder, when everyone rushes to you.

You are the connection point between a business and its customers. In a world drowning in automation and noise, you're what makes it human.

New channels, new flavors, new technology, and we needed a name.

We have been working hard to make your lives easier.

The real question is, are we achieving something truly great?

Every bit of feedback that we get is how improved the process is.

It doesn't matter what role you are. Doesn't matter what level of leadership. You know, show, don't tell. You know, take the initiative.

The possibilities are endless. Endless. Endless.

And by the way, and by the way, and by the way, and by the way, and by the way. You can build in HubSpot.