The CRM Arms Race: Salesforce vs. HubSpot on AI + Data

Yesterday, Salesforce announced an $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management tool. This is just the latest of a series of acquisitions by CRM companies that are designed to set them up for success in the AI era.

Here are acquisitions announced in the past year, alone:

What do these acquisitions tell us about the different approaches HubSpot and Salesforce are taking when implementing AI into their platforms?

Both companies clearly recognize that the most useful AI systems are those already trained on your CRM data. That means that the cleanliness, organization, structure, and integration of data is exponentially more important this year than it was even a year ago. But that is where their philsophies seem to diverge. 

I'm going to break down what I can glean about each of their strategies and, most importantly, what those differences mean for customers.

The big acquisition news yesterday tells us a lot.

Salesforce wants to build the "most complete, agent-ready data platform." They are putting down high-flow plumbing for AI. Informatica brings serious capabilities for cleaning, organizing, governing, and integrating vast amounts of data. This means Salesforce can unify customer data, even if it's scattered across different systems (data lakes, warehouses, other apps), and make it AI-ready. Their goal is to empower "Agentforce" – essentially, highly autonomous AI agents that can operate safely and responsibly on this clean, unified data.

This approach is powerful for huge enterprises with dedicated IT and data engineering teams. But for a mid-market company, it can be a heavy lift. You're looking at potentially significant investment in Data Cloud, specialized add-ons like Einstein AI, and potentially bringing in MuleSoft for integration and Tableau for analytics.

The overall implementation will be complex, time-consuming, and require specialized technical skills or external consultants. Think higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), longer time-to-value, and more technical friction.

HubSpot has always been about usability and native functionality and their recent acquisitions really highlight this. 

HubSpot's acquisitions

Clearbit: Finalized late last year, HubSpot's acquisition of Clearbit added business intelligence into HubSpot resulting in better data enrichment and providing additional data and context for AI tool to leverage. 

Frame AI: This acquisition is about pulling insights from unstructured data like calls, emails, and chat transcripts. It should help go-to-market teams understand customer sentiment and see other insights and trends without needing a data scientist on staff to structure and analyze the data. 

Dashworks: AI-powered search across all of your CRM data, content, file manager, settings, etc, could be a game changer for HubSpot users. If you've ever found HubSpot's search functionality lacking, this could be the game changer you've been waiting for. 

HubSpot's focus with Breeze AI is on making AI useful out of the box. They're building Breeze Copilot (your virtual assistant) and Breeze Agents (like a Customer Agent or Prospecting Agent) directly into the platform. The idea is to give your sales, marketing, and service teams AI tools that are intuitive, easy to use, and immediately actionable, without needing an engineering team. 

This translates to faster time-to-value, less friction in execution, and a generally lower TCO for most growing businesses. They scale their costs more directly with usage (e.g., contacts or AI credits) rather than requiring huge upfront infrastructure investments.

For most growth-stage companies and SMBs, HubSpot's approach often means faster adoption, quicker ROI, and less reliance on specialized technical resources. If you're not planning to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with a massive IT department, the "crafted, not cobbled" power of HubSpot's integrated AI might just be the smarter, more cost-effective path to leverage AI for your business today. 

That's not to say that HubSpot will do everything for you. It won't. There's still a ton of customization and configuration steps that needs to be taken in order for HubSpot to serve your specific business needs. The difference is, HubSpot's shallower learning curve makes it possible for non-technical users to execute those steps.

The AI era is upon us. Here are 3 actionable steps you can take today to help you integrate HubSpot's AI tools into your business: