Time to Help Humans with #HubSpot

Hello, you've reached the HubSpot Helpline.

Helpline, helpline, helpline.

It's Rob, it's George, it's Casey and Kyle. Come with a problem and leave with a smile every Friday at 3. Come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. Open up your link, just make sure you call in and leave a voicemail about HubSpot. Make your Friday divine with the HubSpot helpline.

What up, world? It's Rob, it's George, it's Casey, it's Chris. This is the HubSpot Show. You just can't miss the HubSpot Helpline on Fridays. That was off the top of the dome. Not bad. I've been meaning to change the song. George, Chris, Casey, how are y' all this Friday? Wow.

Not everybody at once.

I guess I. I should do some more Intentional directive. Chris, how are you on this Friday?

Hanging in there, Pat. Under the weather, but we'll get through it.

He's like, I've almost made it, Rob. That's how I feel.

Yeah. In the. In the words of Ricardo Montalban, it's better to look good than to feel good. You look great, buddy. Beard is.

Is.

Is very strong. Casey, how are you?

I'm good. Back with us this week. Going to Great Wolf Lodge this weekend. My first time.

I have to know how that is. I've wanted to go there since I realized they were a thing. And I think the last time we looked at the prices, everybody knew they were a thing because it was, like, out of our budget. But if it's good enough and worth.

It, you gotta tell I'm rich.

Oh, yeah, obviously, I forgot about that. Speaking of rich, George, how are you this Friday?

Oh, God, that's not me. But by the way, Chris, I can't move forward if I don't say, you look marvelous, darling. Like, that's. We got to throw that out there. Definitely not rich. Well, maybe I am, like, in life and family and that kind of thing. Financially, not so much. But I'm not even really trying to, like, go for that. But I'm doing good. It's a Friday. I made it past the week after vacation, which is just usually a real interesting week as a business owner. But we made it. And I'm excited because after this show that we're doing, I have one more meeting with a client, and then I get to go with my wife and some friends to see the B52s. I'm just throwing that out there.

What?

Just saying.

I have wanted to do Hub Shack for as long as I've been working in this ecosystem and that. Let me write that down. That's next up on the list.

Yep. Hub shack. Gotta do it. Gotta do it.

It's a little old place where humans help build each other. I'll workshop it more. That wasn't very good. I didn't know they were still a thing. I mean, I guess they're.

They're either did I until one of our older friends said, would you guys like to go with me? And we said, sure. And then all of a sudden it went from like two people to three people to now seven people are gonna go see the B52. So I'm. I'm excited. It'll be a nice evening. It's like outdoor thing. But I do have a hoodie, go figure. Ready to pack and take with me in case I get cold, you know, that kind of thing.

Well, you only need to recruit 45 more to make it appropriate for the occasion.

Right?

I know.

Good job.

Yeah. Quick math. It's the one thing I'm also not good at. It's usually not right, but it is quick. Speaking of a dream coming true, like seeing the B52s, you to lead us into the first topic real quick and get to the mailbag. And Chris has a question. I'm sure Casey had something. I've got this pulled up, but you mentioned that you're. While you were off on vacation last week, you got back difficult as a business owner, and then you realized a day, I think you said three days ago, your dream came true and you realized it two days ago. Because blank now happens in blank. Can you tell the audience in case they missed this update?

Yeah. So, first of all, this is less HubSpot, more AI in general. And I use ChatGPT as like a backbone of a lot of stuff that we do. And so now we have business knowledge, which is a thing that you can enable, but as part of business knowledge three days ago. And I finally got it, realized it yesterday and got it hooked up today. ClickUp now works with Chat GPT or Chat GPT now works with ClickUp. And so if you're a HubSpot person out there and you Happen to use HubSpot and you happen to use ClickUp and you happen to use ChatGPT. Your world just got really interesting, especially if you're out there and you use Gmail and Google Calendar and HubSpot and click up, and all of a sudden that's your business knowledge vault. With Google Drive, life just got real interesting. The amount of things you can do based on that.

Yeah, I mean this is definitely HubSpot helpline, but I know, I mean I used to use ClickUp every day at RP so that, that's, it's within the realm of things that we can talk about. And just to be clear, you haven't. You have this scheduled for tomorrow, so there's not like an opinion or feedback or review yet. You're just in, you know. Excited about what?

Yeah, not a review, but I'll let everybody know what I'm. I'm excited enough about that. I'm gonna wake up at like 6:05 to go see what happens. And that is I. I have asked Chachi PT every morning at 6 o' clock to give me a list of all tasks that need to be completed listed by the users in my ClickUp channel. So now I get immediate visibility into who needs to do what when over the next day, two days, three days, every day basically. And so I'm excited to see what that does for me. Enabling the work I do, but then also enabling the work that others need to do that I may be part of as a leader.

