AI Just Broke Marketing (And What You Need to Do Now)

Hey everyone, welcome to today's show.

We have a special show for you today.

We're here live in London and we are going to break down all of the things we've learned in using AI in our marketing in the last year and going to share them all with you today. Kieran,

what are we going to tell them?

>> We're going to tell them how search has been transformed over the past 2 years and how we've managed to increase our visibility in AI assistance by over 800%. But that's not all. We're going to

800%. But that's not all. We're going to talk to you about how you do real AI prospect and we've managed to increase our book meetings by over 30 40% month on month and we're going to give you the

exact playbook. We're also going to tell

exact playbook. We're also going to tell you why multimodal is our biggest trend in B2B for 2026 and some of the experiments that we are running to show

you how you actually sell your products.

So, we're really excited to be here share all our learnings with you. Let's

get into today's show.

Hey everyone. Hey, thanks. Thanks for

having us everybody here. Maybe you can set us up with what the heck has changed like how did AI mess up everybody's marketing over the last year or two?

This has been one of the most seismic shifts that we've ever seen. And what I see happening this year is really a kind of bifurcation in terms of how we do marketing in that AI is disrupting how

we acquire demand. Who would have thought that Google's blue links would have been disrupted within the space of three years. That's pretty huge. And

three years. That's pretty huge. And

what's happening is because search is being disrupted, most businesses are putting money back into paid advertising. And so we see the cost to

advertising. And so we see the cost to acquire customers from paid advertising continue to go up. So, it's getting much harder to acquire measurable demand, but

AI has given us way more tools to monetize that demand. And so, the way I think of that is we were kind of in the era of volume. We were able to acquire a lot of volume and convert some of that

into customers. And that volume was

into customers. And that volume was quite measurable through search, through paid advertising, through some of these other channels. And today, I think maybe

other channels. And today, I think maybe we're in the era of value where we can acquire less measurable demand. We're

going to talk about that on this episode. But we have way more ways to

episode. But we have way more ways to extract more customers from that demand.

And I think that's where AI really shines today as the ability to convert more of what you get. It's not just like what tactics marketers should do. What

we want you to understand is what are the inputs that's driven all this change. And the first one we want to

change. And the first one we want to cover here today is Kieran that AI is drastically just changing what the internet looks like. And what's wild to

me, and the stat that's probably blown my mind the most recently, is 74% of new web pages contain some type of AI

generated content. The internet is

generated content. The internet is massively becoming an AI content internet versus a human created content internet. And that has a whole host of

internet. And that has a whole host of implications. maybe break down why this

implications. maybe break down why this is so important and what marketers should think about for us as we're as we're thinking about this changing landscape of the internet. One of the most mind-blowing charts I saw last

week, I think it was put out by a friend of the show, Ethan Smith from Graphite, where they did a lot of research on how content is created today on the internet. And we have now in the last

internet. And we have now in the last month started to reach a point where more content is created be by AI versus humans. And I think that has really big

humans. And I think that has really big repercussions. Now, I will say one of

repercussions. Now, I will say one of the worst uses of AI, and I say this every time I talk, it blows my mind.

When I was a small child, I've always been a nerd. I was into sci-fi. And when

I started to use AI tools, I couldn't believe it. We have AI technology. I'm

believe it. We have AI technology. I'm

living long enough to see this come to fruition. And we give those tools to

fruition. And we give those tools to marketers. And some marketers say, "You

marketers. And some marketers say, "You know what I'll do with this incredible sci-fi technology is I'll automate my LinkedIn comments." And I'm like, "Wow,

LinkedIn comments." And I'm like, "Wow, what what a great use of AI." But

there's a reason I'm using that as an example because there's two things that I think will happen. The more content is generated by AI, the more I think people

will switch towards trusting content from someone they trust, like an individual versus a brand. And the more slop we see, and there's a great example

from people who do not work in AI that they are starting to see this in their feeds. I have multiple different

feeds. I have multiple different WhatsApp groups and one of them is my friends who have no interest in technology. I can't talk to technology

technology. I can't talk to technology about them. I can't talk to AI but them.

about them. I can't talk to AI but them.

They don't care. But in the last week when Sora 2 came out, they kept texting each other saying, "Why is Stephven Hawkins all over my feed in Instagram?

Every second video is a Stephen Hawkins video." And the reason was because

video." And the reason was because people were creating them with Sora 2.

And they started to say, "I'm not going to even use Instagram anymore. It's

becoming full of spam." And I think that's going to cause people to want to consume content from individuals. And we

have always thought about B2B looking like B to C uh over time where you actually consu the person shifts away from brands and shifts towards creators

and individuals. And I think that's one

and individuals. And I think that's one of the biggest trends we're going to continue to see in B2B.

