HubSpot Enhances AI Capabilities with New Agents and AI-Powered Workspaces

HubSpot unveils new AI agents and AI-powered workspace features for enterprise teams - SiliconANGLE

HubSpot unveils new AI agents and AI-powered workspace features for enterprise teams Marketing and customer relationship management platform HubSpot Inc. today introduced new and updated autonomous artificial intelligence agents alongside new AI-powered workspaces designed to provide employees with launchpads for daily productivity. The company introduced a new Breeze Knowledge Base Agent, plus enhancements to existing Customer, Prospecting and Content agents. It also announced new features for its Marketing Hub Enterprise, which puts every marketing tool and data together in one platform, with journey automation and lookalike lists, and three new AI-powered Workspaces that act as home pages for teams including for sales, customer success and help desk. HubSpot introduced Breeze as an AI copilot with agentic AI capabilities in November. It underlies the company's entire platform for go-to-market teams and contains a unified view of customer management. "We've built Breeze, including our agents, so that businesses actually get value," said Nicholas Holland, head of AI at HubSpot. Agents are a type of AI software that can take action on behalf of users and automate complex, multi-step work that would otherwise be tedious and laborious. They go beyond simple chatbots that respond to questions and answers by making decisions independently and do not require constant human intervention to complete a goal. The new Knowledge Base Agent helps customers rapidly fill gaps in their knowledge by doing research across the entire company's existing information graph. It can reach into tickets and conversations to withdraw insights, work with the Customer Agent to identify knowledge gaps, draft articles from ticket data, provide report drafts for human review and publication, and enable customers to find answers through self-service. The updated Customer Agent allows customers to self-serve with personalized answers to questions -- and can learn from unstructured documents such as PDFs and knowledge base articles -- or can take simple actions such as resetting passwords. The Prospecting Agent can use context to research target accounts, personalize outreach for marketing and engage prospects through the smart CRM to help sales teams build relationships faster. The Content Agent allows marketers to quickly build blog posts and landing pages, including preparing them in the company or brand voice. Workspaces are an all-in-one home for teams to access information, AI-powered capabilities and everything they need to be productive during their day. They are embedded with Breeze and powered by the company's Smart CRM technology. According to HubSpot, that's why the company is introducing more Workspaces for sales, customer success and help desk workers. The updated Sales Workspace features a predictive deal score that highlights deals needing attention, offers AI-driven next steps, provides insights into deal context, and includes an AI meeting assistant for preparation and follow-up. "We built the Sales Workspace to make the research process more productive and offer guided actions," said Michael Walton, vice president of product and general manager of Sales Hub at HubSpot. "This way, reps can spend more time building relationships and less time summarizing them." The Customer Success Workspace gives managers a way to handle their schedule, execute tasks and get quick access to their reports in one place. The platform also uses alerts for real-time updates on customer scores. There's also multiteam support for large-scale teams and new reporting to give leaders a bird's eye view of performance leadership so they can stay on top of what's happening. Help Desk Workspace brings AI features to provide information needed to triage customer support challenges in one place. New features include the addition of operating hours, a new application programming interface to add messaging app tools to the help desk, team spaces for dynamic ticket sorting and collaboration, and improved performance analytics. HubSpot's Marketing Hub Enterprise is a marketing automation platform for large organizations and enterprise businesses that provides AI-assisted operations, deep analytics and enterprise-level security all with a broad toolset. It is the highest tier of the company's Marketing Hub software platform and has everything the Professional tier provides including forms, campaign management, multitouch revenue attribution, custom reporting, marketing analytics, a social media AI agent, email marketing tools and more. The company is introducing three new features including Lookalike Lists to help marketers find ideal customers, adaptive automation for customer journeys and multi-account management to centralize accounting for teams across organizations. "Marketers need tools that adapt as quickly as the landscape changes," said Angela DeFranco, vice president of product and general manager of Marketing Hub at HubSpot. "This is easier said than done for marketers dealing with complex buyer journeys and multiple businesses." Lookalike Lists assist marketers in locating customers among existing contacts by using Breeze AI to identify those with similar attributes to their best customers. This helps generate lists of high-potential prospects worth using in campaigns. The Journey Builder helps automate multistage customer journeys that can adapt to individual behaviors using analytics and real-time reporting. Marketers can see where potential leads are dropping out and governance allows marketing teams to work together with oversight.

Adding a journey builder for marketers - how HubSpot is building depth into its AI agents

