Office Hours - Mar 18, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: [00:00] I was muted there for a minute because I was trying to listen to the rest of that amazing song. Chris Carolan: [00:05] Welcome back to the HubSpot Helpline. Chris Carolan: [00:07] It is Wednesday at 11:18 Eastern. Chris Carolan: [00:11] People make fun of me for adding the time zones. Chris Carolan: [00:13] We're joined, or I'm joined by George B. Thomas, looks a little different. Chris Carolan: [00:16] He's grown his beard out. Chris Carolan: [00:17] Actually, George is on vacation today. Chris Carolan: [00:20] So George, we know you're watching, thank you for tuning in. Chris Carolan: [00:23] Uh in his stead is the brains behind the scenes a lot of the time unless George summons him with the Imperial March thing, Chris Carolan. Chris Carolan: [00:32] We have Mr. HubSpot, orange hat himself. Chris Carolan: [00:36] There's been a lot of orange hats recently. Chris Carolan: [00:38] Shout out Kyle. Chris Carolan: [00:40] Uh Kyle Jepson is here. Chris Carolan: [00:42] And uh last in order of announcement, but certainly not least, Casey Grey houndress of the Helpline Hawkins, who is going to be doing a lot of talking today, which I cannot be more excited for. Chris Carolan: [00:55] How are we? Casey Hawkins: [00:56] She has the favorite. Chris Carolan: [00:57] She is the favorite. Chris Carolan: [01:00] It's not even close. Chris Carolan: [01:02] And I'm sorry to inform the rest of you of that, but it is not that close. Chris Carolan: [01:06] She is she's the person that brings the viewers as they say. Casey Hawkins: [01:16] Uh, I already told Chris this earlier today, but um when I went to panic and wear orange today, I put on my shirt which says Queen of Lead Scoring, which my friend Trisha made for me, which was very nice. Casey Hawkins: [01:32] Um, but then my first call of the day was a call about a client I did a lead score for, and I immediately felt like self-conscious about this shirt given the context of the call. Casey Hawkins: [01:49] It just there it's more of a funny bit, but it feels it feels awkward when you're actually talking about a lead score that you built and wearing it on [inaudible]. Chris Carolan: [02:05] Well, I uh, I was messing around with my Bobble Mayor, so the bobble head that I have. Chris Carolan: [02:11] He wears orange too and I left this, I think I had my camera pointed down, but I left it, let's just say right here. Chris Carolan: [02:18] And you want to talk about a weird non-sequitor icebreaker on a call. Chris Carolan: [02:22] It was like, hey, uh, you know, whatever the intro was and then they're just like, I have a question. Chris Carolan: [02:31] Is there a tiny figurine of yourself in the bottom right corner of your screen? Chris Carolan: [02:35] So yeah, we all wear orange around here today. Chris Carolan: [02:37] Uh, Chris, how are you? Chris Carolan: [02:40] I'm doing good. Chris Carolan: [02:42] Doing good, man. Chris Carolan: [02:44] Lots of stuff going on, uh, inside and outside of the HubSpot ecosystem right now, building every day. Chris Carolan: [02:55] Um, and uh yeah, excited to be uh, with you all today. Chris Carolan: [03:05] Kyle, I want to ask about Joan, but I will restrain myself until later in the show. Chris Carolan: [03:10] How are you today on this Wednesday? Kyle Jepson: [03:13] I'm good. Kyle Jepson: [03:15] Uh, yeah, it is it is cold again here in Boston, but uh, we're we're all right. Casey Hawkins: [03:20] It's the weather is rude. Casey Hawkins: [03:23] I'm so upset. Casey Hawkins: [03:27] The fact that it was truly 70 degrees last week in Maryland and today it was 25 degrees. Kyle Jepson: [03:34] Yeah, weirdly yesterday, I was talking to my brother who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, asking him how his uh, St. Patrick's Day was, and he said it was 90 degrees there, which they never ever achieve, and certainly if they did, March would not be the month for it. Kyle Jepson: [03:52] So, yep, it's all broken. Chris Carolan: [03:55] It's eating up, it's cooling down. Chris Carolan: [03:59] The temperature is changing everywhere, but one thing is for certain, we're going to have an update of the week for you and we're going to start the show with that right now. Chris Carolan: [04:09] Uh, with no further ado, Casey, how are you and Claude? Chris Carolan: [04:17] Ready for uh, the update of the week? Casey Hawkins: [04:21] Um, Claude didn't write my full script, so we're going we're fine. Casey Hawkins: [04:26] Everything's fine. Casey Hawkins: [04:28] Um, but we had lots of updates this