HubSpot AI vs. Human Judgment: When Should You Trust the Machine?

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask into action and become the hub.

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Me?

See, I hate that because I hate it because I thought we were just diving right into the conversation. I was like, oh, George isn't playing the intro. And then you pull that.

And yes.

Caught me off guard. I'm not ready for that, dude. I'm not ready for that. I haven't thought about HubSpot for 14 days. I don't know how long I've been off.

And the holidays.

Right. Yeah. I was, like, getting right. I was ready and then you just. You threw me off completely.

You know, let's. You know, let's call it, guys. Try again tomorrow. Let's just try it again.

All right.

Bye, listeners.

Bye, everybody. It's been good.

Just.

See you later.

Just kidding.

So how have you guys been? I missed you.

I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be honest. I've. One second here.

No lack of snacks for this morning.

No, no, no lack of snacks. I've racked up around 349 hours in farming simulator since we've lost brother.

Wow.

Now, granted, sometimes where I just kind of like keep it on and walk away from it and.

Yeah.

But, you know, let's get those farm.

Hours and, you know, I got some hours in 100.

Agriculture never sleeps, man. Man.

Jeez. Hey, you know what? We're just trying to grow better, okay?

Oh, wow.

We're trying to grow better.

This really.

Okay.

That's the vibe of 2025. That's what we're y.

We're just trying to better simulator because we forgot what HubSpot is. We are on.

I ordered a joystick. I ordered a joystick, okay. To control my, you know, your excavators and stuff. My excavators and yeah. Tree harvesters. We're going hard.

You're right, Max Farmer, when you grow.

Up, I might be.

You know what we should be? We should be farming leads.

Yeah. I was trying to make.

Let's go, dude.

That's a Better one. I like that.

I'm trying here. I'm trying.

We're doing our best. We're doing our best. But we are back New year, new episode, but on our same old bs. I'm very excited about today's episode because if you are a longtime listener, first time caller, you know that we spent a good number of episodes before the new year talking about HubSpot AI's new tools as we went through the different data source settings throughout the platform. But AI has been a topic for a while now, not just because of everything that's happening in the headlines, but particularly within the HubSpot ecosystem. It began really in force last year when the HubSpot CMS Hub relaunched as the content hub. And that was when we really started seeing HubSpot leading with some AI powered tools within the platform. But then we saw it continue to escalate when we got to inbound with Breeze Intelligence and all of the different ways that AI is now basically part of the DNA of how HubSpot works. Now, while we've talked about AI and HubSpot before, I have to admit, guys, one of the reasons why I'm thrilled to be revisiting this topic is we were kind of learning alongside everybody else, right? We were experiencing all of these updates in real time. We really hadn't had a lot of time to do a lot of excavation of best practices on our own. So this is still going to be a conversation that will evolve as we all learn. But we're here to talk today about the big question when it comes to HubSpot AI versus our own human powered judgment. When do you trust the machine? Because AI makes it so easy to generate content and strategies without much thought. Which leads me to my favorite rule which is applicable to marketing HubSpot or quite frankly, anything else in life. It's the Jurassic park rule. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because you can build AI content dinosaur doesn't mean you should. So today's conversation isn't about picking sides. It's about understanding where HubSpot AI tools really add value versus where our humanity becomes irreplaceable. Now, George, I want to start with you because your topic at Inbound was literally about this idea of human powered AI assisted. When you're thinking about your AI content, your AI tools as the critical mindset HubSpot users need to embrace when they're thinking about AI. But what does that really mean? And I would be curious if any of your views have shifted on that at all since we gave. Since giving that talk.

Yeah. So the talk, if I boil it down to like three major points, it's one, AI is a tool, not a replacement. In. In the conversation that was a big piece that we talked about that AI should never be the easy button or the silver bullet solution. Like the. The human context matters. And again, we are, we are the leader. We are the brain. Even though AI is really, really freaking smart, especially with, like, the latest models that have been launched. A big piece of the talk was context is crucial. I'll talk about something that I've added to that here as we've kind of been continuing down this AI journey. And then another part was frameworks for effective AI use. Liz. And like, one of the things we literally gave away was like a checklist on how to humanize. And this was specific to content, because my conversation was on content. Although many of the things that I just said, context is crucial. AI is a tool, not a replacement. Could be far outside of the content realm. But if you think about what are the frameworks that keep you rooted to where you need to be, what is the context that you need to give it, and how is it a tool, not a replacement. My mind hasn't shifted or changed on any of those. I still believe those to be true. One of the things that I have been playing around with, to go along with context is this idea of cohesive. And, and what I mean by cohesive is like being able to string thoughts together. Right. When I gave this talk back at Inbound, it was. We very much lived in a world where it was like we had one conversation and we did one thing and. And then we went to a next conversation that did another thing. And now with the way that especially this is less HubSpot for a second, but more like if we lean into chat, GPT and the, the birth of canvas that we have in there and the, the birth of O4 now being able to do things where you can have a cohesive thought across multiple things. I'll give you an example around content creation. I was messing around this couple weeks ago and I said, hey, I want to create four YouTube scripts. I want the four scripts to layer on top of each other and hand off to each other. And I want to teach this topic and I want to teach it in this way and then in an individual canvas in one conversation. So, meaning we had four canvases. We literally had four rough draft scripts for these videos to which then in the same conversation, because we had those scripts, we then asked it for LinkedIn posts and we asked it for YouTube descriptions. Now we never left that one conversation, but we had a cohesive thread based on the context from a tool that was assisting us to do a task based off of a framework for videos to hand off to each other. Right. So this is where, so where we're getting now, I think this is still, you can still think about this when you think about HubSpot, like, how does this begat that? How does the, how do we make this cohesive as we move forward? When we're thinking about things, by the way, AKA data sources, when we're thinking about the service bot, the social bot, I should say agent. Right. But I don't know if we're really in a world of agents yet, but we're getting there. But when, when we get into the agents, content agent, social agent, prospecting agent, like now, now the, the thing that we need to be thinking about is cohesiveness across the board. So that's my thoughts, Liz, to get us going.

