Nobody Has Been to UNBOUND Before

Last September was my first ever INBOUND. I went in with a full schedule and every session picked out ahead of time.

Then I got there. The conversations in the hallways turned out to be where I was actually learning things, so I started skipping a lot of the sessions and spent that time with people instead.

I don't think that's necessarily the right way to do it. It's just what happened. I have friends who pack their schedules wall to wall and get exactly what they came for. Mostly I just wish someone had told me ahead of time that the schedule wasn't the whole event.

Which brings me to why I read all 263 UNBOUND sessions this month, and it isn't that I'm building a perfect itinerary just for me to ignore it once I get to the show floor.

Most of the people reading this probably aren't going to Boston. But an agenda is one of the few times a year HubSpot tells us what it thinks matters, at length, in public, twelve months ahead of when you'll actually feel it in your portal.

Almost everyone reads it as a schedule. It's worth reading as a signal.

At the end of the day it's still a marketing document, so it's softer evidence than release notes. But it's a lot of stated priorities sitting in one place, and this issue, my first ever Hubsessed issue, is about what they add up to. If you're going, it might double as a plan. If you're not, it's the same information without paying for the flight.

AI, agents, and Breeze: 57 sessions have one of those in the title, more than one in five. The count matters less than the shape of it. There's a session on Agent Hub as a place agents get managed, and a lab on building and deploying customer agents that runs four separate times. Four. Nobody builds a lab four times for something they're testing the water on. If you've paid any attention to release notes the last two years, none of this will shock you. AI is in everything now, and the agenda matches.

AEO and answer engines: 13 sessions, twelve with it in the title. In one of them, HubSpot walks through seven of its own AEO experiments, including the ones that failed. I'd take that over the twelve promising you a playbook. Between the tool and the sessions, HubSpot is clearly investing in AEO as a product and as a practice inside their own marketing org.

Data quality: Around fifteen sessions, depending on how you count, and this is the group I'd watch. The framing moved. We used to call it hygiene, the thing you know you should do and keep not doing. Now it shows up as a prerequisite: "Building the Data Foundation for Agentic AI." When the model is the one acting on your data, you don't really get to postpone it anymore. Ryan wrote about this here in July from a different angle.

Attribution appears once. One time, in the entire agenda, across 263 sessions.

It's a twenty-minute Tech Stack Showcase slot from Fivetran on Thursday morning, and the pitch is unifying data out of HubSpot and into a warehouse so you can run Multi-Touch Attribution and Marketing Mix Modeling somewhere else.

That's the only place the word shows up. A vendor selling you a way to do attribution outside of HubSpot.

HubSpot's own guide to the agenda is organized around five goals: generate more pipeline, make your AI investments pay off, win visibility when buyers skip your site, scale revenue without scaling headcount, and develop your team. None of those five is measurement.

The work is still there, though. It's just called different things now: From Dashboards to Decisions, Beyond Ticket Sales: How To Prove Event ROI, Turn AI Experiments Into Measurable Revenue, and Predict Churn Before It Happens Without Health Scores.

So I don't think HubSpot stopped caring about measurement. I think the word went somewhere, and I have a theory about where. It needs more digging than I can do this week, so consider that a future issue.

Recaps and a curated set of recordings go up on the HubSpot Live YouTube channel afterward, free. So this is a watchlist whether or not you're there.

The one you can't miss is the HubSpot Spotlight, Wednesday at 9:30 on the Main Stage, with Yamini Rangan, Duncan Lennox, and Jon Dick. That's where the platform changes get announced and where you'll get the clearest view of where HubSpot is headed. We'll cover what actually shipped and what's worth your time, after.

Two honest caveats before the rest.

First, if you read the top of this email you already know I'm not big on sessions. Outside the main stages I'm only planning to attend a few. That's my preference and it might not be yours, and it doesn't help you prioritize.

Second, narrowing this list down was the hardest part of writing the whole newsletter. Hours, on this section alone. So it isn't exhaustive, and it isn't even the list of what I'm attending. It's a starting place if you, like me, read 263 session titles and thought "okay, now what."

If you only do one thing on this list, make it the first one. It's free, there's nothing to reserve, and it'll give you a better read on the rest of the event than any single breakout will.

Meetup: Admin Home Base: Wednesday at 4:00. The in-person gathering of the HubSpot Admins HUG community, and no "Admin" title required. Rotating conversations across governance, integrations, AI, adoption, and data quality, plus they're handing out a guide to admin-relevant sessions across the whole event. New, accidental, or experienced. For the people who read this newsletter, it's the most on-audience thing on the agenda.