week. Casey Hawkins: [04:31] We always do. Casey Hawkins: [04:33] I don't know how many because Claude didn't count them for me. Casey Hawkins: [04:39] And I could have probably counted them myself, but I have a robot that does that normally. Casey Hawkins: [04:45] Um, I do know that we had a lot of really great updates. Casey Hawkins: [04:51] Um, a couple quality of life ones, one, a couple of my favorite quality of life updates this week were the property history and association history improvements. Casey Hawkins: [05:03] The experience is a little more clear, it comes up in the sidebar, uh, if you're reviewing those histories, um, especially for the admins watching, uh, it just is a little more clean and easy for you to reference. Casey Hawkins: [05:18] Those are things, those are all the words that I have there. Casey Hawkins: [05:22] Um, the other update, the add line items to do deals through workflow actions, that went live. Casey Hawkins: [05:32] That has been a big deal and Chris and I had talked about it this morning, uh, there's a lot of great uh, people have been working around that issue for a long time. Casey Hawkins: [05:44] So now having it in platform, it's just going to make it easier for teams that are adding line items to deals and trying to do that in an automated way. Casey Hawkins: [05:56] And then we had a little bit of a side quest just this morning around the difference between line items and products, which if we have time, I'd be happy to get into because I personally still get confused. Casey Hawkins: [06:10] But with all of that being said, my update of the week is agents in CRM cards. Casey Hawkins: [06:22] Uh, I actually really panicked when Claude wasn't helping me decide the update this week. Casey Hawkins: [06:29] Uh, and then I remembered this one and I was like, wait, this is just just this just is the update of the week. Casey Hawkins: [06:37] Like there's not even any question. Casey Hawkins: [06:40] Um, you can now add agents, any agents that you have added to your portal. Casey Hawkins: [06:46] You can add them directly into your views like this here. Casey Hawkins: [06:54] Uh, this has, this is really great for enabling your team to actually use the agents. Casey Hawkins: [07:03] Prior to this, you had to kind of go to this little special agent area inside of HubSpot, which not only was a little more hard to navigate to, but it just didn't match people's natural workflows. Casey Hawkins: [07:20] Bringing the agents into the uh, into the records directly now is going to help teams actually utilize the agents more often and within the context of their existing workflows. Casey Hawkins: [07:37] Chris and I went through an example around the company research agent, which I think is a really easy low-hanging fruit use case for this specifically. Casey Hawkins: [07:51] You know, if your rep is reviewing a company record, doing outreach, having that agent already in the company record, so then it's just a click of a button to get the company research added to the context so then continuing your conversation from there. Casey Hawkins: [08:15] And there's a ton of agents now. Casey Hawkins: [08:18] Uh, you can build your custom ones, but the ones out of the box are really great and a lot of them still are technically in beta, so they don't use credits, which means use them, get their value uh, now without the credit usage, and then you have the chance to kind of try before you buy um, with all of those agents. Chris Carolan: [08:53] Love it. Chris Carolan: [08:54] Kyle, your thoughts. Kyle Jepson: [09:00] Great stuff. Kyle Jepson: [09:04] What do you want from me? Kyle Jepson: [09:05] Um, another thing, I mean, if we're talking about stuff that's new and in HubSpot or HubSpot adjacent. Kyle Jepson: [09:14] Um, a couple days ago, Dharmesh published a video. Kyle Jepson: [09:19] So Dharmesh is co-founder and CTO of of HubSpot. Kyle Jepson: [09:26] He post, he posted a video to YouTube, talked about it on LinkedIn, Hub Code, um is this thing he he's running in sort of a a limited private beta, but I did get access to it. Kyle Jepson: [09:40] Uh, where you could just talk to it and it will build custom apps for HubSpot, um, which is pretty nuts. Kyle Jepson: [09:51] Um, and as that comes closer to being a thing, more people can access, I'm really excited for that. Kyle Jepson: [09:57] At the Admin Hug, we have done a couple of sessions on custom CRM cards and unanimously the audience is always like, this is a little beyond my technical can, but it's interesting and I wish I could build some stuff. Kyle Jepson: [10:11] And now if you could just like talk to a thing and it would build the cards and the apps for you, that would open up a lot of extensibility and customizability for a lot of admins who otherwise wouldn't be able to do that. Kyle Jepson: [10:24] So, very excited to keep an eye on how that develops. Chris Carolan: [10:27] So it's like Whisper plus access to building whatever in HubSpot. Chris Carolan: [10:33] Like Claude cowork plus Whisper is kind of the thought there. Kyle Jepson: [10:36] It's it's interesting. Kyle Jepson: [10:38] He's built it on top of agent.ai, which is like his pet project right now. Kyle Jepson: [10:43] And I have no idea what it's doing in the background, but it's clearly doing a lot of stuff in the background. Kyle Jepson: [10:49] I think it's using a lot of different agents. Kyle Jepson: [10:51] In his demo on uh, uh, that he published on YouTube, he like generated the first version of his card and then took a screenshot of it and fed it in back into the tool and was like, hey, can you rerange, can you combine these into a single field? Kyle Jepson: [11:09] And then it did it. Kyle Jepson: [11:10] And so it's really smart. Kyle Jepson: [11:14] Uh, it's it's using, you know, top of the line models across all the major LLMs, I think and uh, it's it's it's really it's pretty next level. Chris Carolan: [11:29] Is there Go ahead, Chris. Chris Carolan: [11:31] It's really awesome. Chris Carolan: [11:36] And like two things, um, like I think he's able to do that and what we're finding in the work that we're doing, like the it there's this interesting moment where, you know, HubSpot was always the place where you couldn't customize a lot, right? Chris Carolan: [11:59] It was always very opinionated and that's why most of us loved it, um, because not everybody wants a blank slate to get themselves into trouble, you know, building super complex platforms when they don't really need it. Chris Carolan: [12:10] Uh, but now as it's done as it's grown, it's become more complex and the extensibility, and now you can customize the heck out of it. Chris Carolan: [12:24] But you're doing that with all of this tooling that it's still coming from HubSpot, the platform. Chris Carolan: [12:36] So Yeah. Chris Carolan: [12:37] We've been doing a lot of UI extension work, right? Chris Carolan: [12:41] Which is the cards that like part of what Hub Code can create for you as these UI extensions. Chris Carolan: [12:50] And because it's all HubSpot tooling and modules and just like and agent.ai easily, like it's one of the best ways to access HubSpot tooling like that. Chris Carolan: [13:08] Like uh, hopefully for most it's like, don't worry about how it works. Chris Carolan: [13:12] Just go and ask for the card. Chris Carolan: [13:15] Yeah. Chris Carolan: [13:15] And like plug it into the hotspot, right? Chris Carolan: [13:18] Okay, so I I do worry about how it works. Chris Carolan: [13:22] Well, stop it. Chris Carolan: [13:26] So Yeah. Chris Carolan: [13:31] Um this is a maybe this will help some of the audience, maybe it'll help me, maybe it'll help Casey, maybe it'll help nobody. Chris Carolan: [13:36] I don't know. Chris Carolan: [13:36] But with with that, there is a um, if you can just talk to something and it build an app, right? Chris Carolan: [13:43] There this question is rooted in the idea of like customization is kind of the opposite of standardization. Chris Carolan: [13:52] And so in order to standardize a result, things need to be less custom so that people can know what they're looking at. Chris Carolan: [13:57] This is like Olympic grading and all of that, right? Chris Carolan: [14:00] It I don't think this will apply necessarily to agent AI because it's within HubSpot. Chris Carolan: [14:08] But is there is there danger or like of building apps or building things just by talking to them that override or that prevent other agents apps within HubSpot from doing what they're intended to do and you start having too much customization that gets in the gets in the way. Kyle Jepson: [14:30] That's a really interesting question. Kyle Jepson: [14:33] Um, and I'm just realizing how interesting it is right now as I'm talking, so this is all half formed. Kyle Jepson: [14:40] But as I said, this week Darmesh came out with this video about Hub Code, here's how you can just talk and customize your HubSpot. Kyle Jepson: [14:49] This is part of a series he's doing where he talks founder to founder and the previous one or maybe two ago was why you should not vibe code your own CRM. Kyle Jepson: [15:01] And these two things are in interesting tension, right? Kyle Jepson: [15:05] Uh, on the one hand, you want to buy a CRM and his his his conclusion there is because you want to focus as many calories as possible on serving your customers, not serving yourself. Chris Carolan: [15:16] Which I agree with. Chris Carolan: [15:16] I watched that one just as a quick decide. Chris Carolan: [15:19] I watched that. Chris Carolan: [15:20] That's why hearing this video that you were mentioning was like, it seemed like he had a slightly different opinion. Kyle Jepson: [15:28] Yeah. Kyle Jepson: [15:29] Yeah. Kyle Jepson: [15:30] And but I just stepping away from HubSpot for a minute, I've been building stuff with Claude like everybody is doing these days. Kyle Jepson: [15:40] And what I've learned is like I can I can have an idea and I can say Claude build this thing and it'll be like, yep, go and it'll build it, right? Kyle Jepson: [15:49] Um, but what I'm finding is I get better results if I say Claude, I want to buy I I want to build this thing. Kyle Jepson: [15:55] First let's do some deep research on uh, on what, you know, established principles should be worked into this particular thing and then we build a very different thing, right? Kyle Jepson: [16:06] And if people don't pause and take that step, then you say AI build this thing and it'll just build it and all of your assumptions and all your misconceptions will be hard coded into that thing, right? Kyle Jepson: [16:20] And so to your point, Rob, if people are just talking to Huf saying, you know what I want? Kyle Jepson: [16:24] A card that does this exact thing. Kyle Jepson: [16:26] Help be like, here it is. Kyle Jepson: [16:29] Enjoy, right? Kyle Jepson: [16:31] That is that is scary to me. Kyle Jepson: [16:34] Um, and it's interesting too, I just got access to this yesterday and Darmesh was like, I want you to try it out and see like is it at a level where it'll help admins or or does it have gaps? Kyle Jepson: [16:47] And it by happenstance, yesterday at the Admin Hug, we just did some networking and Allison, Alison, I don't know if you're watching. Kyle Jepson: [16:56] Allison was like, you know, I have this calling integration. Kyle Jepson: [16:59] If someone calls in on a phone number that's different from the phone number on their uh, on their contact record, we get a new contact record created that doesn't have a name or any information, we have to manually figure out who it is and merge it in. Kyle Jepson: [17:14] And so when Darmesh gave me access to this thing, I was like, hey, great. Kyle Jepson: [17:17] And I just said to Hub Hub Code, hey, can you build a thing that will compare look through call transcripts and pull out any indication of name or company and then check to see if that contact or company already exists and suggests a merge if it does. Kyle Jepson: [17:39] I was like, yeah, here you go, here's your card. Kyle Jepson: [17:42] And I installed it, but I don't have any data that represents that use case, right? Kyle Jepson: [17:50] Like, I don't know if the card actually works or not. Kyle Jepson: [17:56] I'm I'm going to ask Claude maybe if it can somehow use APIs to build some broken contact records that only have uh, a phone number in a call transcript uh, to see if it then works. Kyle Jepson: [18:10] But right, you you run into these weird cases where it's very easy to bring something into existence. Kyle Jepson: [18:16] It's incredibly difficult to get it to the state where it's actually solving the problem you built it to solve. Chris Carolan: [18:26] Casey, you look like you were about to respond. Casey Hawkins: [18:39] Uh, I think that's really I like I like that you're pausing to think there because that is the gap. Casey Hawkins: [18:52] I really like when Claude will ask me questions. Casey Hawkins: [18:58] So sometimes I'll send Claude a prompt. Casey Hawkins: [19:02] I'll be like, hey, I got this email. Casey Hawkins: [19:04] Can you help me with a follow up? Casey Hawkins: [19:07] Um, and I think this is just because of the level of Claude that I'm paying for now, but regardless, I it will say like, yes, I can. Casey Hawkins: [19:19] Here, can you fill in like these blanks for me? Casey Hawkins: [19:23] Um, because I am a lazy person who will send Claude an email and say help me reply and Claude's like saying what? Kyle Jepson: [19:33] Yeah, I need more information. Kyle Jepson: [19:36] That's really like about Cloud. Kyle Jepson: [19:38] I use Cloud instead of Chat GPT because I feel like it's better at pushing back. Kyle Jepson: [19:42] It'll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you thought about this. Casey Hawkins: [19:45] Exactly. Casey Hawkins: [19:47] But so I think it'll be interesting to see how that progresses and as potentially more tools, whether that's Hub Code or otherwise, are able to proactively take those step back, um, especially when you're working with humans who are sometimes impatient and excited and just want to see the thing live, not really thinking through all the imple implications. Chris Carolan: [20:21] Yeah. Chris Carolan: [20:22] I I think that's definitely the other side of this is the context piece. Chris Carolan: [20:30] And I was having a interesting conversation with the uh product manager from the commerce sub team about quoting and what they're doing around that and like everybody's kind of starting to understand like the done for you stuff. Chris Carolan: [20:53] Like don't race like towards that. Chris Carolan: [20:57] Like there's so much opportunity in coaching and in creating these spaces for AI to say, do we have all the context that we need right now? Chris Carolan: [21:12] And that could be the human asking. Chris Carolan: [21:15] And that's why AI is asking questions or when this stuff is on the center of a CRM record, right? Chris Carolan: [21:22] Like can we build an agent that says, well, uh, we're on a deal right now. Chris Carolan: [21:30] Uh, you've told us in the past that these 15 things have to be true. Chris Carolan: [21:37] Like including call transcripts and meetings and these this group of things are missing and and the person be like, oh yeah, we got that. Chris Carolan: [21:45] You know, let's get that in and now run it because that's where whether it's Hub Code and agent in the middle of the record, the UI extensions we've been doing, you can do some amazing stuff in HubSpot with HubSpot natively and custom. Chris Carolan: [22:10] None of it matters. Chris Carolan: [22:17] Like none of it. Chris Carolan: [22:20] If your data and context is not good, then there's gaps everywhere. Chris Carolan: [22:29] And and it's just like that's why we've been saying for a long time and now you have AI to help you do this, document, document, document your processes. Chris Carolan: [22:47] One of the ways that we we learn this and I think people are going to learn very quickly with Hub Code because you're using this different UI tool set, there's a way to use like quick fields on a card that receive data and then use the API to fill in the property, right? Chris Carolan: [23:11] But it's not the actual property. Chris Carolan: [23:15] So the autocomplete and all the protection mechanisms that are related to how you built that property to work, like will not apply and and help you in that scenario. Chris Carolan: [23:31] So we've had some it's been a fun challenge to understand the balance of serving the needs of the user where I want it to look like this and like this and I want it to do this, right? Chris Carolan: [23:47] And so we've we're able to and this is where the configurability comes in and it's so much fun in Hup spot right now. Chris Carolan: [23:54] You can put super custom stuff right next to a built-in CRM card. Chris Carolan: [24:03] So it looks exactly the same except we're we're taking advantage of all of the work that the product team has done to, you know, make this great great platform. Chris Carolan: [24:14] So, um, yeah, get your get your data right. Chris Carolan: [24:21] I'm so I'm going to be the comic relief here maybe. Chris Carolan: [24:25] Um, it feels very much like getting data right is a problem potentially for future me. Chris Carolan: [24:34] Um, as I'm I've said that a week ago, a year ago. Chris Carolan: [24:38] Future me though, his name is Claude, because that I don't care about that, right? Chris Carolan: [24:43] There saying that almost ingest, uh, the point I'm trying to make is if if technical competency is no longer like a competitive advantage because Claude can do whatever you can think of and you don't have to think of anything because you have access to everybody else's thoughts via the internet, like what is the competitive differentiator? Chris Carolan: [25:06] And it seems scalily to me like willpower is that thing. Chris Carolan: [25:11] Like, I have seen Claude say, I'm not going to execute that. Chris Carolan: [25:17] I was, by the way, Chris, you'd be proud I was working with Cloud Code. Chris Carolan: [25:20] I said like, hey, set this thing up and it said, this is a dangerous command. Chris Carolan: [25:24] And I said, do it anyway. Chris Carolan: [25:28] And then I was like, I can't believe I said that. Chris Carolan: [25:32] And it did. Chris Carolan: [25:33] It figured