Love it. I will call you at 6:07am tomorrow and we'll, we'll go over it together.

I can tell you, I. Rest assured. Rest assured, I will not answer. Okay.

Yeah. So enough about ClickUp. This is a HubSpot helpline dead gummet. I wanted to go to Casey next because she had something about credits that she. I don't know if this is a rant that we're gearing ourselves up for or a desperate. A plea for help. I don't know what it is. Casey, you had a LinkedIn post and something about HubSpot credits that I'm just going to let you get into.

I asked for help. Yeah. So I started this a little with Chris and George this morning. So I have a bunch of clients that have credits in their portals. Any accounts I think it's the accounts with seat based pricing were given. Okay, I'm getting nods. So I'm right. We're given access to credits. Depending on your tier of HubSpot will depends on how many credits you're given a month. But there's a monthly allotment, they don't roll over. So it's use or lose. Most of the portals I work in are losing all of those credits each month. Worth noting, I have started using a lot of the new agents inside of HubSpot which currently are still in beta and are currently not using credits but likely Will as they move out of beta. However, right now I'm having trouble finding effective use cases for the credits I have used them with to set up intent monitoring for some clients. However, anyone that joined the Sprocketeer Power Hour today heard me go on a rant about, like, how I feel about intent tracking generally. This is not HubSpot specific, just like monitoring company intent I find to be a little rocky. Like, how do you actually know? How do these companies, like, are they. Do they really have intent? What does that even mean? So I've set that up and that will use credits, but I don't love that use case and I don't love that use case for all of my clients. So, Chris and George, are you using your credits? What are you using them for? Yes, on the morning show all the time over this. This is.

Yeah, so, so I muted myself because I didn't want other ding dong bloop things to be happening while you were talking. So here's, here's what I'll say. First of all, can I dig in deeper to the thing that you said at the very beginning of that is that people are losing credits. I was in this camp and this is why I can say this. People are losing credits because of fear that they'll overuse credits.

Correct.

They're afraid that they'll turn these use cases on that we're going to start to talk about and all of a sudden they're going to get a, you know, 5,000, 2,000, $10,000 bill because nobody was paying attention to the credits. If you allow fear to dictate your decisions, you will lose more than just credits in your life. I'm just going to throw that out there. Okay. And so, yes, I actually got over my own mindset of this and I have officially, as of like two, maybe two and a half weeks ago, started to find ways where I could use these credits. One is I turned on Customer Agent for, for Sidekick strategies because I wanted to see, I wanted to play. I want to be able to build it out and understand how it all works because I have multiple clients that I feel could benefit with customer agent. Now I can't let my own fears and decisions dictate the ability I provide to a client. This is why I was able to shift my mindset because I'm like, hey, there's more at stake than just my credit usage. The other thing I'll say is that if you do some digging, you can literally see your credit usage. So, like, if I share my screen and by the way, I said that I have had this on for about two and a half, almost three weeks. If I share with you that I'm using the customer agent, I've used a whole whopping 360 credits out of my potential 5,000 credits. Okay, so here's the thing. Like, come on. Like if you don't at least turn it on or try the use cases that we might be able to dive into and you don't go to the ability to go look at your usage and also be able to refresh your usage and know that if you get to a certain space or place that, okay, it's time to shut her down or whatever until the next cycle hits. So, yes, I am using HubSpot creds. No, I do not want to lose my credits. And I. Well, actually, you know what, let me share my screen again because to, to be a good human. I also want to let everybody watching this show know that HubSpot Hacks has put out two great videos that you should watch. And by the way, I am an agency talking about another agency that happens to do video tutorials that like, because I feel they're valuable and I want to get them out there. One, how to manage your HubSpot credits and avoid overage charges. Go watch it. The other one is HubSpot credits 101. What uses them and what's free. Okay, now this, this, ladies and gentlemen, HubSpot hacks. I love you. This will need to be updated. There should probably be a monthly update to this video where you go to the description and be like, go watch our latest video on this because HubSpot is going to continue to change what actually cost us credits to do. But definitely if you're like, if, if you're. And I'm going to shut up, by the way, but if you're where Casey is saying most people are and where I was, at least those are two videos you could go watch and you could go test some of the things that we're about to talk about. Again, customer agent might be a good place to start.

