UNBOUND UNBOXED
Hosts: Casey Hawkins, Madelyn Donovan, Zach Hussion, Ryan Ginsberg, Joshua Oakes, Chris Carolan, George B. Thomas
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Seven of us unboxed HubSpot's UNBOUND conference in our first official Hubsessed webinar. We covered the people and the product booths, whether HubSpot customers are ready for the new agents, why your data and your definition of value come first, and what AI's speed costs us.
Key takeaways
One of us brought back HubSpot's point that good context improves AI outcomes and bad context diminishes them, and has made getting clients' context updated and accurate a priority since.
The product booths were worth the trip: real conversations with the people building HubSpot, paying customers working through complex problems, and a chance to watch the product used from the same side of the screen.
Agents were the loudest announcement, and several of us said HubSpot customers are not ready for them yet: there is a difference between turning an agent on and using it at the scale you need without creating chaos.
Educate before you execute: know which steps cost credits, what an agent will do to the people in your organization, and what it collides with, such as a revenue agent chasing invoices your accounting software already sends reminders about.
The foundation is your data, the automation around it, and governance that keeps a good setup from being undone. At George B. Thomas's five-layer session, the people who filled in the scorecard came back at a C minus for their marketing, and his point was the experience that creates for the people on the other side.
Start with one use case at a time where the friction is: where the busy work and manual effort sit, and where people have given up complaining, rather than trying to cut the whole Gordian knot.
Outcomes only mean something once a business has defined value. A single North Star metric is easy to game, a hundred closed tickets can be a hundred garbage tickets, and AI now has to prove itself. Ask it three ways: AI for me, AI for my business, AI for the humans I serve.
Speed has a cost. The time it takes to deliver valuable work is now hours, time can feel condensed to a point that feels unhealthy, and because we can do it so fast doesn't necessarily mean we need to always do it so fast.
Transcript
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