"How to Get Real ROI From HubSpot’s Spring Spotlight AI Updates" - The Fast Slow Motion Podcast - Ep 060

In this episode, host Eric Housh sits down with Brandon Landes, Chief Delivery Officer at Fast Slow Motion, to unpack the 2026 HubSpot Spring Spotlight and what it actually means for growing businesses. The conversation centers on a major shift from CRM as a system of record to a system of action powered by context.

They explore outcome-based AI pricing, signal-driven sales workflows, and the move from SEO to answer engine optimization. The discussion also highlights the operational realities behind AI adoption, including data quality, process readiness, and risk controls.

This episode is for leaders trying to move beyond AI experimentation into real, measurable business impact.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And I'll say this. Uh when I read through these spotlight notes, it it felt different. It feels like we've been talking a lot about AI. We've been doing that for a couple of years now, but this release is really where the rubbers meet in the road. These are these are concept features. They're in the portal. They're live. And it it's going to change how our clients and and even we use CRMs on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped thousands of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit www.fastslowmotion.com. Welcome back to the Fast Slow Motion Podcast, where we discuss strategies, ideas, and insights on how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I'm your host, Eric Hush. And today we are diving into the 2026 HubSpot Spring Spotlight. Usually a lot of noise every time a major software player drops a product update, but this one signals a couple of fundamental shifts. First, HubSpot's talking a lot more about value and not just features. Also, not surprisingly, about 95% what was discussed in this spotlight is AI focused, making HubSpot's evolution from just a CRM to what they're calling an agentic customer platform. In the spotlight, they focused mainly on three core use cases where HubSpot AI is promising to deliver real value, building awareness, driving revenue, and scaling support. We're also seeing a move away from the traditional system of record where you just store data to more of a system of action powered by customer context. Stick a pin in that, we'll come back to it. To help me cut through the confetti and the noise and get to the operational reality of this spotlight and these updates, I'm joined today by our chief delivery officer, Brandon Landis. Brandon, you've been looking at these updates from the perspective of how they actually change the game for our clients who are moving beyond static databases and into these dynamic, automated environments. Brandon, great to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Thanks, Eric. I appreciate it. It's always always great to be here. And I'll say this uh when I read through these spotlight notes, it felt different. It feels like we've been talking a lot about AI. Um, we've been doing that for a couple of years now, but this release is really where the rubbers meet in the road. Uh these are these are concept features. They're in the portal. Uh, they're live, and it it's going to change how uh our clients and and even we use CRMs on a day-to-day basis.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

I know it's certainly causing a buzz here at Fast Slow Motion. Everybody's digging into this, really interested in learning uh more about these updates and how we can apply them and deliver, again, real value to our clients. Uh let's let's come back to that word context. HubSpot is positioning context as their massive differentiator this year. Before we get into the details, what do they mean by context in a practical sense?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

Yeah, sure. Uh and this is really the key to understanding HubSpot's AI story and how it's different from some of these standalone uh chatbots or generic AI tool that's bolted on top of your tech stack. When HubSpot talks about context, they mean that their AI isn't operating in a vacuum. Uh it lives on top of the CRM. It's it's specific to your customer history, your email threads, your sales notes, your support tickets, your transcripts. So when AI drafts that follow-up email or recommends a lead for outreach, it's not pulling from some generic stockpile or template. Uh it knows that particular contact, opened your pricing page, and looked at it a specific number of times, and it can use that context to get more personalized in the actions that are taken and in the communication. That's the context, and that's really what's uh driving the power of HubSpot's AI in these updates.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

It's it's that relevancy to the business and that relevancy to the customer record and that layer of intelligence that these AI agents are now able to operationalize. Um, Brent, let's start with probably the biggest update that I think caught a lot of people by storm, and that was pricing. HubSpot's pushing some chips into the table and saying, hey, our pricing's gonna be outcome-based, right? Uh basically, only when we're delivering value are you paying for for the AI. How is that different from the seat-based or credit-based models we've seen in the past?