I assume most of the audience is much smarter than I am specifically in relation to HubSpot expertise. But I'll play if, if this is a, if this is worth going down this road to like the 101 level. I'll ask a couple questions that are confusing. You mentioned that they don't roll over and you're losing them because you're not using them. They. They don't. You have 5,000amonth. That's all you have for the month. And if you don't use them, you don't have 10,000 the next month. Is that correct?

Right. They. They are. They are HubSpot. They are not att that.

Well, that's exactly the joke I was going to make. So thanks for stealing my thunder.

To be clear, just to be really clear, though, you can buy more.

Like, yeah, that was my.

So the second question, not to interrupt is fear of, you know, turning them on. So per action or per what? Like use of customer agent. It'll use a certain amount of credits and people were worried that that would just eat through their credit allotment so quickly that they would end up having to spend money on credits that they didn't already have included with their subscription. Is that correct also got it.

Yes.

Okay, go ahead, George.

Double down on what we're talking about right now too, is because, like, you can get at a very granular level with this. Meaning I'm sitting here in an organization of about 7 to 10 humans. That's not hard to pay attention to. If you're watching this and you're in an organization of 20, 50, 100, a thousand humans, it gets a little bit more crazy when you start to think about how this could extrapolate. But that's where you have. You can manage user permissions to who can use these things that actually use your credits. So you do. You do have some reins to the potential runaway stagecoach that could happen. That is HubSpot credits.

I'm so glad you went towards that analogy. I think we've got the cart doing victory laps and the horse has not even made it to the starting gate. Like where. I think it's much more about what Casey described in that people don't even know they have credits in the first place. So here's what that looks like. The part where it gets a little confusing is like Data Hub and Customer Platform are treated separately, primarily because Data Hub is involved. But then it's like, what can we even use credits for? Right. And we've mentioned the agents. I don't know if there's an easy list here, but it's like customer agent, prospecting agent, data agent, and put me in coach. Yep, there we go.

I did a training on this.

Right?

Yeah, this is, this is how my hyper fixation works. I won't shut up about a topic for 24 hours.

We need the help.

So, yeah, these are the features that use credits. There's breeze, action and workflows. Prospecting agent intent. I spoke about that briefly. Data Studio syncs. If you have large data sets, you can use credits to bring those in. I'm not, I've never used this. I'm not super sure Data Agent will help clean some data. If you, if you click in any of these, it'll tell you exactly what it does in the credits per action to generate response for one prompt using the Data Agent, Customer Agent and then closing agents in beta right now. So there's no credits at this point. It's on that list, but yeah.

And so if we keep this list up like Customer Agent, I highly recommend you don't just throw it up. Like you don't just throw it up on the site like in most people I've seen the portals, they don't have knowledge base articles, they don't have a ton of context. So just throwing up an agent. I think in both the case of Customer Agent and Prospecting Agent, there's a bit of setup to do that most companies are not prepared to do, unfortunately. And a lot of times it's just like, hey, this stuff is happening outside of HubSpot. If we bring that stuff inside of HubSpot now, these agents are going to be a lot better and it should be very Easy to import PDFs and strategy documents and voice and tone and just fill out the brand identity area of AI settings and you'll be good to go. Intent. We're not even good with the data that we do have. Should we bring more of it in? And that takes us to the last point where the rest of it's about data cleanup and data management, which are things humans have never been good at when it comes to CRM. So like the amount of understanding you need to be able to use Breeze in actions or in like Data Agent. I just think that the education gap is so huge right now, so you could be staring at those credits and especially when we talk about all the accidental admins of the world, like they don't have time to be figuring out this part when they haven't even like mapped their data data model and you know, it's on them to make, make sure HubSpot's working right. So I, I hear you George. And we've definitely, I've definitely heard some of that where people are like they're ready to set it up. Then the next level concern is, well, I can't budget for this. I don't, I don't know even know how people are going to use it. And I got all these teams. I think it's be very interesting to see how credits get spread across teams. Is it. It's like a whole nother layer. But, yeah, that's. That's my thoughts.

I think the part I'm having I'm struggling with me as a human is I know how, like, I know how the credits generally work. I know how much stuff costs. But kind of jumping off of what Chris said, like, customer agent. I wrote down. When you said that, Georgia, I wrote down, how long did it take you to set up customer agent? You have a knowledge base. So it. But I'll. I'll just let you answer that question.

Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, the initial setup, I just ripped through, like, hey, do this, look at this, do that, in the understanding that I was gonna come back after vacation and, like, try to finesse it and see how deep I could actually go if I were to give somebody, like, an hours, you know, Like, I think the initial setup I did in less than an hour, But I would probably want to spend, you know, three, four, five, maybe. Maybe even more again, depending on how deep I can go with it to tweak it and finesse it, because. But. But also, you got to remember, you're talking to a nerd. Like, I cloned myself. I've been through the process, like, making it sound like George B. Thomas. So, like, if I'm going to go into Customer Agent and use HubSpot's customer Agent, I want to know all the levers and buttons I can pull and press to make somebody go, damn, this thing is dope. Not, oh, yeah, it's another AI bot.

