Implementing AI as an Equalizer | Manobyte & HubSpot

I think at the core of what we do and what we've always done is we help solve for customers problems and to help to get them unstuck so that they can experience growth. And the reason that we pivot is because when we see the future of what needs to happen and the customers aren't there yet, we're there to help them fill that need and then get unstuck and be able to grow without those chains and challenges.

Have known each other for over 10 years. Yeah, right. And when we first started working together, we call them the early days, it was the transformation to inbound marketing. HubSpot was transforming into a platform. And something you said earlier really stuck with me, which is this feels like the old days again, like we're in this transformational moment. It's exciting. It has that energy. You know, what is the role as a partner in the HubSpot ecosystem? How are you changing during this?

So this is really exciting. There's a lot going on and the opportunity really is great. I do remember the early days and we were able to add value for customers, and I think that's where we are again. It's like we're able now to add value because people are seeing how does AI impact the way that we go to market and that we do business. So that makes me really, really excited to be able to be in that space again and to see like, there are a ton of opportunities that are available. And the way that I see the opportunity is this. There is a lack of education that companies need. And as a solution provider, as a huffpump partner, I think that we have the ability to help educate people. I think there's also a skill gap right there. This is so new.

It's so new. No one's an expert.

Nobody's an expert. Nobody's an expert. However, we have the opportunity to help companies really start to build that expertise within their organization. We can come in and help fill those gaps from a knowledge perspective, from a tools perspective. And we have the ability to come in and be strategic advisors, really helping senior leaders within organizations rethink, and reimagine, you know, where they want to go and how they're going to get there in a way that really increases profitability. Right. Reduces cost. So I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity that we have now with HubSpot to be able to help our shared customers grow faster, smarter, and without the risk. AI is going to give people the ability to do that like never before. And we're turning the page. It's a new era that is exciting. Right.

So a lot of the conversation right now is on agentic AI. How are you thinking about agents in terms of solutions for your customers?

Yeah, agentic AI really is the unlock agentic AI, it really is the foundation and you've got to make sure that within your organization you're ensuring that you're giving it the tools, the knowledge, the access and the training that it needs. Because you can prompt all day long but you're never going to like a person. Exactly.

The tools, knowledge, exactly.

You got to give all of that to your agents and then allow it to grow and to bring back the results that you need as well. So that's so important and that's a.

Big part of what you do. Right. You do sell out of the box agents, custom agents.

It is. So one of the things that a big thing of what we do is we're building cross platform agents that really unlock the power of, that's behind company systems. Right. So we have pre built agents that people can come to our website, they can grab those agents and they can use them to solve common business problems. We built custom agents for companies, but a lot of the things that we do is really not just tying it to a prompt to get a question, but allowing agents that will be cross system. Right. And so pulling information from your erp, pulling information from your CRM, pulling information from all these other tools that allow you to give AI to be able to take action in your behalf. And this is where you can get scale because now you're giving agents the ability to fill roles that they probably couldn't have done on their own. And this also breaks down a lot of the data silos and a lot of silos that organizations have today where because they're disconnected now you're giving these agents the ability to really interact in a way that adds value to your organization.

You hear the word orchestration a lot in relation to agents and that's definitely how I think of it. It's like pulling from everywhere across your different systems.

Agentic AI is a different animal. Right. And the way that it works is that you're giving it the power to go through and say, all right, let me give you an example. So you've got an AgentIC AI agent on your website that is answering a customer problem. That's great, that's one use case. But then it can hand it off to another agent that then says, oh, we understand by looking at your customer profile that this is the tool, this is what you need in Order to solve your problem. And, and oh, by the way, if you purchase this other thing here, you'd get a better result. And it can suggest that back to your customer. And then it acts as a salesperson. Now instead of just being a customer service, now it's acting as a salesperson. And now it can say, oh, you wanna buy this? Yep. Great. So now it goes off and then it puts together a contract for you. Now the agent now brings that back to the customer. The customer signs, okay, great, the customer signs. And now it puts it into customer service to begin the order processing. So all of this happens because agentic AI is really built to do a lot of things that multiple people within the organization were probably doing before inefficiently and missing steps. Right. The agents don't miss those steps. They see the opportunity and they know what actions to take next because of their intelligence.

Now, in that example, do you have a human in the loop?

So I think that you have a human in the loop only where there needs to be a human in a loop. It's like the supervisor or the manager, right? And so like you've got the human in the loop saying, right, does this agent have the authority to do A, B and C? Is this the best decision? And it's monitoring the whole process. Just like with your normal human employees, they may need coaching, Right? And so you still need to coach the agent to say, okay, this is what you suggested, but next time you should be suggesting A, B and C or you're teaching it. And that I think where I see human in the loop adding the greatest value.

Oh, good. So humans are still needed.