Chad, I want to ask you, where do you feel that HubSpot's AI tools shine the most right now, when you get into that ops mindset, which is one of the most incredible things that you bring to the show, what are the specific tasks or processes where they consistently outperform human effort? Because, George, to your point, a lot of the conversation you had during that inbound talk, that was about content, right? That is where humanity in theory is supposed to be on display. But I think when we have these AI and particularly generative AI conversations, we forget that sometimes it's not necessarily that kind of output.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for, for me, when I'm looking at where HubSpot's putting AI in, in what I often do, a lot of the ops integration, connecting system type stuff, it's not really there for me. And what I would do yet, meaning like inside of a workflow I don't have unless it's a third party tool, some sort of AI function. But where it is very, very shining is in the scenario where it's augmenting people's daily manual tasks. So maybe the thing that I would build is something to properly task humans to do something or to make sure that they're aware and trained on when their sales meetings are coming up. And then you can use the AI meeting prepare and bam. It will look through all of the notes on the company record and it'll look through all of the previous meetings and all the last calls and you can ask it for like a sentiment update in breeze, like I Mean, that's pretty amazing. Being able to like just parse through all of that information in an easy to digest manner to get you ready for your upcoming meeting. That's pretty awesome. Like, but when it comes to like getting it to do asks for you automatically, you know, that's I think a little bit where we're not quite, you know, it's not built in to that point yet because I think they're still making sure the guardrails are up longer for a season where you're confident that you're actually going to be able to have that framework that George is talking about in before it starts trying to offload a whole lot into. Well, this one part of the process can be done and saved and logged into a property or something like that. Right? All with AI, right. It gets a little bit more difficult there because we want to make sure it's doing what we need and we have all of our own business guidelines and guardrails to be able to put in so it can do what we want it to every time.

Max, what about you? Where do you see HubSpot's AI tool shining?

You know, again, for me, being the guy who's always, you know, constantly championed the idea that content is what runs, you know, the entire inbound machine that you create. Like, I think a lot of that, you know, in terms of like where it shines the most is really just the assistance around that content creation stuff. And I think like even when you talk about, you know, the content creation and I'm thinking specifically about like written word here, right? Like yeah, all the, you know, mix the. I forgetting, I mean I forget what everything's called now because I've been on break remix. All the, yeah, content remix stuff is like super cool just from like a time saving perspective and content reuse perspective, I think that's really great because it can really amplify what a marketer is doing. But you know, even just where it comes into something as simple as like, you know, assisting people who just aren't great at writing. You know what I mean? I'm not good at writing at all. Right. And like when I write emails, I write long, long emails. Right. So like having some. Oh yeah, totally. Because I feel like I have to explain every single thing. I want to leave no room for questions. Like I want to leave nothing to the imagination. I always, you know, I tend to be someone who like over explains things. Right. And for me it's really great to have tools that help me like shorten that message and make it More concise and fix all my terrible grammar and punctuation and like all these other things.

I totally do that. Like, here's an email, please make it 75% shorter.

Yeah. And even just that, even just that this is something that's like great for salespeople to have. Like, I'm sorry, I've gotten some really poorly written sales emails before. Yeah, right. And you know, especially, you know, from SDRs and BDRs fresh out of college that like don't really know how to write emails well. Right. So like even having something that's like acting sort of as like a glorified Grammarly like in your CRM just to be like, hey, you know what, there's a, there's a better, you know, more professional or, you know, better way to write what you were just trying to write to that person. You know what I mean? I think having that is great just to kind of improve the output quality, quality of their content quote unquote. That like a salesperson's creating. Because if you think about a salesperson, their content creation is their outreach, their communications, their emails, they're this, they're that. Right. I think it's really, really great for that. And I think it really falls in line with, you know, all the other sort of like time saving stuff that like HubSpot's built over the years to make salespeople's lives easier. Right. You look at things like sequences and templates and you know, all these things that are just meant to help automate those repetitive tasks that you have. While it's like, hey, now the, the task of creating that thing in the first place, it improves the quality of. Right. Not just reducing the amount of time you're spending on it. Right. Which also, yeah, you could make an argument reducing the amount of time you're spending on proofreading email or just making sure you're wording something correctly. Right. But it's also, you know, it's going to fix up your sentence structure and it's going to make you like write it like someone who knows how to be a wordsmith on a keyboard. Right. And I think that's going to be great for folks that want to focus on selling, not focus on relearning how to know, compose the English language in a, in a professional and, and good quality way. Right? Yeah.

