The Top 5 Product Announcements from INBOUND25

If you logged into LinkedIn at all last week, you are probably aware that HubSpot’s annual conference, INBOUND, just happened. You've probably seen a million headlines, and with over 200 new product announcements, it's easy to get lost in the noise. And I get it. You’re busy. I am honored you are even reading this newsletter. So, I will distill INBOUND down to the top 5 most important updates you should pay attention to – the foundational shifts that will make our lives easier, our work more impactful, and our businesses more competitive.

So, grab your coffee and let's break down the top 5.

Operations Hub has officially been renamed Data Hub. It’s a nice simplification of branding for a set of tools that were difficult to understand. But, it’s also a realignment of HubSpot's focus on data. If last year’s INBOUND was all about Breeze, this year’s was all about data, and how it needs to be cleaned and structured in order to get the most out of Breeze and other AI tools.

The big news here is the launch of Data Studio. Think of it as a powerful data manipulation and enrichment tool, similar to what you might get from a third-party tool like Clay, but now it's all native to HubSpot.

Data Studio allows you to connect to external data sources and then transform, clean, and enrich that data right inside your HubSpot portal. You can pull in information from various places (like a list of attendees from an event management tool or product users and activity from your data warehouse) and use that data to create new data for properties, segments, or to trigger workflows. It’s all about making your data work for you, no matter where it lives.

This is a massive step forward for anyone doing serious marketing and RevOps. The ability to pull in data from external sources and then manipulate it without leaving HubSpot is a big step up from the data sync integrations and Format Data workflow actions we used to be stuck with.

Imagine being able to automatically enrich contact records with company-level data from a third-party source, or cleaning up messy property values across your entire database with a single, repeatable process.

This feature is going to streamline data operations and provide a powerful new tool for hyper-personalization at scale. It means less time spent on manual data cleanup and generating new, novel data, and more reliable data for our sales, marketing, and service teams. It directly addresses the "dirty data" problem that so many of us face, turning our HubSpot portal from a simple record keeper into a strategic data engine.

This is the tool that’s going to make you a data wizard. You’ll be able to solve complex data challenges without writing a single line of code or relying on a developer. For years, we've had to cobble together solutions using custom coded workflows or expensive third-party tools to handle data enrichment. Now, it's a built-in feature. It gives us the power to create a truly unified and clean customer database, which is the foundation for everything we do.

HubSpot has made a significant shift in its pricing and packaging model. They've decoupled their core Smart CRM features from the other hubs. What does this mean in practice? It means you can access powerful extensibility tools, like Custom Objects, Custom Events, or Sandbox environments, for half the price of a Service Hub Enterprise seat, previously the least expensive way to get these tools. Now, with the new Smart CRM Enterprise seat, you get all those powerful features for just $75/month.

HubSpot has come under fire for the complexity of their pricing and packaging, but this change speaks to how HubSpot is reevaluating how they think about their CRM. They are making their most powerful deep customization and complex process building features accessible to a much wider audience. It's a clear signal that the CRM, not Marketing, is the true center of the HubSpot universe, and they want to empower every user to build a platform that fits their unique business needs.

How does it impact your business?

This change lowers the barrier to entry for building a truly customized HubSpot portal. Before, a small or mid-sized company might not have been able to justify the cost of an expensive seat just to get access to Custom Objects. Now, they can. This opens up a world of possibilities for us to create tailored solutions for our business that go far beyond standard contact and company records.

If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn, you’ve seen plenty of examples of how Enterprise extensibility tools can be used to create tailored data models and automated processes to support industry-specific use cases. You can create Custom Objects for things like events, subscriptions, or whatever else is unique to our business model. This allows you to track and report on your data in a much more sophisticated way, without having to pay for an entire suite of features we might not use.

This is a huge win for anyone on the ops team. It gives you the power to build a better, more accurate CRM without having to go to a multi-billion dollar company that forces you to choose between paying for the platform or paying for a developer to help you manage it. It's an opportunity to build a CRM that is a perfect reflection of our business, and a way to solve our team’s biggest CRM pain points without having to break the bank.

After the success of integrating the external ChatSpot tool into Breeze Assistant, HubSpot now seems to be following the same playbook for Agents.ai. They’ve announced a new marketplace for AI agents. Right now, there's a limited selection of agents created by HubSpot, but the big news is the future promise: developers will soon be able to build their own agents and list them on the marketplace.