Because I feel like where I'm getting stuck when I try to set this up for my clients is there's some cool stuff you could do with your credits. But if you don't have this or that or that already in HubSpot, then, like, then what do we do?

I know what I think I know what you're saying, because I ran into this scenario earlier this week. Somebody sent me over a documentation of, like, we want to implement an AI bot for our website for sales and marketing processes, and they had all of these things they wanted it to do and be great at. And immediately my brain went to, and where does that content live? Because if you haven't historically created that content, then we need to create that content, which, by the way, this is a conversation that I have not yet had, but am willing to have right here and right now. Historically, the only content conversation that we've ever had is blog articles and knowledge articles for external users of website. There will be entire businesses that will be Built on creating content to educate clones, agents, assistants that may never see the light of day. Which is dumb by the way, because if you're going to create it, it should be created in a way for humans and for agents and clones. But there's, there's a business model for just creating that type of content. Let me explain. I have another client. We're building a Delphi agent for them. We wanted to put it through its paces. So what I could do is I could send the client and say, hey, go use your agent. By the way, this could be HubSpot agent, this could be the Delphi that I'm talking about. But I said, hey, let's book an hour meeting. I'm going to use your agent like a dumb human and you're going to listen to how it responds and you're going to then tap in when you would tell it to do something different. Can I tell you, in that timeframe it knocked it out of the park most of the time. But there were two times where he would say, oh, hang on, I want to say something. And I had chat GPT open in another window and I would hit the microphone button and he would start to talk about how he would fix what it had said and he would do this deep dive to which in that time frame, after we were done, I then went back and created two pillar pages worth of content based off of the answers that he gave me in real time of how he would want the actual agent to say or sound. Real time content creation based off of human powered insight and knowledge that can then be added back into the assistant. But also because I'm doing it, it's now pillar page content that will be on their website. So I hope everybody's understanding like content, it's, it's a future different branched conversation that you must have. Is this external or is this agent or clone version content that we're creating?

To your point though, it could be both.

It should be both.

Should be both.

Well, well, maybe because here's the thing, like when I, when I put my organizational hat on there might, because I have another client that we're helping. We literally did like a knowledge vault and a breeze assistant where these are like SOPs that should never see the light of day other to anybody that actually logs into HubSpot Portal as a franchisee. And so we're literally having Breeze assistant be a franchisee trainer. But that's because we're able to put tutorials and SOPs and different stuff like that in it. And again, it would Never be outside on a blog or a knowledge article. Right. But now it can be in HubSpot. As we created that content to do that thing.

How different is that? I saw something it reminded me of that that Winter is doing. It was a LinkedIn post. The guy said Winter is the only company doing this, but they have a pillar page on their website or content on their website that is specifically for it being scraped by LLMs. And it's like a set of instructions or whatnot to them is that that's something entirely different.

Something different because by the way, like if you haven't checked this out, and I don't know if he's going to hate me for doing this or not, but there's literally an AEO schema generator that is new to the market. I've just got to find if I have it up or if I. We might have to put this in the show notes, but I was literally talking to another client. By the way, they want to historically optimize or optimize their historical content to be more AEO friendly and that's fine. Okay, so we're going to do a couple things on page. We're going to add a featured snippet that's question based, we're going to add a table of contents and we're going to add 7 to 10 FAQs on every piece of content that you ever created that's going to be on page, off page or internally in page. There's a AEO schema generator that you can then generate the schema for AEO and it has a HubSpot integration that allows you to push it to the header section of the page that you've chose to like create that schema around. And so now you're hitting the two different directions. You're hitting on page and you're hitting the schema, which by the way, everything that we're doing, it works for SEO too. Like the question based snippet, the table of contents, the FAQs, like that works for SEO. But we're doubling down because of AEO and the schema. It's just, it's more information that people, not humans, bots that are searching the site see this information.

And I'll have you never mentioned a name and in the show notes.

Hang on, hang on, hang on. Give me a second, give me a second. Well, I mean you talk about show notes, but. But let me see if I can't round that up real quick.

Show notes. Look for this.