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, I think I think this is one that's really gonna resonate most with the CEOs and CFOs that are out there evaluating AI tooling. It fundamentally changes the risk equation when you're looking at that type of investment. And the old model, and we saw this a lot with the early AI tools, you're essentially paying for attempts just for usage of the AI uh capabilities. You buy a block of AI credits, AI takes a swing, and whether it succeeds or not, you've spent that credit. You've consumed uh that credit that you've purchased. It was almost an AI tax, or that's how it was viewed uh by a lot of leaders, and it made people fairly skeptical about how to get going, how to get started. Um starting April 14th, HubSpot's flipping that model. Uh, for some of these agents, really it's about the outcomes. It's about the successes. Uh for customer agent, you only pay when a support ticket is actually resolved. So the business outcome is what you're what you're consuming credits for. For the prospecting agent, it's only when it correctly identifies buying intent, uh surfaces a qualified lead, um, you know, other actions that are actually having business impact, not just the attempt at trying it and consuming credits. So if it doesn't deliver a result, you don't pay. Um, you're paying for the output of that AI. It's a pretty significant shift uh with how you know most software vendors are sharing the risk with their customers.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

It's it's refreshing, honestly, just to hear that HubSpot is willing to again push the chips into the table. It's like they're trying to de-risk that initial investment, get value demonstrated really quickly with these AI tools. Uh those AI leaders out there worried about these AI credits just disappearing into some black box. This is different. It ties that spend again directly to a resolve ticket, a qualified lead, again, like you said, real business.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing to think about is, you know, forces HubSpot to make the AI really good. If it's if it's if they only get paid when it works, you know, they have a strong incentive to make sure that it works. It aligns their revenue model with the outcomes their customers are actually going for, right? The business value and and input. Um, you know, for our clients where every dollar that software spends gets scrutinized and we want to make sure that we're making the right investments, being able to say we only pay when a ticket gets resolved, right? That's pretty powerful and it's a different risk calculation and conversation than we we pay per seat or we pay uh and hope the AI performs.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Um I love I love that what you said. It's like HubSpot is now incentivized to make the AI better, and they've got real skin in that game. Uh that's awesome. Moving on, let's talk about some of the specific use cases HubSpot talked about uh in this spotlight. Uh the very first one, building awareness. So now in the marketing hub, there's a big shift away from traditional SEO and something HubSpot and some other folks are calling AEO or answer engine optimization. So what's the fundamental shift here and what does the acquisition of XFunnel have to do with a brand shows up in 2026?

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah, it's a very this is this is a topic that we could get very detailed on very quickly. Um it's a little mind-bending when you first hear it, but once it clicks, you realize how important it is with how people are buying these days. Traditional SEO was all about getting your website to rank on page one of Google. We want to be the top person that shows up. And when you're going to that search engine, you track keywords, you build backlinks, you optimize meta descriptions on your site to make sure that you're showing up uh within those search engine uh searches. But what's happening now is buyers are changing their behavior. They're not going directly to Google, they're going to LLMs, they're going to ChatGPT to go and do research. Uh so we need to change the way that we are displaying ourselves or showing our credibility as a business and for our clients uh to make sure that we're showing up within those searches. Um when they're going to ChatGPT or Gemini and saying, what's the best marketing automation platform for a 200-person B2B company? AI's got to give them an answer. We want to be a part of that answer. We want our clients to be a part of that answer. Um, so there's a big gap uh that HubSpot is closing here with that XFunnel acquisition where they built a native AEO tool that tracks how your brand is being described across these LLMs. Um, it gives you a brand visibility score, gives you sentiment analysis, so you can see not just whether you're being mentioned, but how is it describing you? Is it describing your company as positive or negative? Um, and making sure that it's giving you the correct uh details around and citations on how it's coming up with these uh recommendations or comments about your brand so that you can go back and have a targeted strategy to go and prove it.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

It feels like a whole new frontier for brand management, and you're gonna need different tools uh to operate in this new reality.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Absolutely. Yeah, it really is. And the stakes are high. Uh, you know, if ChatGPT is going through and describing your company as a great enterprise, but overall uh overkill for smaller teams, you're cutting out an entire portion of what you may be trying to target in terms of your uh your addressful market or your or your potential uh ideal customers. So having visibility into that, just knowing how you're coming across in those LLMs, and then working toward a playbook toward improving that is the new marketing play to make sure that you've got power over what your brand is.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

Uh let's shift to the second use case, which HubSpot has called driving revenue. Again, relevant here, the prospecting agent has seen some pretty major upgrades and enhancements. It's moving beyond just automated outreach. Talk to us a little bit about this signal-driven approach and how it helps a sales team prioritize their day.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, absolutely. This is where Breeze Intelligence really starts to become that engine uh that's underneath the hood of HubSpot. The old version of AI assisted prospecting was essentially take a list of leads, uh, we're gonna blast out with them with a sequence and we're gonna hope for the best. The new signal-driven approach is different. The prospecting agent is actively monitoring for buying signals, things like a target company uh posting a new job opening in a relevant department. So you know, you get start to get an idea of what their intentions are or what their goals are. A funding announcement, web intent data showing that they're actively researching a category that maybe you compete in. And when it detects that signal, it uses Breeze Intelligence to automatically enrich that CRM record with third-party data. So you're not reaching out to a stale record with a job title from three years ago. You're reaching out with current relevant context. And that rep's job is then just to review that recommendation, approve it, and let the agent draft the outreach. Or they're not starting from scratch every morning trying to figure out who to call. The agent's helping them prioritize that, and it's leveraging all of that context we talked about before to make sure that we're communicating the way that we should with those prospects.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

So I thought the part that I thought was really neat about this prospecting agent and this signal-based prospecting is that HubSpot claimed that this got a 90% humanity score in the outreach testing. Am I assuming that just basically means it sounds like there's actually another person on the other end of the line uh kind of coming up with these messages?