RevOps for Real: Systems Built for Imperfection: Thursday at 3:30, Deep Dives. Maarten Bovend'aerde's premise is that most RevOps frameworks assume ideal conditions while real organizations are messy and inconsistent and changing under you. He covers diagnosing what's actually broken, deciding what should be automated, and a Minimum Viable RevOps model that doesn't overengineer things. At a conference where nearly everything else tells you to add more, this one's telling you to add less.

From Dashboards to Decisions: How to Build Revenue Reporting: Thursday at 4:15. Nida Ateeq on why dashboards look complete and still fail to drive decisions, how to design conversion metrics that reflect real buyer behavior, and how to build reporting your team will actually trust. Given everything above about the word attribution, this is where the measurement work went.

Kyle Jepson's admin trilogy: Implementation on Wednesday at 2:00. Optimization on Thursday at 4:15. Troubleshooting on Friday at 10:00. These map to stages rather than topics. Implementation is for new builds, Optimization is for the portal you inherited from someone else, and Troubleshooting is for tracing why data changed and workflows stopped behaving. Pick the one matching your current problem. Kyle's admin session was the highest-rated breakout at INBOUND 2025, a perfect 5.0, just like Kyle is. Fair warning that Optimization runs opposite Dashboards to Decisions.

Audit Your HubSpot Live: Friday at 9:45, Deep Dives. Tyler Samani-Sprunk walks you through auditing your own portal in the room using frameworks from hundreds of them, and you leave with a prioritized list. It's the closest thing on the agenda to what this newsletter does, which is either an endorsement or a conflict of interest. If you go, tell me how it went.

Admins Unfiltered: Friday at 12:45, HubSpot Heroes. Three working admins on how they decide where to spend their time when expectations keep moving. Billed as a raw conversation with real Q&A. Fewer slides than most of Friday.

If you're partner-side, add Battle of the Builders, Thursday at 3:30 on the Innovation Stage. Five partners, one stage, $100,000. Most people will go for the competition. I'd watch it for a different reason, which is that it's the clearest look you'll get at what HubSpot thinks good agent work looks like when someone is writing a six-figure check based on the answer.

Reservations for limited-capacity sessions are already open for VIP. Everyone else, September 1 at 11 AM Eastern.

Once you're in there, the thing I'd protect time for is Unplugged Studio, which might be the closest thing UNBOUND has to a hidden gem.

There are thirty slots on the agenda, but that's ten-ish runs each of only three sessions. Small groups, no screens, laptop stays at the door. And none of the three is about HubSpot.

What actually makes these different is that you can't half-attend. Most sessions let you sit in the back with your inbox open and still walk out feeling like you got something. These are small enough that you're in the conversation, and you'll be interacting with the people running them whether you planned on it or not.

That's a lot to ask on day two of a conference. It's also the only part of the agenda built around how you think rather than what you should go build next.

They run all three days, so this one costs you almost nothing to work around.

If you get sessioned out, and you probably will be, I'd point you toward the least original debate in Boston. Mike's versus Modern.

I know. Every Boston listicle since 2009. But I lived there one summer and sometimes you just have to lean into the tourist traps.

So consider this formal data collection. Try both, find me in Boston, tell me which one wins. I'll report the official Hubsessed community cannoli preference in September, in an issue I'm tentatively calling UNBOUND Wrapped, alongside the actual product news.

You're going to get a lot of emails and LinkedIn DMs asking you to meet up at UNBOUND over the next few weeks, and most of them are a demo with a latte attached.

That isn't what this is. No booth, no deck, and nobody is scanning your badge unless you want to connect.

All six of us will be there. If you spot one of us, walk up and say you read this. We'll have something for you, and if you've got a portal problem you've been chewing on, we'll take a real swing at it right there.

Mostly we just want to meet the people who read a newsletter all the way to the end. We just took this over, and the thing we most need to know is what you want us to write about. That goes over better in person than over some boring survey.

If you want to make sure it actually happens, reply to this email or DM one of us on LinkedIn and we'll sort it out.

Not going? Reply anyway and tell me what you want covered in future issues. Or give me a Boston recommendation, cannoli or otherwise.

In the meantime, I'm on The Road to UNBOUND with Chris Carolan, Rob Jones, George B. Thomas, and Kyle Jepson every Wednesday at 11:15 AM ET. We're live on LinkedIn right up until the bus gets to Boston.

Stay Hubsessed,
Casey