It's interesting, Max, because you're listening to you. My brain goes in two directions. One, for all of you listening to this, if you have access to remix and you haven't actually gone back and like, used it in a while. I would go back and try it again because it has had a little bit of a facelift and also like some additives under the hood. I feel like maybe they added a little bit of a turbocharger under there or something. It was.

Yeah.

I feel like we need to have an episode on this because we haven't talked about it.

Yeah. So I was teaching it the other day and. And I always love when I'm teaching something and then it like looks new and then it is kind of new because it's like you have to be good at. Like, I'm just gonna act like I've seen this a hundred times and we're gonna teach it together and learn it together.

Try to try doing that in front of a room of 90 new hires. Live in the moment in front of a giant projector. That was the worst.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So. So that's the first thing that comes to mind when like check out Remix. If you had. The second thing that came to my mind was like, if you knew. And I'm. I don't know how other. How else to paint this other than like, if you knew that you had a weakness. Right. So I'll, I'll pretend for a second that I, I'm not a very empathetic human and I understand. I'm just not very empathetic. I'm very. Matter of a fact. Right. Like, here's the facts of the matter. If I realize, like, I'm that type of person, I can see where this gets real interesting to be able. Like, can you please take this email and add a slight bit of empathy to it or add a slight bit of excitement to it or add a slight bit of urgency to it. Mystique, like. Yeah, like whatever it is. Right.

So like add a little human razzle.

Dazzle, a little demure.

Yeah, give it some zhuzh. Give it, give it a little. Juice it up a little bit. No, but, but, but I'm being dead serious here. Right? Like, think about. And by the way, if, if, if I was a sales guy, which I kind of am, but if it was like my full time thing and I knew that I had to create like these dope emails, I would probably do what I'm saying for the same email. Like, and I would look at the six or seven different ways. Well, what does it look like if it's written with empathy or if it's written with urgency or what if I did a happy mix of the two and I would. Because I could. Because you can so quickly iterate based on these like pinpoints of, of of thinking to get then, oh, I really like how that went. And talk about a B testing your sales emails at the like, I want one that's empathetic and I want one that's urgency and let's a B test those and see what happens. Like so, you know, I think would.

Be the, the thing that I'm like excited about and I don't know how they would deploy this, but like think about. I guess the word we would use is like tribal knowledge, right? Think about how much tribal knowledge is contained within a company's like HubSpot CRM portal. And like by that what I mean is like your internal knowledge bases, your records of conversations that you've had with customers, information about your product that's hosted on your website, your kbase, your tickets that you have. All these different things, right?

Yeah.

If you think about it, your CRM is like this giant repository of information on how you've answered people's questions and ways you've solved problems, right? You know, through all this stuff, right? Like, it's so cool because I think like HubSpot, one day with like their AI stuff could have this whole like, I mean they'll probably call it something different, but essentially this like tribal knowledge engine, right, that understands how to solve all these different problems the way your company does it internally, right? And that information can only be trained on and found in the records of communications you've had with your customers and the content that you're putting out into the world and how you've solved similar problems in the past, right? Like, imagine a day where like a ticket gets created and when you go onto that ticket record or that conversation or whatever, right? The AI is able to say, hey, this looks really similar to a ticket that Jeff B. Solved back in a couple months ago. And like, this is how they came to, you know, this is how they figured it out, right? Maybe this is something similar, right? And it gives you, instead of you going, let me search the, Let me search my search bar to see if I can find any like tickets that are something similar, right? It links you to like, hey, here's an example of someone solving this problem for this other customer, right? Like that is going to be completely, I don't want to say game changing because I'm game changing. That will be like such a giant fundamental step forward, right? It'll change the game and it goes way beyond like, here's an answer and a knowledge base because, like that's something that's, like, so unique to. Inside of your organization. Right. Being able to find, like, past examples of complex problems that are coming up again that have been solved in the past three different way. And then being smart enough to understand that and be like, hey, this sounds similar. Here was the solution. But you can go look at it if you want to. Right. That's going to be.