It's no secret that HubSpot is a champion for the SMB market. And with 50% of SMBs failing in their first five years, they need someone in their corner. HubSpot wants to be that someone, and plans to use AI to help. According to Nicolas Holland, SVP and Head of AI at HubSpot, SMBs want to know how AI impacts their day-to-day business. They've heard the hype; now they want to see the value. That's a big reason why HubSpot is creating tools that make AI fast to deploy and work on a unified dataset. So, let's talk about some of these AI tools, starting with agent updates. First, the Customer Agent, which has moved to GA, is getting a number of new enhancements. The agent now has an action layer. For example, it can look up orders or change your password. Holland said they also worked on how to train it faster. You can feed the agent your knowledge base and your HubSpot website automatically. You can also feed it external data, such as PDFs and URLs (it will analyze up to 1,000 web pages). The Customer Agent now works with other agents, including the new Knowledge Base Agent. Holland explains that technology is no longer a limiting factor in many situations; knowledge is. If the Customer Agent can't resolve an issue, it's because it didn't have the knowledge to do it. Holland says HubSpot has customers reporting a 90% resolution rate with the Customer Agent, and wondering how they did it. What these companies did was spend time capturing all the answers and knowledge needed to train the agent. So, HubSpot built a Knowledge Base Agent that does the same thing. This new agent looks at all the unstructured data from service reps, including phone, email, and text content. When the Customer Agent flags a knowledge gap, the Knowledge Base Agent goes out and tries to fill the gap. It creates KB articles, which the Customer Agent then has access to. By the way, those KB articles are powered by the same engine as the Content Agent. There"s some new technology under the hood, such as the content graph. The content graph builds an interest profile on all your audiences. The Content Agent then takes that data and uses it to come up with content ideas. Also, because it knows all your content when the Content Agent creates new content, it handles all the backlinks in that content. No more manual backlinking (I can hear content marketers crying now). The Prospecting Agent is helping reps do research now. Holland said that reps are spending seven or more hours a week researching and building an action plan. The Prospecting Agent reduces that effort. It will find all the people related to an account in the CRM and build the buying committee, assigning roles. It can also do personalized outreach for the rep, and it can do it on a segment or product line basis because it knows everything about the rep and the business. Another important note on the research done by the Prospecting Agent is that all that information is stored in the CRM, so reps can see it there and make changes if needed. Basically, everything HubSpot is doing with AI and agents is about going deeper. Holland says the firm wants to help companies leverage AI correctly, and these four agents are the start of helping companies expand their digital work team: You'll see now that we're just trying to take these things and go deeper, versus many of the agentic systems out there are just trying to go wider. They give a lot of proof of concepts. They let the company go in there and try to cobble stuff together. But we are basically saying, like most companies that we work with, need a prospecting agent. Most need content marketing. Most need something like a customer agent to work with their customers. And that's what we're working on. HubSpot understands that people need tools that simplify their daily work. That's where the workspaces come in. These are a home base for Service, Sales, and HelpDesk people, giving them one place to work. Holland refers to them as "mission-control," where you have your tasks, a list of accounts to work on, and other things. These workspaces are AI-powered, meaning AI is driving suggestions and signals for employees to help them work smarter and faster. Where's the marketing workspace, you ask? So did I. There isn't one - yet. The HubSpot Marketing Home was announced at the last Inbound conference, but it's not exactly a workspace and is not AI-powered. It's also hidden in the reporting section, which is a pain, to be honest. So, still waiting on that one. Holland argues that HubSpot is working hard to unite all of a company's data - structured and unstructured. Once they do, they will have all this context about your business. He said they want to get to a point where they can make all this training data available to everything. Over 200 updates to the HubSpot platform have been announced, but the one that caught my attention as a marketer is the new Journey Builder. HubSpot has always had workflows that marketing can use to create simple nurtures using email and SMS, but it's not a true journey orchestration tool. The Journey Builder is built on top of the automation platform, but it's purpose-built to help marketers put the customer at the center. Holland says that the automation platform grew and workflows became more powerful, but it also became more about data and process automation. While marketers do need that functionality, they also need more, he suggests: As we began to work with marketers, a lot of them said, Yes, I need to automate, but I'm trying to put the customer at the center of what I'm doing. I'm trying to craft a journey that is personalized. It basically understands where they are at each step along the way. I need that lens. And so we took that automation platform, and then we built customer journey automation on top of that and things like that. And that really gave us the ability to see the analytics, the multi-touch revenue attribution, and the fact that now you can go craft again on the same platform, same unified platform, but you can do something that's very oriented to them, to the customer journey. Read that quote carefully - HubSpot can now show multi-touch revenue attribution, and it provides deeper analytics on where customers are in their journey. These are challenges that companies of every size face, and connecting the tools to do it together can get expensive and hard to understand. Here's the kicker, though. The Journey Builder is only available in HubSpot Enterprise, so it's not something SMBs will get access to. Holland arues that journey orchestration typically requires a level of sophistication that SMBs don't have. It can be complex; you need all your data connected, and you need to think strategically through multiple journeys. Tools make that work much easier. I personally think SMBs could use it. It could be a scaled-down version, but they need a place to start. HubSpot could offer them that place. SMBs need to move beyond the hype of AI and get access to the tools needed to run their business. Holland believes that the novelty value of AI will fade, and people will demand more from it. And as we move from novel AI to necessary AI context and quality will be critical, he says: This kind of concept of novel to necessary means that context and quality are going to be critical. And I think that when you get to all these like point solutions, they just lack a lot of that context that you need about your business. I think that's an area where we really see the future. Like the more context you provide to AI, the more you focus on kind of bringing that all together is going to be good. The next frontier - which I believe we are already at - is multi-agent. Agents working together, sharing an underlying data source, and context. Adobe is doing it, Salesforce is doing it, and Demandbase is working on it. It just makes sense, and any tech vendor bringing AI agents into their platforms needs to have a plan for it. Everything HubSpot is doing now works for both SMBs and enterprise clients. We do need to get away from AI for AI's sake and from playing with it and start building solutions, agents or otherwise, that affect real change in a company. AI that works alongside employees as part of the team is a big part of that. The last thing Holland shared was with this mindset. He said we will move from purpose-built AI agents to a new paradigm - reasoning agents. We give them the skills, context, knowledge, and a goal, and the agent will work on that goal. He said it's futuristic, but HubSpot is building skills across the platform, and they think they are close to being able to do this. There is never a dull moment in a world packed with AI. As long as we are smart about how to use it, the opportunities are exciting to think about and plan for. But we do have to get past the novelty of AI - and fast. As for HubSpot, one only has to read LinkedIn posts from Darmesh Shah to know how important AI is for the platform's future.