>> Yeah. So, we have this shift in AI generated content and it happened with text very fast and now with Sora 2 and these new AI image models, you're just going to see AI generated content

everywhere. Right now, it's a big deal

everywhere. Right now, it's a big deal if somebody makes like a video ad with AI. That's just going to be common place

AI. That's just going to be common place over the next year. So, I I think you outlined some of the big implications here, which is people have gone from caring about and trusting brands to

caring about and trusting individuals.

And we even see that like on the HubSpot like our LinkedIn strategy like nobody cares about our hub HubSpot LinkedIn ch profile anymore. They care what Yomi has

profile anymore. They care what Yomi has to say, what you have to say, what uh our head of product has to say. All of

those individual profiles are now what the brand actually is. And that is fundamentally very different than how most companies in Europe or anywhere in the world have been thinking about

telling their stories and influencing their audience.

>> Right. We got kind of lucky with this where you and I had seen the trend in B TOC and the way we've always thought about building marketing engines is if you looked at B TOC the same trends will

happen in B2B just 3 to 5 years later and so we acquired a company in 2021 called the hustle because we wanted to be much more in the creator space and much more in the individual content

creator space. It has a really popular

creator space. It has a really popular podcast called my first million. Sar was

the founder of the hustle and if one of the incredible trends if you look at and we are you know known as the inbound company we used to we generated a lot of demand from these kind of brandled

channels today we generate more content from humanled channels which are individuals creating content on YouTube newsletter podcasts than we do from traditional brandled channels and I

think this is a trend for everyone in the audience to pay attention to because I think creators are going to become a core part of your content strategy, but also a core part of your distribution

engine through paid. And we're going to talk about that as well.

>> So, I imagine there are a lot of people watching on YouTube or in the audience here who are like, "Oh, I have this good SEO strategy. I have a lot of content on

SEO strategy. I have a lot of content on my website, but I don't have a lot of content other places and I don't have this diversified content strategy yet."

And Kieran had this brilliant slide which was like, "Hey, before we did all of this, it was basically like here's our audience and how they spend an average day and we show up in bits and pieces of that day when they search for

stuff on Google." And then you're like, "Well, after we do this, we're going to show up when they listen to a podcast on their way to work in their morning, when they open an email newsletter on their lunch break." And it was this really

lunch break." And it was this really powerful before and after of, oh, we are much more integrated into the touch points of how people consume and interact with information now that we've

kind of diversified this strategy than we were before. And so for anybody who's thinking about trying to diversify that, that's just like a great simple juristic to communicate it with inside your company or your team. What we really

showed was when you are a B2B company and you're optimized for search, which we had all historically been, you were a part of your customer's life when they then when they asked a question, when they search for an answer, right? So,

you showed up when they needed an answer. And what we wanted to be is we

answer. And what we wanted to be is we wanted to show up as an ever an everpresent part of their lives. And to

do that, you have to be part of the channels that they consume, not just when they're in something on on Google.

And I think that turned out to be now we did get somewhat lucky in that we saw the trend B toC to B2B and AI is 100% accelerating this. It is 100%

accelerating this. It is 100% accelerating the shift for people to consume content from individuals. I

would say if you just think about your own content consumption habits. I wonder

how much you consume from individuals versus how much you consume from brands.

I bet you it's much more on the individual side. The second thing we

individual side. The second thing we want to talk about today is how drastic the change in search has been and you you know you as the search brat and the

SEO interested in this world have have long been a student of search but man the data around the amount of searches that are not ending in a click and what

is shifting out there is very dramatic.

When we first used chatbt, I remember we did the show in November 2022 and we had used it and we talked on that very show that this was going to be hugely disrupted for Google. And actually a lot

of people disagreed that Google's blue links were be steadfast. They would

never get disrupted. But why did we see that? Because if something is easier and

that? Because if something is easier and faster, humans will always gravitate towards it. And everyone kind of

towards it. And everyone kind of thought, well, it's not as accurate. I

don't think people care. It's easier,

faster wins each and every time. So if

you look at the data traditional kind of Google blue links have already moved towards no click like we had feature snippets we had knowledge boxes it was always mo moving in that direction I

think six out of every 10 searches would result in a no click the data with AI mode added which is Google's hey front and center we want you to use AI before

you even look at the blue links in terms of their beta test they are seeing anywhere between eight or nine searches result in no click >> out 10 out of 10.

