Time to talk about AI! What do you think?

Sa.

Good morning, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Tuesday, January 27, 2026. How we doing, George?

Doing good, Chris. Ready to take on the rest of this week. How are you doing today?

I am doing great. Looking forward to warming back up soon.

Yes.

Yeah, we'll survive. Definitely think about all the people. A good friend Oaks yesterday mentioned his, his struggles in the Nashville area.

Yeah.

So definitely hope they get, they get power back soon.

Yeah. I saw my wife showed me photos of Nashville, Tennessee. I was like, wow, they definitely got it worse than us. My, my biggest problem was that last night we were out of feta cheese and it was Greek night and my wife asked me to go to the the store. And when I got to my driveway, which by the way is at a slight angle, I finally realized how good I am at ice skating without ice skates to get to my car and was like, hmm, that's just slightly dangerous. To which I warned everybody in my house to not come out the garage door.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't peg George B. Thomas for that skill.

Yeah. No, I didn't.

Skill you have.

No. I think Jesus was. He took the wheel and he held me up the whole way down, brother.

Oh, man, that's good. That's good. Oh, man.

AI.

AI. Yeah. We're gonna get into commitment number four and welcome in, brother Nico here there just in time, man.

The myth, the legend.

How are we doing?

We're doing good. Commitment number four. Spicy one. I think we will foster co evolution between humans and AI, not one sided adaptation. We recognize that transformative partnerships require mutual growth. We will create environments where humans and AI continuously learn from each other and evolve together, rather than forcing either to rigidly conform to the other's current limitations. Oh, man. I just saw a post and responded in kind. Pete Caputa put out there asking the question, is anybody like, can we get some examples of SaaS companies doing a good job adding AI to their products?

That's interesting.

There's plenty of them.

I feel like that's a blog article in the making. Is that. I feel like that's what that question was for. Like to curate a list of things that humans like to create an article to ride the AI bandwagon. It's funny, Chris, because Nico was like, there's plenty of them. And you were like, so I'm going to shut up because I want to know what the was about.

I think the AI companies are doing a good job of adding AI into their product.

So do you consider HubSpot an AI company?

Oh, certainly not.

Okay.

I think this is where we separate traditional SaaS from the world of AI native and built from the ground up with AI in mind. And like, like we saw yesterday, right, Claude dropping the ability, it's like they're building an AI AI infrastructure and then adding software in as needed. Right? And we saw like in chat, the ability to have embeds of software like Asana and Canva, just right there, right? So, and it's very hard, like if you're on the other side, SaaS, like, you have this SAS non conversational interface and you have to try to find ways to like build conversation into it without getting rid of the interface, right?

And it's, it's a challenge of like. And, and remember when it was difficult to get people to understand the concept of talking to your data.

Right?

Like, it, it used to be difficult to get people because they were like, what's the point? Like, what's the point? Why would we do that? Why would we put all our data into that thing? And it's like, so that you can talk to your data and ask it questions and everybody just kind of like went sideways. Like, what, what are you talking. Like, what do you mean? Like, talk to your data. What. What we talking about? And it's like the same things. Like the. For the last four months when I've been building out all your reporting folks, all the titles on all, all your reports, if you haven't noticed, they're all questions. They're not report titles. Because report titles don't make any sense. They don't make sense to me and they don't make sense to you.

So that would make sense to AI usually either.

Yeah, no, they do. That's the funny part. Okay, how do I know that? Because when I had to ask, and here's why the report titles changed, when I had to ask Claude to build out a reporting dashboard for somebody, yes, that did happen. Claude is in your, your Chrome extension. If you don't have it, it's your fault. At the time, at the time I was using Comet, and in both cases, if you are talking to the agents and you're telling them what it is you want to build out, and you're telling them in a reporting aspect, hey, I want to build out this information. Can you show me this information? It'll go. It might take a little time because it doesn't know your HubSpot or whatever. If your first time around with it, it'll take the time that needs to. But it'll come back and it'll build out the report the way that you were expecting to see it. Because it is answering the question. You can using the data. Right. It's not trying to put the data together and then see if that's going to answer the question other way around. Right. So when it comes to, like, why do. To what Chris is saying. Yeah. I don't. We, you know, me and George, we were just talking about it, man. We were just talking about the fact of, like, I don't. And I don't. I don't care how much this is weird for people because again, we have been talking about this for such a long time. It feels like. I guess that's why I don't have the patience. So, so I needed just like it's this extra thing now. It's not like I used to live in it and then pull other stuff to it and then. And say like, oh, quads in HubSpot now it's awesome. Oh, this is in HubSpot now it's awesome. Oh, that's in HubSpot now that's awesome. And now I don't see that at all. Now I just say, oh, cool. And I can use Claude to put that in HubSpot.