out a work around that was not good for me, it, the internet at large, like it was not a good idea, right? Chris Carolan: [25:44] And so I was like, just close my laptop like panic for a second. Chris Carolan: [25:48] And then thought, if you didn't really have another option other than seeing how far you could push what Claude would do by just saying do it, do it, do it, do it. Chris Carolan: [26:01] I am commanding you to do it. Chris Carolan: [26:04] Does willpower like become the thing that can either accelerate you. Chris Carolan: [26:08] I mean, judgment, right? Chris Carolan: [26:10] Casey said a minute ago like I suggest that you do ABC before you send this email. Chris Carolan: [26:16] Kyle said the same thing, right? Chris Carolan: [26:18] Like, let's slow down, let's think about how this could impact other things. Chris Carolan: [26:22] Does willpower play a part in that? Chris Carolan: [26:25] As like a problem for me now or future me, future customer, because we're get we're transitioning into uh some letters. Chris Carolan: [26:34] Right. Chris Carolan: [26:34] I like judgment has the word because judgment comes from expertise, no matter how much you have or don't have. Chris Carolan: [26:44] And like I think human domain expertise is now like if the build is easy, which it is, um, like the human domain expertise required to know within your own business, within the people that you work with, within your customer base, within your vertical, your horizontal, like wherever it is, like that's the context that um, is human specific right now, like no matter how much uh, some AI companies will tell you otherwise to where uh, and I were talking about shadow data yesterday, like whether it's shadow data or shadow context, there is additional context in the heads of humans that are involved in the process and the challenge of understanding where and how to put them in the loop of AI, like I think is the number one skill needed from every AI orchestrator or admin, you know, moving forward. Kyle Jepson: [28:03] Something else to say here too is, this is something we were bad at before we had AI, right? Kyle Jepson: [28:10] Like, you pull your teammates together, you decide to do this thing, nobody's qualified to do it, but you assume you just know how and it'll work out, right? Kyle Jepson: [28:20] Occasionally you have someone who's like, should we do some some research? Kyle Jepson: [28:24] Should we pull in some experts, right? Kyle Jepson: [28:27] But mostly it's like, no, we don't have time. Kyle Jepson: [28:29] Let's just do the best we can with what we have and we'll iterate later, right? Kyle Jepson: [28:33] And with AI, the problem is that's accelerated, right? Kyle Jepson: [28:38] Now, now a a poorly defined process or project that may have taken weeks or months, can now be done in an afternoon and you can pound out five or 10 of those in a week and now you are just getting exponentially farther from where you actually want to be. Kyle Jepson: [29:00] Uh, so I think this really is like a habit we'll have to build into ourselves. Kyle Jepson: [29:04] No matter what guard rails and how much wisdom and prudence are coded into the models, like we ourselves have to get clearer on what it is we're trying to accomplish and what is needed to get there. Chris Carolan: [29:15] Yeah. Chris Carolan: [29:16] and I were just talking about that this morning actually. Chris Carolan: [29:22] Like the idea of a business saying, okay, here's our plan for scoring, right? Chris Carolan: [29:34] And then they start executing that plan and then they're like, maybe we should bring some scoring experts in here. Kyle Jepson: [29:40] Yeah, maybe that score was just totally made up and didn't mean anything. Chris Carolan: [29:42] Right. Chris Carolan: [29:43] But then as we do, we're going to finish this plan that no experts were involved in the creation of, uh, it's like, let's and that's I think like our value as we as we shift into the next topic, Rob. Chris Carolan: [29:59] I think anybody helping people with HubSpot right now at any level. Chris Carolan: [30:11] You you have to be like who who had the expertise involved in the decision, like when was it made? Chris Carolan: [30:17] How do we make this plan? Chris Carolan: [30:19] Like understanding that stuff is so important because it's so easy to just run 100 miles an hour in any direction you want now. Chris Carolan: [30:30] And like that's what clients, that's what, you know, humans like need a lot of help with right now. Chris Carolan: [30:40] Yes, I had a Chernobyl reference, but I will save that for later