Well, the good. Not too. The good thing, too, is it's not. It's. It's not necessarily needing to look at somebody specifically went and created an SOP or documented. It's looking at the conversation that happened in the system. Therefore, hey, this is what happened. Here's the thing that excites me about that, too, is it's. It's three employees ago. It's six years ago. Yeah. It's like, you know, like, hey, on June 19th of 2027, Bobby ran into this problem with Frederico, and this is how he fixed it. Like, and what's great about that is it's now all of a sudden, what was exciting about content is we were like, there's no more writer's block. There's always a beginning draft. You have an idea and you just. At least you have a place to start. Now when you're talking about fixing people's problems, you have a place to start because you see the finish lines of where you're trying to go with this human. Anyway, I'll even take it a step further.

I'll even take it a step further, George, because one of the things I really like about it, it reminds me of human nature. Right. We are more outspoken and reactive when we see something we don't like. And so what I've actually found that is helpful with AI is that it kills that blank document syndrome that becomes. It's. That's where writer's block begins.

Yeah.

Right. But even if it gives me absolute trash, even in that trash moment, I'm like, well, I know definitely it's not this. And it still gives me a starting point.

Oh, yeah.

Of where I need to go.

Yeah.

Which I love.

Yeah.

I want to. I want to switch the conversation here a bit. I want to talk about the potential risks or downsides of leaning too heavily on HubSpot AI tools. Like, for example, have you ever experienced or heard of a situation where HubSpot. I just produced something that completely fell off or completely missed the mark.

You know, I could see it. I could see there being issues for, like, I think about, like, the workflows tool and how, like, you can use a workflow to like create actions. Right. I could see a situation where someone who's not as understanding of the nuances of HubSpot would just like tell a prompt to build a workflow and be like, all right, well, you know, I told HubSpot what I wanted and it did it. So like, it must be right. But I'm not educated or understanding enough of how like, you know, workflows can have different effects on things to, to know, like to check its work if it's right or not. Right. Because then they can.

It's not specific enough, like, because if you're not specific enough to say, oh, well, I want these things to be updated when meetings are completed, but only the first time or if it happened, you know, like, I mean, it doesn't understand that unless you tell it.

Right. Exactly. So like, so for some new users who like, you know, see AI as this like all powerful thing, but don't necessarily understand its limitations or like, you know, are hyper aware of the nuances of how it might not like fully understand exactly what you want to do. Right. But just kind of like build something that sort of like aligns with it. Right. And then folks kind of leaning in on that too heavily. Like that could be a risk, right? Yeah, I think you do also, like, you know, I've talked about these risks before. Like, you do totally have the potential with these tools in front of you to just put a lot of trash out there, whether it's content, you know, or, you know, email communications, communications or anything like that, where people just go, oh, AI is the easy button and you hit it and boom, there you go. Right. And it's just, you're just pumping out garbage and people hate you because of it. Right? And not like using it as a tool to like assist with the creation versus using it as the thing that just builds everything so you don't have to think about it and you can go play Fortnite or something like that, you know, so that's like still kind of what I'm worried about. Right. But I feel like as HubSpot kind of like moves more into those realms that we were talking about around the. I don't want to say the portal becoming self aware of itself, right. But the portal maybe. Here's kind of like what I wanted to say before and I think it kind of weaves into like solving that problem that I just said. Right. You know, imagine we had the, you know, full fledged prompt thing inside the workflows tool and as you built your workflow, it could talk to you about the implications of what you created. Right. So for example, if you're building like a workflow and you add an action that's like just changing like a property. Right. What if little, you know, HubSpot Clippy AI popped up and said, hey, we'll call it Hippie. Hey, just so you know, just so you know, if you change this property, it might go and like trigger this other stuff. And these are some of the effects that that could have. Right. Because maybe it sees the action that you're adding, runs that, you know, simulation in its head and goes, oh, all this other stuff is going to happen because of this. Right. Just to warn you. Right. And then if you could like have conversations with it, like, oh, well, what if I do it this way? What if I do it this way? And it knows, like, it understands what the implications of what that would be because one, it has like a really good understanding of how workflows work. But two, it matches that with the really deep understanding in the context of your portal and the data inside of it. Right. You put that together, there's your missing link of the nuance that new users aren't going to have. Right. So that, that'll be a really interesting way to solve that. Yeah, totally.

Because like, think about this. I work at a partner agency and we have multiple people sometimes building workflows inside of our clients hubspots. And like, what if I'm building something that somebody either has built near or already built or something along those lines?

Right? Yep.

Then, you know, Hippie might be able to tell us what's going on. Yeah, Sprocky will get, you know, a little HubSpot Sprocky, little Sprocket in the corner there and it just.

Oh, hey guys.

Hey.

Wow. Okay, so I love, I love the little comic relief there and I also love how you guys are like future talking today. This is actually pretty amazing. I, I have to be honest with you. I have seen where, let's, let's just say reporting gets a little. Because the AI reporting, I literally teach it this way. I'm like, hey, it's there, Play with it, but be careful. And I know there'll come a day when that isn't true. But like, again, you guys went to Workflows, which is one of Most mere mortal HubSpot users. Achilles heel is the workflows tool. They feel it's, it's difficult and it's confusing and, and, and it's changing and it's. The other Achilles heel is reporting. And so if you're Looking for the like, biggest return. You're like, well, let me just have AI do my reporting, which is a, as a, as an opportunity for a disaster. Again, if you don't know the specificity and the actual like, formula or framework of like question to insight to like data points and all, all the underlying pieces. So I, I love the idea of it getting smart enough to know all of the underlying pieces and being able to say, hey, unfortunately we can't give you the report you're looking for because you should be creating a custom property called this that's tracking that. And over time we could then do what you're looking for, but because it would be based on what, what it is like anyway. So that's, that's the other thing here, here's another piece though, that.

Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. Can I say, and also, right, that that report builder needs to be able to ask you clarifying questions before it actually creates what it's building you.

Right?

Because dude, think about how many times when you ask someone, oh, when they go, oh, I want a report that does this, what do you ask? You go, why do you want it? Like, what, what is it going to what? Like, what do you want it to tell you? Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And like that is so important to understand how to build that actual report. And like AI needs to do that too. Instead of being like, okay, here it is, boom. And give it to you, it should be like, wait, wait, wait.

Yeah, I love.

How do you want to see this data? Why do you want to see this data? How, like, how should you lay it out? And then it also should be able to tell you, bro, you can't build a chart that does that because what you're asking for is impossible in the laws of time and space. Right? Like, think about how many times people have said, I want one chart that shows me this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And you're like, no, I would always say, draw that for me. And they go, oh, I can't, because I didn't realize that was impossible to represent on a graph. I mean, that's what AI is going to need to do in order to one, train people to be better report builders. Right. But two, generate reporting. That's not trash. Right?

And that's true of anything.

Yeah.

You know, that idea of like, I think that reminded me of conversations I used to have. This is going to sound strange, but my graphic, graphic designer I used to work with, she said, I used to get really frustrated when people would come to me telling me exactly how to click a button or design something instead of telling me what problem they're trying to solve. And I think we're seeing something similar here, which is there is an assumption on the part of these tools which makes sense. This is the beginning of these tools and we talk about that a lot, but that we know what's best for us and what we actually need. So I love this conversation we're hearing right now around this idea of are you sure? What are you actually trying to solve for?

Yeah, and I love the idea, especially with the reporting max, because the, the technology's there, right. It can ask follow up questions. Like I love when I'm using a custom GPT and it's like ask me seven questions and I have to give it the answer to get the thing that I'm trying to get. There's a, there's a. Again, it comes back to the context, right? And with reporting it, asking you five, six questions and then trying to build the report would be so much better. But here's.

I think a wizard would be cool. Like a wizard to set it up. That takes. Because like what's, what's a report? It's trying to answer question. Right? And so like that's the whole goal of a report is to answer somebody's question and should basically start by saying like what question do you want to answer? And then ask some clarifying questions and then take a stab at it. Just like when somebody submits a ticket and they go I want blippity blah. Right. But here's the thing that I think is going to be the Achilles heel of AI. It comes to custom properties, trying to build your report. Public service announcement.

If you're creating custom properties, put a.

Description and an intelligible name.

Yeah.

Don't make it the damn question on the form.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta.

You.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean otherwise AI's never gonna know what the frick's in that property, right?

Yeah.

Like how's it supposed to know if you don't tell it either? A, a good name and B what happens in there?

Yeah, yeah, dude. It's almost like it needs this like AI intervention engine, right? Where see someone doing something stupid in HubSpot like a common me help you. Yeah. It pops up and goes, are you sure? Hey dude, are you sure you want.

To that all right.

It just needs to send them memes again.

Like Jerry Maguire. We need Jerry Maguire in HubSpot. Help me.

The easiest thing is like when you're, when you're building a form and you hit Create new property and it realizes you're asking a full sentence question. It should just immediately pop up and be like, no, don't do that.

It looks like sales is trying to find out where all the revenue is. Do you need help?

Here's. Here's something I want to hit on though, because. Liz, ask your original question again.

Absolutely. So when we think about what are the potential risks or downsides of leaning too heavily on HubSpot AI tools? So, and then I asked again, like, did you have any experiences with that or situations where HubSpot AIs produce something that's like, why are we here? How did we get here?

Yeah. What happens, what happens when you as the human psychologically just start to feel dumb? How are you. How are you going to deal with that? So when you ask AI to do everything and what was happening historically is that you were learning something and you were achieving a task which then would release endorphins in your brain and you would feel good about accomplishing a task when you're no longer accomplishing the task because AI does. What does that do to you psychologically as a human? This is a piece that doesn't have anything to do with HubSpot, but has everything to do with HubSpot, has everything to do with business, and has everything to do with us as humans. We're gonna have to be careful on how we are reprogramming our brain to perceive a completed task based on assistance assisting us to do the task that we never had before. So I'm just putting a stake in the ground right now in a year to two years or two months or six months from now, when all of a sudden we have this massive thing happening in organizations where humans are feeling depleted, defeated, not energized, not motivated, not understanding. Anyway, I'll just leave it there for people to think about.