>> It's like an 80% of searches just no clicks back to the website >> because AI does a great job of answering that question. And so we are starting to

that question. And so we are starting to see clicks disappear. And when people say, well, hey, search volume is increasing. It will increase because AI

increasing. It will increase because AI is a different experience. You don't

search in keywords, you have a conversation. So search volume is 100%

conversation. So search volume is 100% going to increase. And that is not the thing to look at. The thing to look at is the disappearance of clicks. And that

is the most fundamental disruptive thing I think happening probably to a lot of people in the room as well. Like, hey,

my clicks are disappearing. What do I even do? Well, first of all, the fact

even do? Well, first of all, the fact that chat GPT is the top five most visited website on the internet in 3 years is just like mindboggling that

that that is where we have gotten to in such a short period of time. And you

have AI mode getting rolled out very aggressively on Google Gemini. If you're

AI dorks like you and I, you're using Perplexity Comet or OpenAI Atlas as kind of like this AI first browser and you have forgotten what the 10 blue links even look like because we're just having

conversations with our AI all the time, which is both good and bad. But I think that is I think the experience that we're having is emblematic of what the mainstream experience is probably going

to be over the next couple of years, right? AI mode puts it into chatbt is

right? AI mode puts it into chatbt is still you know semi not mainstream with like the average person who's not into tech right it's not it's still somewhat adopted by people in tech in certain

sectors I think AI mode because Google is the front door for the internet will help to onboard the huge amounts of people who are non techreated onto AI as

a search assistant this here chart is also pretty incredible in 2028 chatbt is forecast to overtake uh organic search and actually if you add in AI mode in

Google I suspect there's a good data point out there that says over 75% of all organic search will be consumed by AI first and again that is just such a seismic change in the way that we market

and the way that we actually grow our businesses and maybe what we should do is give everyone some tips on what we've been doing about it and what we would do about it if we were you obviously we've

established that you have to play here you know we one really piece of interesting information is that 89% of B2B buyers have already cited that they're using AI search for, you know,

buying decisions and research. So, it's

already here. It's not just a consumer quick uh quick response research tool.

It is a real business research tool. And

so, when we think about what we've been doing Kieran, we've been really I'd say in the last like 15 months heads down in this search engine problem. And we were

in denial for a little bit. And It was it was a rough time and we tried to do a lot of things in the short term to try to get more traffic from Google >> and traditional search and that worked a little bit but didn't work great and we

decided instead to really lean heavily into answer engine optimization and how we were going to show up in these modern search engines and it really completely

transformed our content strategy and the just way we approached the problem. And

maybe you could outline for us what are the big things that shifted in how we did that.

>> You have two two types of search where you haveformational search where you can create a lot of educational content, how-to content, teach people to do something and then monetize a small percentage of that into customers and then you have transactional search. And

transactional search is people searching for things around your product or services like the best X product, the best 10 products to do something. Um,

and so there are two different fundamentally different types of search.

And so we saw educational search get disrupted much much rap more rapidly, which makes sense because what happens with these AI assistants is they turn information into action. And so the user

used to have to say, what are 10 ways I can optimize my Facebook lead genen ads?

And now they can say to AI assistant, optimize my Facebook lead genen ads. And

the AI assistant is using your content to be able to do that. And all of that has been consumed by the AI assistants.

And so that has been cannibalized pretty pretty rapidly. And so actually what we

pretty rapidly. And so actually what we decided was that is going to happen.

That is a trend that you cannot fight against. There's nothing that we can do.

against. There's nothing that we can do.

We can make our content better. We can

integrate something into our like unique data points, unique customer case studies, unique unique examples, things aren't that aren't in the LMS into that content. But ultimately that's going to

content. But ultimately that's going to happen because AI is just a better experience for the user. Transactional

search, we were actually much more bullish, would not get consumed by the AI assistance. So it would not become

AI assistance. So it would not become the kind of platform of choice when people are trying to decide what products they want. And we have started to see that also start to be cannibalized by the AI assistance in the

last 6 months. So a lot of product recommendations, a lot of transactional search has started to be cannibalized by the by the AI systems. So you can't fight against the trend. Go to markets

are built based upon where consumer habits are going, not where you want them to go. And I think that's a really important thing to understand as a marketer. You can't shape consumer

marketer. You can't shape consumer habits. They would be shaped by the

habits. They would be shaped by the platforms and the tools that they use.

And so you have to actually integrate your marketing plans into these AI assistants. And that's what we've been

assistants. And that's what we've been doing. We've actually had a AEO pod, AI

doing. We've actually had a AEO pod, AI engine optimization pod stood up for the last year and we've seen huge results in terms of our ability to increase our

share of voice or share a voice are is if I implement and add a bunch of questions to AI in terms of how I think my consumer is going to ask questions about products and services, how many

times do I appear in the answers? And

that's kind of your share of voice and we'll go into some of the the tips and how we did that. But the stats for us, there's two core stats I'll share and then we can maybe get into the tips.

We've we've increased our share of voice by about 800% in the AI assistance over the last six to eight months, which means that we're much more visible whenever we have questions asked about

our product or services. And when you look at our vertical, we're the most visible out of any other software in terms of how many times we appear in those answers. And we've increased our

those answers. And we've increased our referral traffic from AI assistance by around 1,400% which is like measurable traffic being clicked through and coming to the website. And we can see it comes

from Chat GBT. We can see it comes from Gemini. Not so much Claude. I don't

Gemini. Not so much Claude. I don't

think Claude are actually trying to play in that space to be honest.

>> But and this is the the big butt.

>> This is a big butt >> that traffic is still less than 2% of what we would have seen through organic.

it's still tiny in terms of what is measurable that's coming from these platforms. So I would say that a uh the AI optimization looks much more like

brand than it does performance marketing. Brand marketing is coming

marketing. Brand marketing is coming back into the circle. That's one thing that you need to understand and a lot of the traditional brand metrics are part of this AEO mix. Uh the other thing we haven't mentioned yet, but we should say

is one of the main tools we we used to get those results was this tool called Xfunnel which helps you scale your AO and HubSpot just agreed to acquire Xfunnel uh about a week ago. So we're

going to bring that to all the HubSpot customers in the HubSpot community because we found that to be incredibly valuable in how we're scaling our AO AO effort. So I personally super excited

effort. So I personally super excited about that. The team is amazing.

about that. The team is amazing.

>> Huge. I think that's a a big part of it is that tool. we were a customer and we were so blown away by the tool in terms of the results we got working with the team that we were fortunate enough that we could acquire them and make them part

of a kind of hotspot platform and there's a couple of things that I can share with you that will be pretty useful in terms of you really want to like you you have to play in this space and so it's kind of a mustave and I

think like one of the interesting things you can do is you can use AI to build an ICP ideal customer profile we've showed how we've shown how to do that podcast

if you want to go get that tutorial. But

once you have that ICP and AI can kind of build a real great representation of your customer, you can then ask AI, hey, what are all the ways that this customer would ask questions about my product or

services? Because remember, it's much

services? Because remember, it's much harder to understand why pe people are conversating about your product than searching via keywords. Searching via

keywords in B2B, usually three to five keywords per product. Pretty easy to like find those keywords. Having a

conversation about a product or service, well, how does my customer even talk?

How do they ask questions about my product or service? So then you can get going and you can say well I get a hundred different ways that they can ask those questions. I upload them them them

those questions. I upload them them them into Xfunnel and then I get my my baseline. What is my current share of

baseline. What is my current share of voice? And the things that we have found

voice? And the things that we have found that really help increase that sher of voice are niche content, which is like an old school SEO thing, but it's the

reason makes a ton of sense because in the old B2B world, you have a product page optimized for three keywords because that's the only ways that people would search around your product or services. Now you need like a hundred

services. Now you need like a hundred variations of that product page because of the way people ask questions about that product or service. You need to have a small piece of content that the

LLM can integrate into its answer every time that question is asked about your product or service. Niche content very boring, very impactful. It's it's worked really well. Frequently asked question

really well. Frequently asked question pages, all of these things have worked really well. Citations,

really well. Citations, huge for unlocking increases in share of voice. And what's interesting about

voice. And what's interesting about citations for AI is in the Google in the Google world, it was much more democratized, right? like you just get

democratized, right? like you just get links from high authority sites and all of these sites kind of were agnostic of Google. What's more interesting about

Google. What's more interesting about LLMs is they all have these kind of partnerships and depending upon who they're a partner with and who what license agreements

they've actually signed, those sites are going to appear much more frequently uh in terms of the ones they're using to determine what their answers are. So

when you think about your citation strategy, which isn't links, it's just that you're mentioned on these websites, you really want to understand what LLM you're optimizing for and then who their

license agreements are with because doing it for chat GBT is very different from doing it for Google Gemini because they actually have different license agreements and they're looking at different websites to form their answers

or questions. Yeah. So like for example,

or questions. Yeah. So like for example, we have bunch of time that we now spend on Reddit because Reddit is a key source for chat GPT because chat GPT and Reddit

have a licensing deal for Reddit data.

And so that means we now have to play much more in the Reddit community and it has has a big impact.

>> Look, AI has completely killed the marketing that we all knew. The old

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uh let's get back to the show. Okay, we

we got a lot more ground to cover though. I I know I know that you are

though. I I know I know that you are obsessed with search and I think we gave AEO its proper due, but one other topic that I think is super important is is

data. And data is basically the

data. And data is basically the foundation for how all personalization is going to work in the future. And

we've seen some transformational results through data and personalization. And

and what we've actually really found is you need to figure out what data matters to your buyer and to that marketing tactic. And then you need to use that

tactic. And then you need to use that data to actually better target and better personalize the message. Right.

>> Right. We we I think paid advertising is like one of this the kind of areas that doesn't get enough coverage in terms of how transformative AI is being actually

maybe more than search. Uh we are an early user of Google's new AI max tool.

>> Do you want to do you want to explain what that is and everything because it's kind of wild.

>> So AIAX is basically Google's new tool that uh if you give it the data, it does the targeting, the ad creation and everything for you. you basically are a

you basically have the data and you have the money. And so if you think about

the money. And so if you think about where we're going with AI, it's actually one of the more interesting examples because they have basically taken a lot of what we used to do in the paid

advertising role and used AI to do it better than we can do it. And I I was an early tester of PMAX actually about two years ago, which was their first kind

their first push into this AI within the platform. and they consistently failed

platform. and they consistently failed to outperform our best paid marketers at that time. And two years later, their AI

that time. And two years later, their AI max product is actually drastically increased conversions on paid advertising based upon like AB AB testing against us. They've been better

at targeting. They've been better at

at targeting. They've been better at creating the ads and converting that into customers. And that is like pretty

into customers. And that is like pretty interesting. Sure if it's scary or not,

interesting. Sure if it's scary or not, but >> you think it's a little scary.

>> It's a little And so what what what's our role? Our role is to make sure that

our role? Our role is to make sure that they have the best data set to build the best targeting in paid advertising ads on to convert more customers and try to

optimize our budget. And all of the platforms are going in this direction.

Google is ahead, but Meta will go in the same direction. All of these platforms

same direction. All of these platforms will go in the same direction where they will hand handle the targeting. They

will handle the ad copy and they will also at some point I suspect handle things like landing pages. And so what you will have to have is a great data set. A big our what we are really

set. A big our what we are really focused on is like better data, better data, better quality of data and we kind of push that into the platforms. I think I think data is one component. I think

story and message and what you're trying to run that campaign against is going to be a critical marketing skill more so than it's ever been. The other thing that I think is really important to

understand is that I believe we as humans have a complete endless capacity to consume when something works really well or is really effective. And so when

I look at like better AI personalization and targeting through ads, for example, right now we're we're limited to that manual work. So we're limited to the

manual work. So we're limited to the number of campaigns we can run. We're

just going to run 10 times more campaigns. Exactly. Right. And there's

campaigns. Exactly. Right. And there's

going to be a ton of human work involved in figuring out the basic segmentation and messaging. And then the AI is

and messaging. And then the AI is actually going to go test and iterate and manage the targeting and everything for us. But one of my big learnings from

for us. But one of my big learnings from the last year is that the world of AI makes everything much more granular like you just said in the where you need more niche granular content. In advertising,

it's going to be you're going to run much more niche granular campaigns. In

brand marketing, for example, like the model with brand marketing, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create this big ad campaign. You get a couple of 60-cond, 30 seconds, and 15 second spots, and you place them. In an

AI video created world, you're just going to have a hundred different assets, 200 different assets, and you're going to place them in much more finely tuned ways. And so, we're going to

tuned ways. And so, we're going to continue to get more granular and create much more marketing assets and campaigns as this scale happens is is my belief.

Do you agree with I think we're moving to I we're moving from the kind of segment level era of marketing like most B2B is done in like these kind of segments and these hypothetical versions of your segments and all segments in B2B

marketing are basically fogmographic dem demographic you're like company of this size in this kind of geo whereas now AI allows us to move to like these micro audiences and do much more marketing at

scale for smaller groups and I think the perfect example of that is email. I

remember when uh Kip and I were talking when I was still at Zapier and we were kind of talking about coming back to Hopspot to do AI and he was talking about some of the AI work and I was like yeah email is like everyone's

integrating AI into email. It's probably

like not that high of a ceiling. you're

like, "Well, we're seeing like 500% increases in conversions." And that email is like one of the best examples of a a channel that AI has breathed new life into because since then, we've

actually seen phenomenal results with integrating AI across all of our email workflows and tailoring the content to that individual. Uh, and I think that

that individual. Uh, and I think that has been fascinating to watch where you have this historical channel and AI has kind of like reimagined it. you know,

it's like a 40ome year old channel and we were, I think, resigned to the fact that like our click-through rates were always going to be like two to three% and it was just going to be what it was going to be. Open rates are going to be

30 to 40% if we were doing well. And now

with AI, you can get the engagement clickthrough of like a human message, which is >> orders of magnitude higher with at at the scale of traditional email marketing. and you've done a lot of work

marketing. and you've done a lot of work when it comes to prospecting and helping book sales meetings using AI and this is one of the prime uses of email that I

think any growing businesses business is going to work on getting better at and scaling. So tell us what you've learned.

scaling. So tell us what you've learned.

>> Yeah, so mo most I would say the majority of companies I talked to are failing with AI for prospecting and the reason they're failing with AI for prospecting is because the output is generic. So they add in some you know

generic. So they add in some you know base level data and then AI personalizes it to the individual and it all sounds the same as every other message. And

when you look at prospecting, so I would divide prospecting into two parts. AI's

ability to prospect into your inbound demand. So something gets triggered,

demand. So something gets triggered, they sign up for a form, they do some action, and the AI reaches out to see if they want to book time with a sales rep.

That's inbound. Outbound is like pure cold, not in your database, has shown no internal signal, and you kind of reach out to see if they want to book time with a sales rep. Now I'm going to cover inbound. Outbound can work and it does

inbound. Outbound can work and it does work if you have great data sources.

It's much more saturated right now. I

think inbound is a huge opportunity.

Let's break prospecting into two parts.

I think this is also interesting. If

your company is marketing to small companies, then prospecting via email is actually a viable solution via AI. You

can actually book all of the meetings via via email only. And so you can automate that entirely because you don't need the human in the loop. when you're

marketing to like larger companies really mid-market anywhere above I think 25 employees you start to get into the need to do email call and social outreach to book a meet and we see about

6% of our our meetings in midmarket and a corp are only booked via email only right so you need these multi- channelannel sequences so the human has to be in the loop and what you do there

is AI is able to assist the person to have much more productivity cover much more space and it does that by creating the email for the person and the person can decide that they want to send that

or not or edit it or not. It creates a call transcript and then it creates all the social outreach. And we've seen big results on both of these. Email only.

We've seen about an increase in 35% of month-on-month meetings. But we've also

month-on-month meetings. But we've also started to see big big increases in our sales team's ability to book meetings where AI is integrated into their prospecting workflows. So why do most

prospecting workflows. So why do most companies fail at prospecting? It's

because they are using really generic data and generic prompts. I could just collapse your whole thing into the

ability to get better data sets. It's

we've seen two three four 500% increases in the conversion rate to median the more data we're actually integrating into that uh into that flow. And then

prompt is your product. And I will give this with one quick story. And so I have this thing where you have to demonstrate value in six weeks. So you do six week sprints and you can't demonstrate the value in that we move on because I don't

want this kind of long period of time where you where you're trying to do something it's not proven successful. If

I had in if I had enforced that on the team doing this we would have been unsuccessful. It took us six months to

unsuccessful. It took us six months to actually start to see increases in the AI workflows versus our traditional workflows. Six months. But then when we

workflows. Six months. But then when we saw it and we really got the prompts working because we st with the sales team, we iterated and we iterated and we iterated. We've just seen huge increases

iterated. We've just seen huge increases over the past 8 to 10 months. And so

there is a real learning experience. So

you don't give up in you don't give up uh too too quickly. But the data and the prompts I think are two of the most important things. And customizing those

important things. And customizing those prompts to sound like your sales uh your sales reps. you're going to have to let

sales reps. you're going to have to let go. If you want every word of an email

go. If you want every word of an email to be perfect and you want to review every single word of an email, that email is not going to do as well. That

is the fact of the future. And I know that's very controversial, but like I believe it in my bones. It doesn't mean that you don't have to spend a lot of times making sure that you're constantly

improving and and annotating the quality of these emails that AI is writing and sending on your behalf. But if you want to approve everything and you can't

afford to have any word out of place, you are going to really be at a disadvantage in the next era of email marketing.

>> Exactly. The other thing I would say is you break it into modular parts. So you

have a prompt per subject line. You have

a prompt for your intro, prompt for the body copy, promp prompt for the call to action. Break it into multiple prompts.

action. Break it into multiple prompts.

But that's the skill set. And the people who are really excellent here are not trying to like check every email.

They're trying to check every prompt and they are engineer they're back engineering the best sales reps. So they

take the best sales reps emails and they back out from there. And I think that is a a big part of it. And the actual follow along here which if if anyone in HubSpot spends you know a couple of

minutes with me it's only like within that first two minutes I've talked about multimodal >> and multimmodal agents I think are one of the biggest investments to make in 2026.

>> You explain what a freak a multimodal agent actually is for for everybody.