This is essentially the AI equivalent of the App Marketplace. Just like how we can install apps to add functionality to our portal, we will be able to install AI agents to perform specific, automated tasks. This promises a future where we can build a highly customized team of AI agents that can work in our portal, providing us with a ton of utility and customization.

 Imagine an AI agent that automatically analyzes your sales call transcripts, identifies key objections, and logs them in a specific property on the contact record. Or an agent that monitors support tickets and automatically flags issues that indicate a risk of churn.

This marketplace is going to unlock an incredible amount of efficiency and insight. It will allow us to automate complex, multi-step processes that previously required manual work or a convoluted series of workflows. It’s all about creating an automated workforce that works behind the scenes, freeing up our human teams to focus on high-value, strategic work.

This is the future of our jobs. AI isn't going to replace us, but it is going to empower us to do more with less (and hopefully take away the boring busy work so we can be more engaged with work that challenges us to grow). By configuring a team of specialized AI agents, you can build a system that proactively identifies problems and opportunities, takes care of tedious tasks, and provides you with the insights you need to make better decisions. HubSpot has yet to achieve the promise of agents working with other agents to complete complex tasks, but the new marketplace is certainly a large step in that direction.

Building on the AI theme, HubSpot has also introduced Custom Assistants. This new feature gives HubSpot customers the ability to create their own personalized AI assistants that can be trained on their company's unique data. Think of it as "Custom GPTs" for HubSpot's Breeze assistant.

With Custom Assistants, you can use company-specific information—like your brand style guide, product documentation, sales playbooks, or customer FAQs—and create a specialized AI that understands your business inside and out. This assistant can then be used to help with a variety of tasks, from generating content that matches your brand voice to summarizing internal knowledge base articles for a new hire.

This is the key to making AI truly useful for your specific business. General-purpose AI models are helpful, but they don't understand the nuances of your products, your brand voice, or your customer base. By training an assistant on our own data, you can create a powerful tool that can assist our marketing team in writing on-brand copy, help your sales team quickly find answers to prospect questions, and empower your service team to respond to customer inquiries with accurate, company-specific information.

This feature ensures that the AI we use is not just smart, but also relevant. It turns a generic tool into a proprietary asset that gives us a competitive advantage.

This is where AI becomes personal. This isn't just about using AI to write a blog post; it's about creating a true co-pilot that understands the specific challenges and nuances of our day-to-day work. It's like having an incredibly knowledgeable new hire who has already read every single one of your internal documents and is ready to help at a moment's notice. It will save you time, ensure brand consistency, and empower everyone on the team to be more effective.

While this isn’t the complete overhaul of the Campaigns tool that I have been asking for, Marketing Studio is an incredibly powerful new way to organize integrated marketing campaigns. Marketing Studio allows marketers to visualize and manage all campaign assets in a new canvas view. You can see emails, pillar pages, social posts, etc., all in a single, unified workspace.

You can also add notes and tasks for each asset, which makes it easy to track progress and collaborate with your team. And, while I find this part less exciting, Marketing Studio also uses your brand voice and training data to create a "first draft" of each asset. This means you’re not starting from a blank page. Instead, you have a decent starting point to build upon. 

This tool is going to be a huge help for anyone who is trying to create integrated marketing campaigns instead of what I like to call "Random Acts of Marketing." It provides a single source of truth for all campaign assets, which will reduce confusion and streamline collaboration. The canvas view makes it easy to see how all the pieces of a campaign fit together, ensuring a cohesive and integrated message across all channels.

The AI-powered first drafts will also dramatically reduce the time it takes to create campaign assets. This means we can launch campaigns faster, test new ideas more frequently, and free up our creative energy for strategic thinking instead of content creation.

Marketing Studio is the answer to the age-old problem of campaign management. Instead of having to jump between different tools and tabs to see the various components of a campaign, you now have a single, unified view. It’s going to make you more organized, more efficient, and more effective. It will help you move from reactive marketing to strategic campaign planning, which will ultimately drive better results for the business.

It will also help you convey to leadership that, no, you can’t build and launch a full marketing campaign in a week. There are dozens of assets they will be able to see in a single view, which should help convince them that, even with AI, you need more time to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

And there you have it, the five most impactful product announcements from INBOUND 2025! These tools are available now, either live in your platform or in beta. So, what are you waiting for? Time to start building!