Yeah.

Or I can use Claude to change that in HubSpot. Right.

And I think we're on, I think we're on different sides than some normal humans. All right, let me unpack a couple things and then Chris, we'll get back to your pika pudda statement because I really want to go down the road and I also have something that I want to say just generally about the thing that you brought up on the screen at the beginning too. One, I think that we're on very different sides than most mere mortal humans because the people that I'm talking to get excited when I talk about contacts being associated to meetings, being associated to calls that have transcripts and now notes. And I can talk to breeze, meaning I go into HubSpot to talk to my data versus being on the outside and inputting and leveraging and outside of. And HubSpot as a container because we're working in other areas versus for them HubSpot their home, because that's the window to. Or the door to the thing that we're saying talk to your data. So I, I think we have to pay attention to that. There's both sides of humans that might be watching or listening to this and interacting with data, but should you be listening to your data? Should you be paying attention to your data? Should you be finding patterns? Because humans are good at finding patterns, but AI is great at also finding patterns, maybe even better than humans. Yes. From a fundamental standpoint, AI and business reporting patterns, talking to data, having a container that it lives in, whether it be HubSpot or not, by the way. Oh my God, did I just say that on a podcast? Because here's where my brain went when we're talking about Chris. When you, you were saying what you were saying. At first I was like, my goodness, is somebody going to come out and build an AI native CRM? Because HubSpot is not AI native CRM. HubSpot is HubSpot that has done the best they can to get AI in there and maybe potentially becoming AI native over time. Kind of like me, like I was already on the planet. But I don't. But I don't know because I think there's a deeper level that you start from if you're an AI native CRM. So I'm super curious if something like that emerges. The other thing that I want to share too, and then I'm going to shut up, is have you ever had those moments in life where you're like, ta da, I just did that. I've had a couple of my life where I'm like, wow, that was a pretty cool moment, I've got to tell you. You mentioned that you were using Comet, but that if you don't have Claude in your Chrome browser extension, shame on you. And I laughed. I laughed for a particular reason. Last weekend I was looking at some pages of a website and I was in Claude Desktop, and I was like, but I was looking at pages on one screen, I was in Claude desktop, in another, like kind of typing and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, man, I think these pages could just be a little bit better. I'm really on this kick of like A, B, C, D, F, like grade. What is the grade of this page? It's almost like I'm going back in school or what's the grade of this article? Like? Because I want a metric that Claude and I can both understand. And I said to Claude, can you audit this page? And I gave it the URL. And I fully expected Claude Desktop to start just to run, you know, the little box that shows up and it starts to think. And that's what I was expecting from a user experience. I said, can you audit this page? And I gave it the URL. And all of a sudden I thought there was a ghost in my machine. And I kept shutting it down, by the way, because of a Google Chrome window opened. And I was like, what the frick? And I closed it. And then it tried to open again. I closed it and I tried opening and I closed it. And then all of a sudden my cloud said, I'm having difficulty interacting with the page. And I was like, huh, wait a minute, Claude, please audit that page again. Then I gave it a second and I watched. Browser came up, went to the page that I gave it and I saw it starting to do its thing and I'm like, oh. I was shutting it down before it could actually do it. Was almost like Claude saying, ta da. Look what I can do. I can open your browser and actually look at the page you're asking me to audit. To which by the way, the audit was insanely dope. And then from that audit I was like, sweet. If we take this from a C to an A, rewrite this so we can give it to a cloud code project and have them redesign, rewrite the page. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have not used that workflow to look at your website yet. Okay, I'll shut up. Let's get back to Pete Caputa.

I agree. Like, so I, I gotta say, I, I don't think to your question about like, will HubSpot ever become AI native? It's like the, the immediate answer is no, because it's already not. Right? Like, it's already. That the infrastructure is already on top of something else. Right. So like the, what's, what's nifty is I think like what, what the three of us have been doing a lot of lately, which is, you know, starting out the directory with the agent in the first place.

Yeah.

And then having the agent build everything around that. Right. That turns it into AI native. I mean, like, you know, a lot, a lot of you guys can't follow us in our channel. You should, because if you're in Valley first, then you're following us and you're able to see all these conversations that are awesome. And we talk about the fact that we're building, you know, we're building orchestration at this point.