Yeah, I think a big part of the challenge Right now is there's so many other things to do with breeze in the portal that doesn't cost credits.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, that's where most companies should spend their time because I think customer agent, if you've never been doing ticketing or managing tickets or help desk inside of HubSpot, it's going to be a pretty big lift. And that's where most. I'd say, like that curve is not normal probably in terms of most users, like either they don't have enough traffic to their website to warrant that now, especially as buying behavior changes, or they're very high traffic and they've got to seriously worry about the credits, which are the stories that I've heard where credit's gone wrong have all related to too many conversations happening with the customer agent.

Right.

And if you're in that situation, I don't know what kind of decision matrix like you can put in place. I'd say if those are effective conversations, then 100 credits should be like. Should be a drop in the bucket. But it's a whole new, you know, budget line item probably that you have to worry about. In most organizations, obviously at the beginning of 2025, they didn't have credits like in the. In the budget line.

Yeah.

Well, I think one thing like I, what I'm hearing is people who have heard they have these credits and then they, they feel like they feel pressure to use them, but they don't know how to do that. And from my. What I've seen is every time I go to like set it up, I'm like, I don't know what, like you don't have enough data or you don't have the right, you don't have the right data to really make this effective. Is what I find myself like in.

Well, and is it, is it you don't have the right data or data inside of your. But also we're gonna have a fight over you not have the right data or data in your brain because you haven't educated yourself to understand. And this is why I brought up the HubSpot hacks videos by the way. You have an educate. And I'm Casey, I'm not saying you. I'm saying no, no, no relation. Have not taken the time to educate themselves on where and when and how to make it a smart decision. Right. It's almost like you have to go through a new sales process, but it's an internal sales process in your own brain for like the effectiveness or use cases. But go through that sales process, you've got to educate on like to sell yourself. Right.

I so for fear George said let my fears go by the wayside. So I'm going to say that before I ask this stupid question, but here we go. I guess you could, a lot could go wrong. You could drill down into this so much further. And so maybe Chris, George Casey can help me out with this. If it's customer agent and there, there is, it'll it'll block credit. So if you have zero left it'll give a prompt or that will stop working in effect until you buy more. It's not just going to charge you money based on overusage. Right. It's not like roaming to use your thing. It's like oh I'm now I'm roaming, I don't have any, I'm out of my coverage area. That type of thing. It's not just education. I'm wondering why you couldn't either give limiting factors to that like directions built into the prompt of what they're supposed to do or like a by any means necessary type of thing. So I don't know if it would be just volume. I don't know if it's just based on transaction between. If George Goes is interacting with customer agent and there's a lengthy conversation, is each response an amount of credits? Is it just certain people? If Rob the Troll goes to your website just to use your credits by asking a bunch of stupid stuff, could it kick me out? Right? Is there a, is there a way that you could program or give instructions that are, hey, this is, I'm not even going to use a credit here. We're going to ping a CS member or divert this to somewhere it could be answered because we haven't learned this yet. Like I am not capable of doing that. Versus could you also say I don't care if it uses a billion credits, we are not handling any more like this will not be passed off from the agent if it were trained well enough and we're educated well enough. Is there a way to put parameters on the usage not just in terms of credit but in terms of decision making or ways that the those tools are being used.

And first of all, let me just kind of back us up. 50,000 foot view because you mentioned customer agents specifically. But we have to remember that screen that Casey was sharing that had like a bunch of different options that could be using credits. And to my current knowledge, not every one of these tools have a turn it off if I reach my credit limits button. Now if HubSpot created that Then you could literally. Because right now I, I believe it is just based off of volume. Like if you go and look at Data Agent, right? It tells you 10 credits, total actions. Here's the credit usage. If you go to, you know, the customer agent, it says same thing, cost per action, total actions, credit used. And so at the end of the day it. It is a volume thing. Therefore if there was a. If I reach this level of volume, shut it off for each tool. Cool. But again, to my understanding, that's not the world we live in right now. Therefore you have the potential of something eating up or using more credits than you may have wanted it to and. Or going past what you had allotted. Now I could be completely wrong. If there's somebody out there even on the show, it's like George, you're full.

Of.

Cool, let me know. But to my understanding, no.

There.

Go ahead.

Can you bring my screen back up? Because this came up earlier today. Because in the documentation there's this spot to manage credit settings and you can set it to like auto upgrade or pay as you go and stop overages, like stop before it pays. However, I. I checked a bunch of portals and I don't see that option anymore. It's supposed to be right here and I checked mult. I checked multiple portals, more than one and.

Yeah, some parental controls on the credits.

It is not in mine. I wonder if it's in the. Nope, that goes to a knowledge article and I wonder if it's in here maybe. Nope, that's just user permissions. It's. I don't, I don't see it in my portal either Casey of being able to like manage it in that way. So again that's like you want to. You almost as a user. I want to have a fail safe and I don't see a way to have a fail safe.