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Yeah, it it seems like it. It's it's both an improvement with the models, but it's also an improvement just in the context. And again, that's where layering this on top of all this data that's contextualized is so powerful and is a huge driver just to ensure that you're communicating with where the customer is at that time, potentially within the buying cycle. And being able to pass that through with context through the agent makes it seem more like it is a human on the other side having that conversation.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

That just seems crazy powerful and really will allow you to scale your sales effort and where your sales team is spending their focus to kind of really uh communicate better with those deals. That's super exciting stuff. Let's stay on that driving revenue use case just for a minute longer. Uh, there's an update to sales hub that targets that classic problem that we all have of salespeople not updating the CRM. So they're calling this smart deal progression. How does that how does this tool kind of turn a transcript of a meeting into an actual operational update?

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yeah, I'm sure uh Eric, in your career, you've never seen this before. Um but sales, sales managers have been fighting this battle forever. You invest in the CRM, you train the team, and then you know, three months later you go pull a pipeline report and half the stages are wrong, right? Um or the data, the the data integrity just isn't, you can't trust in it because nobody updated it after the last call because it takes manual intervention after getting off of uh you know a meeting. So the smart deal progression, this is one of the coolest uh ones that's coming out. Uh it's the answer to help solve for that. It it works essentially, it transcribes calls, transcribes meetings. Um that alone isn't new. A lot of tools have done that here for a while. But what's new is what it does with it and what happens next. The AI reads the transcript, identifies specific action items that were discussed. The rep can then save those directly as HubSpot tasks with one click. Then it goes a step further, and based on what was discussed on the call, it can suggest a deal stage update so that you keep that data clean, right? You keep it right and accurate. If the call included a budget conversation, for example, it confirmed a next step. It might make a suggestion, let's move this to proposal. It should be there, um, just to keep prompting and ensuring that data cleanliness. It then can draft a follow-up email based on the conversation, not just a generic template. So again, that context can be provided from that meeting uh to send out and directly communicate in a personalized way with the person you just met with. Uh, it's extremely powerful in terms of taking some manual intervention out of it. It also increases efficiencies of a sales team because you take that follow-up work out of the way. Uh, and then it just increases the uh accuracy of your data.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Yeah, I'm seeing this as a game changer on multiple levels. Obviously, if we're not having to now take notes during a call, if we can rely on the transcript to capture what we're talking about, grab that contextual data around where the deal is and what our next steps are, and then update the CRM automatically or suggest updates to the CRM. Again, it's just allowing you to really um let that sales team focus where they need to be focused versus being tied up in administrative tasks. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Outcome isn't just time saved, it's data quality, uh, which feeds back into everything that we're talking about here today. You know, and it's additional context to make sure that we are communicating with the clients or prospects as we should be with the with the data that we should, that we want to be.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Third use case that HubSpot mentioned in this spotlight is scaling support. A lot of leaders are hesitant to hand the keys to AI support agents because they fear a bad customer experience. So HubSpot has introduced some guardrails and some deployment controls in this spotlight. How can a company leverage these updates to ease into using these agents without really posing massive risk to their reputation?

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Yeah, this is this is I said I was very excited about the smart deal progression, but I'm really excited about these AI risk controls because it's been a bit of a barrier to adoption for our clients as they start getting ready and where do I begin with AIs and leveraging agents? Um, it really takes that that risk equation and changes it like I mentioned earlier. Nobody wants a company whose AI is answering back to a VIP at two in the morning on a Saturday with incorrect information. Right. There's a lot of risk that comes with some of the stuff, especially when it's client-facing. But HubSpot has introduced some mechanisms to address use cases like that or fears like that. So, example, for customer agent, you can adjust and say, I only want AI to interact or the agent to interact on 10% of the conversations that are going on versus 100%. It's not all or nothing. You can control how much uh the agent actually picks up. That's just based on a percentage. The other, you can get much more granular by leveraging workflow based deployment of these agents, where you can enroll people into a workflow and have decision trees or decision points in there where we split them out based on certain attributes. My VIP example, you may not want you may want to say it's it's 10%, but you want to have additional control where we make sure we're not hitting any of those VIPs. Well, if we've got that designated on the record and HubSpot, we can split it out and say that's always escalation and needs a human touch point, right? But if not, let's go ahead and send them over to that agent. Okay. So it just helps control uh both from a risk management standpoint for externally facing with clients, but then also you're controlling your credit consumption. So as you start to get adopted, you don't have to worry about that runaway AI. There's some tooling there to help you control those use cases and get comfortable before you broaden your use.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