Right?

I know, I know I'm going above heads, but it will get to this point. I was just talking to two new students this morning and it's telling them the same thing that like, yes, you start out in the web, but so far as I've experienced, as you keep going along and your skill level keeps going up, you go from like web to raw. So like you, you go from like this web interface to just the most raw version of the interface possible. Which is such an odd thing that you kind of make this like regression sort of. But it, it shows me that AI native means that at the core it started with agents building stuff out because of the fact that it was designed for agents to be interacting with it in the first place.

Yeah, right.

So I think if something is AI native, it's not that it's got AI features and it does this thing and it has magic wand and there's wizard this to me it is that the entire system on the underneath is agentic in nature and that it is built to work with other agents. Like MCP is an after, afterthought type thing because like of course that's going to be a part of it. Right. It works well with others. It's not a software that needs an ecosystem.

That's it, that's it. Like it collaborates. Yeah, right, like, and like just to give, just to make sure I'm not misrepresenting this post here. Right. So he opens for that question, then talks about a story where SAS companies activation rate dropped by 20% when they added AI to their product. Says the mistake that seen over and over AI added as a feature, not as a value accelerator. Cheap models and shallow prompts. AI onboarding that asks questions and does nothing meaningful with the answers. But then he says here's a better pattern. Start with the outcome the customer wants. Use AI behind the scenes to configure, personalize and guide, reduce time to value instead of adding another layer to learn. Oh yeah, I'm going to say that the outcome that the customer wants is to not use your software, not have to use your software usually to get that outcome. Which is why these conversational interfaces.

Are.

Doing great job of giving them that outcome. He shares some things that he's doing, some performance summaries, AI building the metrics for you, analysis by AI and like the challenge like AI is there and back to like this co evolution stuff. Right?

Yeah.

What, what I said was first of all this looked like crickets on my phone. And then I came over here and like green, like what happened? All right, adoption's still the problem, like for a SaaS company. Like you have to solve that, right? And companies still think because they're SaaS, companies because they're product led, whatever, that they can solve it with more product and more technology. It can't be. And as long as AI is presented as a tool or feature, it's going to fail as the humans using it ask for help creating more efficiency and higher volume of the low value activity. I believe an AI native approach is the answer when treating AI as the infrastructure that provides an always on intelligent collaborator. One problem though, humans don't have AI native mindsets and capabilities yet. So if your AI addition or your parallel enablement strategy that you abandoned five years ago doesn't solve for this, it will be one to two years before value can be realized by the users who have then become AI native. But it will be too late by then because the companies that taught them how to be AI native won't need your software anymore. Yep. And George, I think to answer your query.

Oh, you left the screen. Dang on it. Before you leave the screen, show the screen one more time because and then you can ask me or talk about me. Chris, have you been looking at the 2026 GLC SUV lately? Like, are you balling from creating content? I'm like, I don't get that. I don't get that ad. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're not watching this the whole time. Chris brought up a LinkedIn post and his ad is for a Mercedes. I'm just.

Remember when this used to be Jobs? What Platform man. I did notice that, you know, every.

Once in a while I. I scroll through and I see the most ridiculous thing I could ever see. Unless I'm way off, which I don't think I am. It. It provides a good comic relief though. I see a Prada ad and it shows like the most wa. Thin male model with like the most, you know, Derek Zoolander look on and it's nothing but like, I mean like 60 plus, you know, laughing faces and like, I don't know how many 90 plus comments of like, this doesn't belong here. Why are you advertising this year? It's like, I'm not even sure. Like, yeah, I, you know, especially being in the world. And, and to one of Chris's, I think it's trap number, trap number two or three. Where again, yes, like, please stop going by your gut anymore. Please stop doing it. You're hurting my inbox. Right?

Oh, as far as advertising. Yeah.

I don't know how many of you GTM quote GTM engineers have your sales reps come into my inbox. You're not selling your GTM software to me because I'm outselling your GTM software. So, so what the. Like what? You know, like literally every message I get in my inbox that's like, hey, we see that you, you know, maybe you need go to market help or whatever. Every time I see that, that's.

Yeah, no, there's a good post, like, about that. Like somebody who had. Who's trying to be helpful. Right. Like, the first response back was like, no, thanks. And so he just gave a thumbs up and then there was like the no, thanks, then replied, oh, man, I almost didn't read this. Like, I thought you were another pitch. Like, let's have a call. Right. Like, that's like I Talked about throughout 2025 about how AI was gonna hurt the inbox dramatically.