Well, don't hop off the mic too quickly, George, because I want to ask you first my next question, which is when it comes to content creation, specifically because this is a topic you have spent a lot of time on.

Yeah.

Do you think HubSpot AI tools are more effective as a starting point or as an editor for refining human created.

Drafts, I think it depends. I think it depends on the human. Like, if you're sitting there and you're like, don't have access to GPT or Claude or Perplexity, you haven't been, you know, waking up with AI along the way and figuring it out or whatever, then HubSpot's great for all of the things for you like you can generate your ideas. By the way, you should still probably have human conversations with people inside your organization to generate some of those ideas to then bring into HubSpot to then refine the idea. But I think HubSpot at this point from a content standpoint could be a from beginning to end with AI assistant process. Now I started this with it depends because I actually do a lot of stuff outside of and then bring into and so what I do understand, especially when you have your brand voice in place, it is a, it is a phenomenal refinement tool, meaning voice consistency and saying the things the way that they they should be said. To have this kind of holistic cohesive content engine resource center inside of HubSpot, giving it a final brush of like and make this my brand voice, make this my brand voice, make this my brand voice is a very interesting phase or step that we've seen adding in depending upon the content. So again, I'm a great marketer. It depends both one all I don't know.

Well, the other thing too though is that as you get more comfortable with the tools and as you quite frankly become a more sophisticated content creator, you probably have a little bit more flexibility, right? So for example, if I'm working, I'm training a content manager who's very, very green and very, very new just at the principles of Storyte, the principles of architecting what a great piece of content looks like, understanding how to construct a great introduction, understanding what a great conclusion looks like. I'm going to want them to be more involved and hands on in the process before they start bringing in their AI assistants. What I would probably do though, I would have them start learning how to use AI on the back end, right? One of my favorite things to do is, hey, this was the keyword I was attempting to optimize for. Can you just take a quick look and see if I maximized all those opportunities correctly or did I miss anything glaring or helping them integrate it into other pieces of the process? I think there is this idea, and I will admit I've perpetuated this, that I'm against using it at the front end and only more at the back end when it comes to where AI fits into the content creation process. But really my big sticking point is do you even know what a good story is supposed to look like? If you get a piece of content that is generated from your strategy, your principles, your ideas, do you even know if the output that is in front of you is good or not? Do you understand what should Be changing. So the. That's the only thing I would say there is that it. It comes down to your level of sophistication as a storyteller, and that will greatly sway your inputs and your outputs.

Yeah, see, I agree with everything you said. What I hope people understand, though, is like, here's what I love about where we live right now. I think every human can look at a piece of content. And I'm going very content specific here for a second and be like, yep, that's a turd. Nah, I don't like it. And so then you're like, well, okay, I know I need to probably add a little bit of storytelling to it. I need to add a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Here's. Here's what I love. I love the fact that you can still Google and you can still grab three or four links. You can still read the material, you can still educate yourself, but then you can educate the machine, the assistant that you're using on those things that you're doing. And so even your turd, after you educate yourself and you educate it, you can be like, hey, can we try to rewrite this? But based on the things that we've learned together in the six links that I've uploaded with, with this, that, this, that. Because now you can. And this is gonna sound gross. This is gonna sound gross. But now you can mold that turd into something better.

Could we just go with clay or something?

Well, but see, clay is like a canvas that you could do anything you want with. And we know we're starting with a big old turd.

I think, you know, a lot of it is this. The way I look at is enhancement and amplification, right? So it's like, you know, enhance the content you've created, right? By making it better. Whether that is, you know, you know, making the words better or, you know, improving the punctuation or the structure or whatever, right? But then, like, when I think of the amplification piece, like, that's immediately content remix, right? Like, just that. Because, you know, like, I remember, like, you know, saying, like, all right, I created this piece of content, and then it's like, oh, shit, I gotta go now.

What?

I gotta go write a blog post about it. I gotta go make social posts. I gotta go craft emails. I gotta go do a landing page. I gotta go do this. And it's like, well, now you don't have to have that big giant block of, oh, shit, there's all this other extra work I have to do, right? You know, that you can at least get the scaffolding and the framework of that stuff put together. So instead of, oh, I've gotta push this giant boulder up this hill to create all this stuff, it's more so, oh, it's already kind of, like, built for me. And all I'm doing is, like, refining the little pieces and, like, making slight changes to it, and then it's. It's out there. Right. But it's all derived from your original content you created. Right. The other thing, too, I think is, like, great for, like, a starting point. Like, I think, you know, when we kind of talk about it being a starting point, like, there's saying, like, you look at something like a blog post, there's a big difference of generate an outline for me and then I'll add the original content into it so I have this, like, structure instead of having to, again, push that boulder up the hill to, like, create, you know, zero to something else. Right. Which is what gets a lot of people's way when they're really just kind of going out and starting and trying to create content. Right. The other option is generate the whole thing for me, and I don't think about it and push it out there. Like, it's. When we say starting point, I think we're saying, like, starting point for you to. To make it easier for you to create something original. Right. And to get rid of all those mental blocks you might have around. How hard it is to go from 0 to 1.0 on a piece of content. Right? Yeah.