That's the word I think I've been looking for this entire show is fail safe. Thank you, George.

Yeah, yeah.

I think like with customary customer agent is definitely the most configurable in terms of like all that stuff you were talking about, Rob. Because I mean it is open to the public. I don't know about things that can like prevent like whatever we'd call the DDoS attack of the agent. Like if somebody just spending your credits but it looks like you could pause it and then it's a matter of if you've given the system permission to just add more credits. But what's interesting though, this is again where if this is your first, if you've never Even used a chat before. Right. It says once paused or here we go. Like once customer agent assignment is paused, visitors will no longer see powered by AI within the header of the live chat, which means it's moving to a like a human based live chat. And do we have somebody like available for that?

Yeah.

Right.

With that said like can we take like a couple steps back and talk about like what customer we've talked about? Customer agent. Customer agent is like an AI chat bot, right?

Yeah, okay.

Yes.

Yeah.

I just like it's as if it. You had chatgpt on your website and your. And it was trained on your business and it was chatting or like George's clone.

Yes and no, I would say and I hate this, I hate this term. It's an AI chat bot on like crack. Right? So like like you're. Again, I said I hate the term, I hate the term.

Well, I think I'm more left here like I hate to say it like this.

I mean at the end of the day like a normal AI, you know, chat bot probably doesn't have where it can like immediately find knowledge gaps. It might not immediately have recording associated to it. You know like, like if we go, if we go into the customer agent right now, like there's there's a CRM data beta in the actual like management section. There's an email capture beta inside of. So like normal AI chat agent I don't think gets like new beta features over time that can be like that Again we got to realize HubSpot is HubSpot and this thing is ever changing into what they think it should become. But simple answer, sure. AI chat bot kind of.

Yeah, that's makes it clear as mud. Again, speaking as the troll of the group, I would be the one going on that there's like a talking about training the agent and not only credit usage, but how would you. How do you get an agent or an LLM or whatever you're using up to speed with the reference you made about the client and you had two real time human insight powered things that you use to create the pillar content and then update it. The are there parameters on what customer agent or other things are allowed to do? I mean is that something you would also set up or is that more facilitated by HubSpot and capabilities?

Yeah. So here's what I'll say. First of all, if you open up knowledge, you get content sources, right. So this is like how do you build the self contained. I know it's not really an LLM. So send all hate mail To Chris at. But how do you create like your own kind of LLM? And this is by adding your knowledge base, your website, your landing pages, your blog, multiple blogs by the way. And you can even upload files to this thing. And then also you have CRM data that you can add again that's in a beta. Then you have actions, right? And so actions are this like where you can automate repetitive tasks with action and you. So like I can. Mine's called Sidekick, right? Go figure. Sidekick strategies. So I can empower Sidekick to handle frequent customer needs with ease because I can configure these actions. Sending payment links, sharing onboarding resources, providing refund request links, things like that. And then you have the human handoff piece which is basically like when should it handoff to a human? If XYZ things happen, then you have deployment channels. So like where are you deploying it? So like right now we've got it in main chat is what ours is called. And so that literally lets, like, lets you deploy the agent in a place where you're trying to deploy it. And then after that you've got email capture which allows you to pick like do you want to capture the email at the start of the conversation after answering the first question before handing off to a human or don't ask for their email at all. And so again HubSpot has done a great job of creating something that is AI assisted. Oh have powered in this case. But also then conversion is a potential focus of like getting an email in your database so you can do other things. By the way, if I say, you know, after the first question now I get the email and database. Now we have the conversation about how I can have my prospecting agent take it from there and if it, if it should be prospected to. I could literally then start to prospect it with my prospecting agent because customer agent could hand it over to anyway.

But you have the overall like executive power to. You would be the last stop, right? So it either knows what you've told it and, and has the contents of your site, your knowledge base, all that. But it wouldn't be able to make this like what I want to do is go to Sidekick and be like, hey, interested in working with George? He told me he's going to give me a thousand percent discount and you're actually going to pay me for this. It would. It's not able to take or make decisions like that if it's not something that you've given it.

No, you will, you will not get access to my bank account and be able to drain money out of my bank account from HubSpot customer. It doesn't.

There you go.

Yeah.