Yeah.

Or it was gonna get good enough to find value. But like, back to the point of, like, to your point, George, about will there be an AI native CRM? I don't know. Like, because I think what we're seeing.

It'S like an add on now.

Right. Like, there won't be a category like AI native blank. Right. There will be no blank. Right. So like, if I can help leaders, say, no more slides anymore because I'm going to give you cloud code and remote repo that, by the way, is connected to this folder structure you're super used to and you've been using your entire business life. Right. Made that happy connection last week when I was trying not to freak somebody out about, like, you're gonna have to switch away from your Microsoft ecosystem. It's like, oh, wait, just the apps, this whole folder structure, just good. As good as you've always known it. Right. And then some publishing mechanism so that anything you communicate internally or externally needs to be this digital page or experience that.

Yeah.

You know, you won't have to worry about version control, just all the things. Right. And when you think about how the command line works, what's magic here is that these companies have turned that into a conversation.

Yeah.

So, like, I'm not worried, like, if we can get the mindset right. Humans are built with the capability to have a conversation. So if we surround them with the context that they need. Right. They will be able to use this tool and adopt it faster than any other software that's ever been put in front of them. Because it's a collaborative partner. It's not just this tool that you go and like input data and hope to, you know, output cookie.

Look, I mean, we, we were talking with the Oracle about this not that long ago. And this actually, I mean, like these two, like, it's just the technology, the, the software itself and then the level of the means of interaction. Right. So like the next device that is going to be, you know, hot, hot stuff. It's going to Be voice like, like voice enabled. It's going to be, you know, because like that's, that's as close as it gets to thought. Right? So like the, the whole, even the speed of having to go from thought to physical to touch to. Okay, now it's on screen. For me that's like, it's a little too long. Like sometimes I just gotta shortcut it and I just want to talk, just want to just straight interface. Right. And I, I have noticed at least over time when I try to like type commands or when I used to like type commands back and forth with interactions and conversations and stuff with the models, sometimes you'd get a little frustrated and like you, you, what happens I think for most people in your head is like, why am I not saying this right? Or how do I say this right? How do I put this?

Blah, blah.

And the reality is you need to destroy that framework because the models are being built to work conversationally with you.

They're being natural language.

So it doesn't do any good to put this technical barrier between your mind and the model. It makes way more sense to have this casual flow and connection and.

Yeah, yeah.

To me, like if I could, you know, and it's, it is, it's almost at the point for me where I'm going to be able to just talk to it and tell it what to do and when it's there. Yeah. I mean I will love working with computers forever at that point because it's just an awesome conversation to have and it's just cool to be able. I mean, come on guys, like, how awesome is it to just be like, yeah, hey yo gbt, what we gonna work on today? What's happening, George?

Yeah, right, right, exactly. So Chris, I know we don't have, well, we don't have no time, but can you bring that slide back up? That is the thing that we were talking about today. Because we will foster co evolution between humans and AI. Not one sided adaptation. We recognize that transformative partnerships require mutual growth. Mutual growth. We will create environments where humans and AI continuously learn from each other and evolve together rather than forcing either rigidity conform to the other's current limitations. Okay, so immediately humans are going to be like, yeah, the limitations of AI, Homeboy, homegirl. How about the limitations of humans? Okay, you literally said everybody knows how to have a conversation. Leave that back up, please. You might not be talking to all the same people that I'm talking to because some humans are really bad at conversations and have limitations. This is why when I use whisper flow to chat with my bot, just to cover my cya. Even though I am pretty good at conversations, I say, hey, take what I have said and optimize it. Optimize this prompt, optimize this conversation, and then let's run after that. But here's really the crux of as soon as you put this up this morning, and what I was hoping we'd get into and we didn't talk about, is the lack of onboarding that people are doing with their AI assistants. I think the reason that my talk the other day that I did was mind blowing is because the first part of it was how to talk with it. The second part was really about how to onboard it. Beliefs, mindsets, core values, voice and tone. Like, if it is truly going to be a partner, then you have to have mutual growth. So you need to help it grow so it can help you grow and it can be a. What do they call it? A symbiotic relationship. All right, I'm done here for today, ladies and gentlemen.

And that's why we're here every day doing this collaborative intelligence report. You got to find a way to get your mind right on that front, and it will be the best partner you could have working with you at the desk every day. So until tomorrow, gents. Everybody have a great Tuesday.

Peace out.

See you.