And Max, what I love about what you said, and by the way, I'm always more of like an outline guy. And then go from there. Because here's what's fun about outlines. You can be like, okay, I love this outline, but can we also add this and this to the outline? And then you can. And then you can be like, you know what? I talked about this on a client meeting. Let me go ahead and get a transcript of that. I actually talked about this in a PowerPoint. Let me go ahead and grab that. Talked about this over here. Let me grab that. And now you can collect stuff that you've historically done anyway, and you can upload it and be like, based on the stuff that I've uploaded in the outline that we've created, let's build a rough draft from that. So it is your brain, it is your words.

It is like you're just reducing the mental lift to get there. Right. But then the other thing too is, like, when you have AI go and generate an outline for you, right? And you go, okay, yeah, this is the stuff I should be talking about. It also makes it that much easier to be like, oh, here's some of the things that it probably missed, right? Because you're seeing what it created as an outline. That's giving you inspiration and making it easier for you to think about the other stuff that you should put in there if you are going to mention these, you know, X5 things, like whatever it may be, right? So, so, you know, it just. Again, I think reducing mental lift is. Is good, right? Mental health is important, right? And obviously, like, reducing your, Your, your, your mental lift to create content is going to make it easier to create content. Again, like, you're applying a lot of leverage with AI, right? So I think it's just. It's important to think about it that way.

Two. Two things I want to throw in here. One, one of the questions I love to ask before I actually move forward past the outline is, is there anything else I should know about, Think about or train around this conversation and see what it spits out? It's amazing to go down some rabbit holes with that. But second, we, as we do many times on this podcast, we dove into the content side of the world for this. And so, Liz, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about another thing that happened back at inbound 2024 that was in the presentation. We talked about a content editing checklist going back to, like, humanizing your content and AI being the. The assistant, maybe talk the listeners through that. Because I don't know if we've ever really shared that whole checklist on here, but if, but if they are listening to this, they are like, oh, yeah, outlines and, oh, yeah, these things, like, talk about that whole piece of this to kind of give them a framework to follow.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I think about any piece of content that I'm editing, what's funny is the checklist I'm about to share, we built it and developed it and launched it to go in tandem with these AI tools. But this is actually. That's actually just enabling us to automate or to. To apply structure to a process I was already using before AI even existed. Because when we look at a piece of content, to your point, George, there is a framework. There's a. You're looking at a piece of content. Well, how do I know it's good? Well, because it could be good or bad across a number of different things. It could be factually accurate and grammatically a dumpster Fire. It could be a grammatical work of art, but a narrative train wreck. So whenever I look at a piece of content, one of the p. One of the biggest lessons I teach new content managers or anybody who has to look at content is do not edit for everything, all at once. Edit in sequence. Edit for one thing, then edit for the next thing, then edit for the third thing, and so on. And there is a specific order in which I do it. And the reason why is because, let's say, for example, you have a piece of content that is narratively a trash can, but you've grammatically made it sparkle, right? Well, you're gonna have to rewrite it. So those sparkling new bits of prose that you've thrown in there, if you have a trashy introduction, a conclusion that doesn't make sense, you're speaking to 18 different Personas instead of just one or two, you're gonna have to redo that work. Work. Exactly. So here is the order in which I do it. First round, I'm looking for fact checking and accuracy, right? Is this. Is this factually accurate? Is. Are the things here correct? I always recommend, particularly when you're dealing with AI content, do you know how many times it'll say, like, well, I got this statistic, And I'll say, are you sure? And it'll go back and say, you know what? You're actually right. I made that up. I'm sorry. So, like, you have to actually check things. Do not just blindly trust what's put in front of you. Next. Once I have determined that what I have in front of me is factually accurate, Right? And again, I'm not thinking about anything else. I am thinking about these things in a vacuum. Only then can I start taking a look at readability and engagement. Right? How can I simplify the language for clarity and impact? How can I guarantee that I am speaking at the level of the people I am trying to reach? Right? So, molding the turd, shaping the clay. We shape the clay in stages, right? Okay. The facts are right. Great. Now let's take a look at how readable and engaging those facts are. Once I've determined that those facts are accurate and the words are readable and engaging, then I start looking at SEO optimization. How can I enhance it for searchability? How can I make sure that it is included, including relevant keywords and phrases? Then I do final proofreading. Now, one of the things I always find challenging with most people is they don't understand why this is step four. Again, leave the spelling errors alone. If you're just going to delete that entire sentence. It doesn't matter if we're talking about pooper skills versus computer skills if the whole paragraph is getting killed. Right. And then feedback and iteration. So that's really what you're looking at, right? Are the facts accurate? Is it a great story? Okay. Is it optimized? Well for search? Fantastic. Now that I know I have the right facts with the right framing and the right optimization, it's spelled correctly. Is that grammar all razzle dazzle. And then after that, you can do feedback and iteration. That's the order in which you do it. Now I would be curious though, to hear you guys as we wrap up today's conversation. What advice would you give teams trying to figure out when to trust HubSpot AI versus stepping in with human judgment? Are there specific guidelines or use cases that you'd recommend? And if you don't mind, I'd actually like to go first so that I can turn it over the floor to you guys. The reality, my guideline is very simple. Never have a process where the human is absent. You're either at the beginning, at the end, the beginning, the middle and end, the middle and the end. You have to be present somewhere. The only way you actually truly 1000 million percent screw this up is to just click that AI button willy nilly with no oversight. And with that. Chad, do you want to kick us off?