It really feels like HubSpot was listening to the market with this update uh because that's what you know. We heard the concern about credits, we heard the concern about just turning these agents loose and going 100% autonomous. And they've really rolled out some features and some uh aspects of the software that that allows us to kind of address those concerns uh when it comes to AI.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Exactly. Yeah, and I'd add one more layer, and there are there are multiple things you can do from an adoption standpoint or a risk management standpoint to starting to leverage AI or agents. But there's also, uh specifically with Breeze, there are uh agent guidelines where you can go and give it explicit instructions. What topics do you want it to discuss? What shouldn't it discuss? What should it never say? What tone do you want it to use? You can get very, very detailed around how your agents interact, both internally and externally, to ensure that you've got the right brand voice in these communications.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Amazing. Uh Brandon, these features are live in the portal right now. You mentioned it earlier. If I'm a leader listening to this, I want to start taking advantage of these enhancements today. Where's a good place to start?

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, I'd I'd say for now, resist the urge to go and just start clicking buttons and turning things on within the portal. Right? The technology's ready, it's all there, there's opportunities to test, but you want to make sure you have your data and your processes ready first. Single most important part to any AI agent is you need to define the rules of engagement for it. What should the agent do? What should it never do? What topics are out of bounds, which customer should always be routed to a human. Getting those guidelines right is the difference between an agent that helps your business and one that creates some cleanup work. From there, I'd prioritize getting one agent live on a low percentage deployment, get comfortable with it. Whether that's the customer agent on 10% support of supportive traffic or a prospecting agent reviewing a subset of your lead list, pick one, run it for a little bit, measure the results, and then continue to expand.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yeah, we've always told people focus on their process. The software is built to support processes now autonomously, but uh that dirty data, that starting slow, uh that that's still the biggest kind of hurdle approach to getting these agents to work, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, absolutely. And the the unglamorous truth about AI adoption is that nobody puts uh puts in a product announcement, is that your data's got to be right. Right. The AI is only as smart as the context that you give it. And that's again, that word context. We've got to have clean context in the right context in order to get the right outputs that we want from it. So if your CRM has duplicate context, uh outdated company info, deals that haven't been touched, um, you're gonna get bad recommendations from the agents. Right. So you've got to start with making sure that you have clean process and clean data. Um, and then Breeze Intelligence can help enrich records. It can go through and help uh provide recommendations and prioritize uh next steps, but we've got to have the foundation right first.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Absolutely. Certainly some exciting times around here in this spotlight. It's definitely got uh all of us at FSM here buzzing. Uh Brandon, before we wrap up, one thing's we like to do on the show is ask our guests one final question. Uh, and that is what's one piece of advice that has made a meaningful impact on you and your career.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Yeah. Um difficult one, but uh in the context of this conversation, I'd say clarity before speed. Start with clarity on what your outcome is. There's a lot of stuff uh being rolled out. There are really cool tools that can really uh uh you know superpower your team and level everybody up, but you want to make sure that you're doing this on an outcome-based approach and know what you're trying to solve for as a business before just turning on a tool to leverage something like AI because that is what a lot of people are doing uh with this adoption. So have clarity over what your business objectives are first to ensure that you have the right tooling and setup to support that outcome rather than just turning on the new tool.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, right? Brandon, this has been awesome, man. This has been a lot of fun. Uh this HubSpot Spring Spotlight, it's not just about new buttons in the portal. It's really uh a shift in how we think about the ROI of our CRM or our agentic customer platform. From the outcome-based pricing to AEO visibility, the focus is clearly on making the platform work harder for the business. But remember, as Brandon said, AI is only as smart as the context and only as powerful as the clean data that you give it. So if you're listening right now and you want to make your HubSpot Foundation ready for these updates, that's that's our wheelhouse. That's what we do. We'd love to help you think through it. You can reach out to our team at a link in the description or hit us on our website at fast slowmotion.com. Brandon, thanks so much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Great conversation. For sure. Thank you all for listening. That's a wrap for today's episode of the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. You can find past episodes at Fastslow Motion.comslash podcasts. Thanks a lot. See you next time.