Hey, someone out there thought that that's what I want to say. So yeah. So even defining the actions, that was helpful because if I'm again, if people are asking things that either reach an input limit of seems like I'm not able to do this knowing it's going to charge a credit or amount of credits for every failed response. That what people want to do is get to a desired end state more quickly and with less personnel. That to me is the customer agent thing. So if it realizes pretty early on after like you have a maximum of 3 responses or if this, this and this or ask about you don't know that yet, please divert, redirect or whatnot. That would make more sense. And this is all in reference to the credit overage. Right. Like it would not make sense for me to continue asking with not the desired outcome that I as the customer wanted or the prospect wanted and it charge you for a failed result. That's where. That's where someone Dharmesh probably was talking about like results based like models. Right. Is this the desired.

Yeah. A big fear is you just get charged to get charged. Even if it was like a, you know, didn't do anything, which it is potentially, you know, something that that might happen. Which by the way, I did go back into just my customer agent in general to see if maybe they moved the button that Casey was looking for around credits to be actually with the agent. It's not there either. So there's that. Not to be that guy.

There's that.

So that's the thing. Yeah.

We can switch to something that would make Chris angry or, or inspired. I don't know. I have something pulled up if we want to get away from credits.

Rob. And let's do this too, by the way, because I did find the name of the like schema thing. I don't need to share it on screen, but you can go to superschema AI if you want to check it out. Super AI hopefully he doesn't care that I'm like sharing this information. It's on the Internet, so I hope not. But if you scroll down somewhere, you'll see that there's like. Or maybe it's even in like somewhere you'll see. Yeah, you scroll down a little bit and you see HubSpot integration. So anybody who is a HubSpot user who is focused on being AEO friendly and wants to be able to do Schema in a not nerdy way. They might want to reach out to this organization. And by the way, if you're watching this, tell them that George B. Thomas sent you because I'm not affiliated. Let them know because if they hear that other times, maybe they'll at least say thank you or something and you.

And use code. George.

I'm not affiliated with them. I'm just saying I've seen it in action. I think it's cool. I like what it's doing for people that aren't necessarily nerds but want their content to be effective in AEO search, which, by the way, let me just throw this out there because I don't know if a lot of people know this. Like, if you happen to be using Cloudflare for your DNS, Cloudflare automatically makes it so that like, LLMs can't search your site. Like, I had to go into Cloudflare and tell Cloudflare that I wanted to enable LLMs to be able to search my site. So if you're watching this and you're like, well, of course it's searching my site. Go check GoDaddy, go check Cloudflare. Go check where your website is hosted. Or the DNS is to make sure that they don't have some sort of like block LLM settings so that you're like not cutting your nose off despite your face. That's not a good example, but you know what I'm saying.

Yeah.

People that are right do all this work, use the schema generator, add all the snippets and then like, that's crazy. Later you go, oh, crap. Like what? I'm locked in a DNS level.

What I'm hearing from that is people that were. That might be complaining because we've seen that, right? We've seen that at Super. I saw it at RP of heard other people talking about with. Well, we don't really know why we're showing up in ChatGPT, but our company, like, we gotta lead from here. You're saying that some people might not be getting that type of exposure or getting leads coming in from that and it could be their own fault. I'll censor myself because they have a.

Setting that they know. I'll go back to this. The amount of websites that I've seen launched back in the day with WordPress to within the first 30 days. Somebody asked why we're not getting traffic and I went into WordPress and somebody had set setting in the dev setting of like, don't, don't put this site so it can be searched and like you uncheck it and be like, hey, give it 30 days, it'll be searchable. But you were telling it not to be searchable or your dev team was like, I've seen, I've run into that. And it's literally this same scenario that might get caught in is like you're doing all this work and then you didn't realize it was being blocked at a DNS level.

I learned multiple new things every time.

I'm on this call.

Yeah, Chris, Chris asked me today what to look out for with changing Indian his domain. I would. This is what you should look out for.

I don't have to worry about that because it's hosted in HubSpot.

No, the DNS. The DNS.

Yeah. So your, your DNS is not like the website is hosted in HubSpot, but your DNS is on Godaddy or whatever. So like my domain name, I purposely, because I do some stuff for like site speed and nerdy stuff. I purposely have all my GeorgeB thomas.com psychicstrategies.com beyond your device. They're all in Cloudflare because I can enable an extra layer of like make this website faster because I can use some Cloudflare tools. Even though the HubSpot website is hosted on a Cloudflare CDN, I still do this extra step to get more speed. However, in that understanding, I realized, man, my domain name is over there. I better go make sure that Cloudflare isn't stopping it from being seen by LLMs. And it was, it was a setting that I had to go change.

Do you say LLMs or aliens?

It could be either. Yeah, I did say LLMs.