>> So I think the future we live in is you have a dual purpose website. I think

part of the purpose is to serve your a AI agents with lots of niche content because that content is not needed by the user, right? It's like one of the more interesting things. It's the first time we're starting to market the agents, not not consumers. So, we have

all of this niche content on our website, it's for the agents. It's

specifically for the agents, which means that I would say when someone is kind of using AI, but 90% of the research is already done. So, what's the purpose of

already done. So, what's the purpose of the website? the historically we do the

the website? the historically we do the website to actually help you research our products and services but now you know everything about them I think it turns into your first kind of sales interaction and so the historical

textbased chat I think converts into multimodal chat and multimodal chat means that you have a real sales rep an avatar not a real one actually an avatar that can do multimodal so multimodal

means that they can do visual they can actually show you something within that chat it does audio so it can talk to you and it can do textbased chat if you want now we've exper experimented with these where we've had AI avatars on our

website to conversate and actually do a lightweight demo. It can actually bring

lightweight demo. It can actually bring you through a demo of HubSpot there and then and we've seen the engagement go through the roof. How how long cuz this is this is the thing that blows my mind.

If somebody's coming and they're chatting with this avatar, they're having a conversation or they're typing in and and getting some questions back.

How long does a session like that last?

>> The so the average one on the website is like 5 minutes. This is wild unqualified traffic. The average one when they've

traffic. The average one when they've actually shown some form of attent so we have an avatar that helps when you ask to do a demo down market the avatar will actually do that demo for you immediately if you want the average engagement rate there is 8 to nine

minutes someone talked to the avatar for 2 hours now I did not want to look at that call transcript because I did not want to know what they were talking about it was too long I don't know what was going on there but the engagement

rate was through the roof and that was actually quite surprising because I didn't know if consumers were ready to like get their information from an avatar do the demo through an avatar.

And when you look through the the all of the transcripts, they're asking real questions. This is not like someone just

questions. This is not like someone just interested in talking to the avatar.

They're asking about questions about the products, services, and HubSpot. So, you

can imagine the kind of prospecting.

Someone talks to the avatar and then we actually decipher intent from that conversation and then the prospecting agent immediately follows up with an email asking, "Do you want to book time with a rep?" That's what we were doing.

And so multimodal also drastically changes sales because instead of the sales rep having to spend their time doing a lot of discovery and qualification which is like hey here's a

show here's the product what's your budget what do you want HubSpot for what other use cases we can solve. So in that first call, most sellers are actually doing discovery and qualification. It

turns every seller into a closer because what we do is we capture that conversation. We run it through an LLM

conversation. We run it through an LLM and then we provide the rep with the context of that conversation. So when

they're doing their first call, they turn that call into a closing call because they've already done all of the discovery and qualification through the agent. And I think it collapses the

agent. And I think it collapses the sales into much more of a uh you can get like increases in deal deal velocity and close deals much much quicker.

>> I think in addition to like these agent experiences which may seem a little science fiction to some there are a couple really important lessons that you went over that part of your website is going to be for robots not humans that's

a real big shift and that the experience that somebody needs to have on your website is getting deeper. It used to be really wide because they were going to hunt and peck and do a bunch of research. Now it's getting deeper

research. Now it's getting deeper whether it's with an agent or with an with chat GPT whatever what you may have you like the depth of information they need is much much deeper and as a

marketer we're going to have to have a lot more of information that might be private inside our company now is going to need to be public as part of the public facing experience. So I would kind of you know uh describe that use case for next year if you're kind of

thinking through is this something we want to invest in is like your AIS SDR the ability to have an agent on your website conversate with the person show the product and then the ability for you to connect that into your email and prospect and book time with a rep.

Something else that I know is top of mind on on folks mind Kieran is short form video and content. And one of the things that we've seen is

AI video and image models have gotten very good and is leading to a lot of prevalence. You've seen you talked about

prevalence. You've seen you talked about Soru earlier. Short form video is

Soru earlier. Short form video is becoming more important in B2B becoming a higher influence channel in B2B. If

everybody out here has been doing more traditional web content and less short form content, how should they be thinking about scaling short form content? There was a great stat I read

content? There was a great stat I read recently where in B2B the primary way people want to learn about products and services is short form content. And I

was even surprised by that because again that's a B2C trend that we're starting to see in B2B. It makes sense because AI I think accelerates our attention collapsing into small incremental parts where we can't like watch full videos.

We want to watch short form video. I

think short form video is an incredible tactic to also not just acquire attention but market your products and services. the the new virality today for

services. the the new virality today for AI startups is the product demo, right?

When you actually see how fast they're growing, it's because they're able to show these magic moments in short form video and those things are really taken off. The other thing we talked about

off. The other thing we talked about backstage when we kind of went loosely through this is if you can master short form video, you can master every single type of content. It's actually one of the harder things to do is make really

interesting content, engage with someone in a short period of time. But I do think again if you want to be ahead of the curve, what happens in B TOC happens

in B2B. Tik Tok shops or ecom store is

in B2B. Tik Tok shops or ecom store is built off selling through short form content. Humans are humans whether

content. Humans are humans whether they're buying consu products for themselves or buying products for uh their company. And so this one here I

their company. And so this one here I think is a real investment to make that you can be ahead of the curve because I don't think many B2B companies have mastered this and then for good reason.