Humans most definitely are needed. We still need humans to innovate and to create and to come up with solutions that the agent can go out and accomplish the goals for us.

So you talked a bit about how agents can orchestrate across systems. They can take data out of different systems and take actions. We know data is super important in this era. Can you talk a bit about how important unified data is and what that actually means?

You can't solve the puzzle if you don't have all the pieces. And that's the way we think about unified data. You've got to have data that is really able to pull together all the things that AI and agents will need in order to give the proper results. If you have gaps in your data, if you have poor data quality, then you're going to garbage in, garbage out. Your AI solution isn't going to be accurate.

Right?

This is where you're going to have things like hallucinations, but you've got to have the right data, access to the data. You need to make sure that there's good governance around the data. All of those things are super critical when it comes to data. If your data isn't unified, you're not going to. This is the foundation and you're not going to get the results that you need. Data really is the gold mine that companies need to be looking at. Your data is your competitive advantage.

Yeah. Your differentiator.

It is your key differentiator for sure.

So IDC recently released a brief where they talked about the HubSpot ecosystem opportunities. So the opportunity around the software in terms of services, applications, integrations, agents, and they forecasted it's around a $30 billion opportunity by 2028. Where do you see the biggest opportunity within that? And why are you still building within the HubSpot ecosystem after all these years?

30 billion. You know, I didn't release the report, but I think that there's probably even a bigger opportunity, honestly, because there's just so much opportunity right now with within, within the area. And the reason that we are excited and that we're continuing to build our relationship with HubSpot. Number one, HubSpot's core beliefs.

Right.

They align with our core beliefs and that revolves around solving for the customer. Right. And HubSpot has been always very customer centric and we're very customer centric. We want to solve for the customer. Number two is the platform. Being a longtime HubSpot partner, we've seen HubSpot. We've seen and we understand how HubSpot thinks about product. And HubSpot is ahead of what its customers needs and it thinks about product in a very connected way. And that makes a lot of sense. Right. And that gives you. One of the things that is important right now is that you have security, transparency and eliminating risk. So the health platform gives you that ability to have all of those three key components and knowing that what it's releasing as far as features are true features that are going to add value for that customer journey. And then I think the third reason that we think HubSpot is a great platform is because of its ability now to solve for the needs of customers in the mid market in a way that would be just too inaccessible in the past. Exactly.

Like bringing enterprise functionality to the mid market.

Exactly. That's exactly what HubSpot is doing. And I think that that's awesome. And that is where we see there being a lot of value that you can give mid market Companies the ability to have enterprise level value, to be able to transform the way that they go to market and service customers.

I also think the AI opportunity is an equalizer in that respect. Right. That was large language models have existed, right?

Yep.

But they were not as easy and accessible to all businesses as they are now.

It's the key differentiator. Right. We're past this era where people just need to build their own things. Right. But I think what HubSpot does is like, okay, you've got these core functionality, a good platform that gives you 80% of what your company needs and now you can add on top of that and customizing the platform for your key differentiators. Right. And that is where I see the opportunity with HubSpot and why we're continuing to double down with HubSpot because it's going to help customers move fast without the risk and to see value. And that's what we're all about.

Earlier we were Talking about the HubSpot ecosystem and today a lot of our solution partners actually have a custom integration or a use case for a customer that they end up productizing, turning into an app in our marketplace. So they actually offer software and they offer services. And the bar to creating software is lowering. It's easier. There's more. No code tools and things that you might have turned into software, you can now turn into agents as well. And so we were chatting about this earlier. I'm curious your perspective on our agents, the new apps.

Yeah, agents, 100% are the new apps. So we have on the HubSpot marketplace, I believe, five different applications that we've built over the years, same use case that you've mentioned. I think that agents are going to be, are going to take place and there's going to be different types of agents. There are going to be agents that do common standard things. There's going to be very specialized agents that can only have knowledge of certain things. For instance, we have one agent that mimics another app that we have on the marketplace that is for the medical industry that allows them to go out and get information that they need. Right. And knows how to go out and get it, bring it and put it to where exactly it needs to be. That's a very specialized agent that knows how to do one specialized things. I think there's going to be lots of agents that are very specialized, industry specific, industry specific or task specific. And I think this was going to continue to grow because I believe this is going to be the future. The AI layer is going to be amazing. It's a huge opportunity.

When we worked with IDC years ago, the report was really broken into what is the services opportunity and what is the application opportunity to build in the HubSpot ecosystem? And this time around, when IDC was looking at the opportunity, they said these categories don't actually make sense anymore. There's this agentic opportunity belong to either audience, ISV or the solution partner. It's.

It's its own thing.

Yeah.

And I think that there's going to be. I think there's going to be a rise of agents for various needs.

Right.

And they're going to be very specialized, very niche and very valuable.

Kevin, thank you so much for coming.

Sam.