Just trying to see if Chris was still paying attention. For this to wrap us up, I think we, we asked this maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago, but it's from the Reddit mailbag and we. We've had a similar question. Chris, this was really cool that you said I want to ask. I want to read the prompt again or read the question again and remove the word AI. I think you're probably staring at what I'm looking at right. Right now. Maybe.

Anyway, I'm not.

What is one thing you were able to do in HubSpot? What I omitted from that is what is one thing you were able to do if AI was done right in HubSpot? And it really changes. Like this question has been asked a ton of times. What's one thing you wish HubSpot had? Basically, what's one thing you wish HubSpot were able to do. And I went and found both. I don't. I can't find the other one right now. But a lot of the questions, a lot of the responses are about the same. Does that say more about the HubSpot improvements in general probably 6 months ago since that question was asked, or does it detract from like the AI and then it's not fully baked out yet and people are still expecting it to be able to run their business for them? Let me, let me give you some examples.

That part.

Top response. Build complex reports, build simple reports, build reports. Build any report that is in some way use like that seems like more of a human problem.

Yes, see that's. But here's the thing, Rob. You're not hitting on anything new. For the last six or seven years, I've been able to ask a question and know the answer. If you had to tell me what your achilles heel and HubSpot would be, what would it be? Number one, reporting. Number two, workflows. Without fail, those are the answers that I get. Now. Can I just say something not to derail us? I did something earlier today that shocked the crap out of me.

Stick a fork in an electrical outlet?

No, no. I went to clone a page to build another page in HubSpot and there was a checkbox that I could check that asked me if I wanted to generate new content with AI. As I was cloning this page and the process that it walked me through, I was like, I might have to come out of retirement when it comes to HubSpot tutorials because oh my, like, it is a completely different way in which you can build something that was never able to be built in the way that it was happening. And so like, do I think reporting will get to that point too? Yes. Is it there now? Not in my opinion. Chris, I'm getting sick of saying is the worst that it will ever be that just.

Just the. The variance of responses from humans. George, I don't know if you had the humans drop, but from.

Yeah, from the humans.

There you go. Tells me it's more their problem. And it's a. It's a very subjective matter anyway. AI or not, right? This. This response. Anything the AI and HubSpot does not work properly. The response. Are you serious? I've been using Customer Agent and it's awesome. It handles above. Above 70% of my tickets there are. Is that not the same? They're using the same thing. One person, not very good. What are the expectations? I guess other person I love it. 70% plus is automatically handled. So I am sticking up finally for AI. Right. I've been a lagging adopter and very cognizant and all that. It's probably my mom fault because she's a Southern woman. But this, leave the AI out of this. This speaks more to the capability. This is the part Chris liked. What are you trying to do with it? How much data is actually.

Yes, yes. What is HubSpot supposed to be doing for your business? That first person, like in response to the customer agent content comment might have been like, you can do tickets in HubSpot. Oh, man.

Right.

Like, that's where we are. And that's why you just take that word AI out and people are in the same spot. That's why it's like reporting, reporting, reporting, reporting. Like those two weaknesses. I tell everybody those are my two weaknesses because I spend time on data modeling on what are you trying to do with HubSpot? Because if you can't handle those two things, I'm not touching reports because we're going to waste a lot of time with no, like, real result. Right. And it's unfortunate, but this is from the historical need to buy tools for like, specific activities. Like, I want to email people, I want to report on stuff, I want to automate instead of. I want to use HubSpot to grow my business.

So I don't mean to be a dick, but AI is not your strategy. AI is not your goal. AI is not going to help you with your education deficiency or manage your expectations of something that you don't know about or haven't put your brain. Again, I'm not trying to be a dick, but if you don't take time to set the expectations based on the goals that you have and the strategies that you're implementing and realizing it's AI assisted and human powered, you will continue to have issues.

Yeah. Bolling says all the time knowledge transfer does not equal behavior that requires having some knowledge in the first place. But AI is not a strategy. I love that. Like, what, what is the, what is the desired end state? Probably the same as if you didn't have AI and it was never invented. I want to help more people. I want to make more money. I want to reduce time here. Like whatever you're saying that I want to, I want to make my outbound process more efficient and reduce errors with or without AI. Is that not like the. The desired intent, the end state? Yeah. So, yeah. Glad I could finally, for once, one Friday, stand up for AI and put some blame back on the humans. See?

I appreciate you, Rob.

There you go.

Finally I got the message in my ear.

There we go. It's been a great Friday. George is back with us. Casey is has been trying to not rant again, and Chris is under the weather. But we'll be back next Friday at 3 Eastern after this update from George.

Hey, I just got a call from AI. It says, thanks, Rob.

See you next week.

Hello.

You reach the HubSpot Helpline.

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