The gap between output and results
Over the past two years, I have had hundreds of conversations with business leaders about AI. The pattern is always the same: initial excitement about what AI can do, followed by frustration about what it actually does.
“It writes great emails,” they tell me. “But do they convert?” Not really.
“It can research prospects in seconds.” Great. But is it about finding the right people? Normally not.
The gap between the impressive performance of AI and the business outcomes we actually need has never been clearer. At HubSpot, we have an opinion on why this gap exists. This is because AI today works without the one thing that humans have always brought to their work: context.
The missing ingredient: context
Think about your best team members. They know which prospects are worth prioritizing because they’ve already seen similar patterns. They write emails that convert because they understand your brand voice and your audience. They resolve customer problems quickly because they remember what worked in the past.
That’s the context: having the right information at the right time, coupled with the judgment to know what to do with it.
Without context, AI gives general answers based on the uniform wisdom of the internet. It doesn’t know your customers, your business, or the factors that actually drive the results of companies like yours. This is why AI agents cannot produce the desired results without context. They lack the necessary understanding to make their actions effective.
The problem: The context lives everywhere and nowhere
Currently, most of this context is buried in people’s minds, scattered across systems, and hidden in how your team actually works.
Why did you extend the deal? Why did this campaign work? Most systems capture what happened, but the reasons for decisions (exceptions, precedents, rulings) are spread across emails, Slack, and in people’s minds.
This insider knowledge builds over time. And it disappears when someone leaves.
Most AI tools cannot find or use this context. They ask you to upload your brand guidelines, configure your workflows, and teach them how your company works. Then repeat the process for the next tool. And again.
This is backwards.
What we are building: The Agentic Customer Platform
At HubSpot, we believe there is a better way. We’re building what we call an Agent Customer Platform: software that captures all of your customer data and business context in one place and then makes it available to both your team and AI agents so they can collaborate on marketing, selling and servicing customers.
For 25 years, CRM software helped track the work of marketing, sales, and support teams. The software contained the data and humans provided the context, judgment and actions. Now AI agents can take on more work, but only if they have access to the same context that humans have.
This requires a fundamentally new type of platform built on three closely related layers:
1. The context level: Where knowledge lives
At the center is our Smart CRM, a central source of information that combines:
Complete customer details: Not just structured data sets like companies, contacts and tickets, but also unstructured data in emails, call logs and chat conversations. The full picture, all in one place.
Business context: Your unique brand, products and strategies. Not just what happened, but why decisions were made. Understanding the reasons, precedents, exceptions and judgment requirements.
Team context: How your employees work, communicate and collaborate. The patterns that make your team effective are systematically captured so that knowledge doesn’t disappear when someone leaves the team.
Industry intelligence: Insights from more than 250,000 companies and their users. What works for companies like yours: What campaign tactics drive results, what business signals predict sales, what support approaches keep customers happy.
Domain knowledge: Extensive go-to-market expertise acquired over 20 years and millions of campaigns, deals and support interactions. This guides smarter actions, e.g. E.g. which deals need attention today, when a potential customer is ready to buy, or how to escalate a complex issue.
2. The Action Level: Where the work gets done
Context alone is not enough. You need applications that can actually use it to drive value:
Hubs: Our marketing, sales and service hubs are smarter from day one because they are context-based. This makes it much easier to increase awareness, build pipelines and keep customers happy.
Breeze agents: AI teammates doing real work: researching accounts, enriching data, answering support questions, qualifying leads. You complete tasks that free up your team for higher value tasks.
Breeze Assistant: An AI go-to-market expert for each employee, providing specific insights and recommendations for their role and context. It can also write and update the CRM for you.
What makes these differences? You are informed about the entire customer context, achieving better results for your company and better experiences for your customers. And because everything is on one platform, you avoid spam and disjointed experiences caused by fragmented individual products.
3. The coordination level: Where people and agents work together
For people and agents to truly work together, coordination is required that goes beyond traditional workflow automation:
Agent management: They decide which tasks agents carry out autonomously and which remain with humans. You can @mention agents in deals, assign tasks, and set permissions (just like any other agent).
Connected systems: Your business doesn’t run on a system, and neither should your agents. HubSpot connects to your broader technology stack, allowing agents to work across platforms, becoming the glue between systems.
Unified governance: A platform means a set of permissions, an audit trail and a security model. Everything is subject to uniform governance.
Why this is important
You don’t care about AI. You care about results. And results require context.
AI models are becoming commodities. What AI cannot replicate is the combination of your customer data, your business knowledge, and best practices from hundreds of thousands of similar companies. AI knows a lot about the world; You need a platform that knows how to do this your World.
Most CRMs are not designed for this. These are systems of record, not systems of context. AI point products do not have access to your full customer data. And cobbling together integrations creates the very fragmentation that a shared context is intended to resolve.
With HubSpot, your context lives in one place and controls everything. Where humans and AI work together as teammates. Here you can put your customers at the center of your marketing, sales and service.
This is our vision: to make AI actually work for growing companies.