Yeah. I mean, for me, I think it goes back to the old adage, you know, just like you're saying trust but verify, right? I mean, it's like, I don't think you could really say it a whole lot better like, yeah, let's do it, but let's, you know, put people in the process. I really in some, like there are some things that are a little bit more process driven, like the ops hub data cleanup stuff, some of the AI driven contact duplication detection stuff, even some AI associations. Like there's AI, I think call to ticket association feature in HubSpot to like try and figure out which calls are related to a ticket based on the content of the call and things like that that exists and has existed for quite a while. I mean, those kind of things, you know, they're more operational, they're, they're less, you know, being presented to people. The only real people it causes problems for is the HubSpot admin. If, if it does, you know. So I mean, I would say like you could maybe worry a little less about those kinds of things. It's like all it's doing is capitalizing first and last names and you know, somebody has to verify that the, there is a human with, with duplicate contact or dupe, you know, detection, right? Where you're accepting or rejecting the merges and moving data from spot to spot. By the way, if you guys haven't checked out the, the new UI for contact merging, it is sick. Like you can get in there and tell it, I want two properties from this contact and three properties from this contact. And then I want it to go into that one or this one. Like it's pretty cool, like some real cool UI changes to that compared to what it's been in the past. But yeah, like they're putting people in the process, I think where it makes sense and you know, trust but verify. That's, that's my advice.

Max.

Gentlemen, don't be so shy.

I was also going to say trust but verify. You know, it's.

Are you trusting but verifying Chad's trust but verify?

I would say Mikey's just verifying. I don't know the way I would put this right, what should go through your head? I think when you generate a piece of content using AI, you should just assume that it doesn't know anything about the subject matter and verify it, right? Because it's very possible that it will just say some that's completely wrong, right? And totally made up and, you know, incorrect, right? I'm not saying it's gonna do that. I'm saying you, you know, when, when you write content with AI, all of a sudden you become an editor, not a writer, right? You gotta be the editor, right? And you gotta, you, you can trust that it put together a nice piece of content for you. You should assume that it doesn't know shit about the subject matter and you should verify that what it actually outputted for you is correct. Real information, right? Because one, people are already starting to easily be able to like pick up and understand, oh, this is an AI written article, especially search engines, right? But two, the last thing you want is them consuming the content and you're giving bad information, right? And making yourself look stupid because the AI just kind of gave some like milquetoast take on some sort of like, you know, subject matter, right? And all of a sudden for people who don't know that, oh, this is an AI written article, right? They're reading some, some junk from you that's either incorrect or not good, right? So yeah, you can, you can trust, trust that it's going to create some content for you, verify that that content is actually good. And. And. And informationally sound.

Yeah. Interesting. So the way I'll answer this question is if. If you deem that there is some emotional intelligence needed or some strategic direction that needs to be laid down, it's all about the humans. If you're.

There we go.

If you're looking for a place where you're trying to enhance speed or extrapolate scale, then it can be about the AI bottom line. If I. If I'm gonna throw a divider out there, that's what I would want you to think about. Emotional intelligence, strategic direction, human, but then leaning into speed and scale through AI.

Assistant George, you're not off the hot seat just yet.

Yeah.

Help us land the plane. Take us home.

Yeah, this one's.

He's good at that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us what that one thing is. If we forget nothing else from this conversation except one thing. What should it be and why?

Yeah, without a doubt. Listen, Chad talked about the new merging ui. We talked about how remix is different. We talked about, you know, there's different AI platforms and should we be doing things just in HubSpot. We talked about how there's going to be different agents that you can. Like, there's a. There's a lot, ladies and gentlemen. There's a lot. And so we are definitely in a world where the thing that I would want you to take away from this when we're talking about AI HubSpot, AI versus human judgment is experiment and learn. Experiment and learn. Be curious, test different approaches, Refine, reiterate, refine. Like, figure out what works best for your business in a world where you can do almost anything you want to do at the light of speed. But I'm going to end it with what Max said. If you're doing things at the lightest speed, it's stupid. If you're making yourself feel stupid or look stupid.

Why is he saying it like that?

Why are you saying it?

Why are you saying the light of speed?

Speed of light.

Oh, well, whatever. If that's the last takeaway, we're verifying here. Speed of light. Light of speed, whatever. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat. Defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes. You'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.