It's very very hard. But I do think this is a similar trend that we talked about earlier where you have creators becoming a core part of your product or service that actually uh short from content. And

the one the one tip I would give is take we talked about this take 5% of your paid paid advertising budget and give it to creators to create content for you.

At Zapier, our biggest channel through paid was paid advertising through short form video that creators created for us.

It was actually the way we acquired most of our demand on the paid advertising side. And so starting to integrate this

side. And so starting to integrate this into your paid is probably the fastest way to get started.

>> Yeah. Find a couple of people in your industry who have YouTube channel, Tik Tok channel, big Instagram account, and go partner with them and do some sponsored content and see how that compares to some of your programmatic

paid is is what we're saying.

>> The other way to think about this as retrospectively my life, I maybe I was destined to be a marketer when I was like seven years old and just would watch infomercials all the time. and Tik

Tok and short form video is like a modern-day infomercial but in like 20 30 40 seconds. And the great thing is is if

40 seconds. And the great thing is is if you can tell a great story in 30 seconds then you can tell it in whatever length you need to. And that's why it's becoming a really foundational format for storytelling.

>> And I think uh these tools are democratizing. I'm actually working on a

democratizing. I'm actually working on a short form uh documentary like five minute style using VO3.1 their new model. And they actually have released tools now that allow you to stitch together 8second clips much more

cleverly. And again, what do you need to

cleverly. And again, what do you need to be good at? You need to be good at prompting, right? I if I can prompt

prompting, right? I if I can prompt correctly, I can create pretty good video assets. I'll give you a quick tip

video assets. I'll give you a quick tip there. One of the ways that you can get

there. One of the ways that you can get really good at VO3 prompting very very fast is actually have Perplexity or one of these assistants create an onboarding doc. So just say, "Hey, I want an

doc. So just say, "Hey, I want an onboarding doc for someone that I'm going to teach how to use V3 and make them really great at prompt." it will create you an onboard and doc and then I give that to a custom GPT as the document and now you have an assistant

that can actually prompt for VO3 for you and so you can shortcut a lot of these things but I think these short I think these video tools are a real must-have tool for most marketers to learn because

I'll one of the things we'll end with or the way that I see marketing really drastically changing is marketing has always been art or science right like there's like a scientific part to it there's an art part to it and I think

that what AI does is it pushes the skill sets to each end of the spectrum where you have to be either deeply engineerled to under understand really how to integrate AI across all your marketing

or have incredible taste and I think you're big on taste being a central part of like what separates good market >> taste is not this arbitrary thing that people have or have not taste means have

I seen tens and hundreds of thousands of this thing and can I then arbitrate what good looks like and what bad looks like and then can I work with AI to build the good version over and over again. And I

think that's where there's a bunch of opportunity. Um, the fact that you're

opportunity. Um, the fact that you're building a fiveminute AI documentary, >> it's going to be it's going to be >> makes you the least cool person I know.

And that's okay. Um, okay. We have we have a minute left. We have a couple wouldn't be a show if we weren't giving you some actionable things. We're coming

to the end of 2025 and we want to give you a few things that you should 100% put in your 2026 marketing strategy.

Things that you should be doing. Kieran,

on this list, we've got we talked a lot about AEO. You obviously need to build

about AEO. You obviously need to build an AO playbook. We got that in here.

What are the other like one or two that are must do on this five for you? I

think I I think this is a technical one.

I know it's hard. I I spent hours and hours with customers going through this one as well. I think having a great data layer and being able to like easily integrate data across all of these AI

function and features and applications you're using is a mustave. The better

the data, the better the context, the better your output. And that

differentiated input also means like how can you differentiate your data and context from everyone else. If you have some unique data sources, internal, external, that's going to really

separate you from the pack. I think uh I think every SAS brand's content strategy should look more like creators than it does brands. I think that's a hard shift

does brands. I think that's a hard shift to make. The only way to stay relevant

to make. The only way to stay relevant in terms of what's happening >> and then you have to give up control.

Let the AI personalization get into your messaging and email strategy to improve those conversion rates. I'm an optimist and I believe that marketing I've never had as much fun doing marketing as I have had in the last year. And I mean

that very genuinely. I am having the best time ever and I can't imagine doing anything other than marketing right now.

If you have not subscribed to Marketing Institute you thank you all so much for having us today. Appreciate you.

today. Appreciate you.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

>> Have you heard of HubSpot?

>> HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

>> Whoa. I can see the client's hold history. Calls, support tickets, emails,

history. Calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed.

>> HubSpot. Grow better.