Value-First AI Daily - Jan 20, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, Hubspot Nation. It is time to Wake Up Customer Platform with your number one unofficial Hubspot updates morning show, where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carolan, joined by my co-host George B. Thomas. George B. Thomas: Mhm. Chris Carolan: We're here every weekday morning to make sure you're not sleeping on Hubspot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in Hubspot today. Happy Tuesday, January 20th, George. George B. Thomas: Happy Tuesday. Doing good. How are you doing, buddy? Chris Carolan: I'm doing good. Good, good. Uh enjoyed enjoyed the long weekend. I hope I hope you did as well. George B. Thomas: Oh, yes. Definitely uh had some time to go spend with the wife and go do some fun stuff, but also had time to get my butt kicked by my AI assistant and set up some uh fun uh Hubspot stuff as well, since we're on the Hubspot podcast and around and in something that I'm building. We'll keep that top secret, plus we don't have time for it because we've got updates to talk about today. Chris Carolan: Yes, we do and I I'll just say I was able to disconnect for a moment on Friday night, got to enjoy uh the new Avatar. George B. Thomas: Nice. Did you like it? Chris Carolan: I did. I did. Yeah. It's very cool. Um [01:44] **Hubspot Update Introduciton** Chris Carolan: Updates today uh we've got six of them plus a couple others that might be hiding behind the scenes. Uh we'll start with Customizable Extended Sidebar for Customer Success Workspace. In public beta. What is it? Users see a persistent, customizable sidebar with comprehensive customer context and actions directly in the customer success workspace before you start, George. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: I asked specifically for this last year and I am so excited to see it. George B. Thomas: Nice. Love it. Love when that happens when you um say something then all of a sudden it changes in Hubspot. It's an amazing uh journey. So why does this matter for you this customizable extended sidebar for customer success workspaces? Well, customer success professionals often lose efficiency by switching to the record pages to access customer context. They also find that the default side panels not relevant enough to be helpful and they need to be able to customize it. The benefit: this feature lets users view and act on critical and specific customer information in one place, reducing workflow disruption and saving time. Hallelujah. Nice. Chris Carolan: Oh man, I because I want to know and uh hopefully others do too. I I'm going to go through how does it work here. Um accessing the sidebar from the Customer Services or revenue tabs in the CS workspace. By the way, if you haven't been in the CS workspace, you can see customer services and revenue all in the same place. Uh like no other place in Hubspot that can do that for you. Okay. Uh once you're there, click the object name in the table to open the extended preview sidebar on the right. Sidebar usually displays uh or the sidebar displays multiple tabs with configurable cards about about health score, activities, deals, tickets, etc. Admins can add, remove, reorder, and rename cards and tabs within the sidebar using the layout editor. These changes only affect the CS workspace's extended sidebar and can be reset to default if needed. The default experience: Hubspot can add or update default cards for users. Users see a consistent set of context cards and tabs unless customized. Wow, there's been a lot of moments where you didn't customize the sidebar card the way you needed because it would affect other things in other places in the portal. Um This is awesome. I can't wait to check it out. Uh got to share the use case that I mentioned last year when I was talking to the commerce hub team so I was showing them CS workspace. Um like the ability to build something like a quote. Uh or deals with line items, right? Whatever that is and be able to go through on the left side to see customers and services and then revenue like and keep that sidebar up uh should be so so powerful. Um and if we see it there it might not be too long before we see it in other places as well. Maybe this CRM Index page. George B. Thomas: That would be nice. [07:14] **Agent Run Notification System** Chris Carolan: Number two today, back to your our AI friends. Uh we weren't gone for too long. Agent Run Notification System. What is it? Automated agent run notifications keep your team informed about agent activity without requiring constant manual checking. When agents complete automated runs, encounter failures, or require tool approvals, relevant team members receive timely updates directly in their inbox. George B. Thomas: Yeah, they do. Why does this matter? This feature transforms how teams monitor and manage their automated agents. Eliminates manual status checking. Team members no longer need to repeatedly check agent dashboards to see if automated runs have completed or require their attention. It accelerates response times when agents need tools tools approval or encounter issues, notifications ensure the right people humans can take action immediately rather than discovering problem uh problems hours later. Yeah, that always stinks. Supports flexible team structures. Whether agents are managed by individual owners or collaborative teams, the notification system adapts to your team's workflow by allowing specific users and entire teams to receive updates. And last but not least, maintains user control. Users can customize their notification preferences at the account level ensuring they stay informed about what matters without notification overload. very nice. Chris Carolan: I like it. Uh we definitely want to know what's going on with our agents if we're setting them up. Very cool. [08:45] **Prompt Based Assistant Builder** Chris Carolan: Uh number three: Prompt Based Assistant Builder. George B. Thomas: Okay. Say more. Chris Carolan: What is it? The prompt based assistant builder is an in product setup support that helps you easily write strong structured instructions when creating a custom assistant. Instead of facing an intimidating blank prompt field. Now you can describe your goals in plain language, maybe natural language is some is the way people would say it too. Uh and get robust instructions at the press of a button. The enhancer then rewrites your goals into a well structured prompt that follows Hubspot's best practices for clarity, tone, and behavior. George B. Thomas: Hmm. There's an interesting part in there Hubspot's best practices. Very interesting. Why does this matter? Formally customers had to complete the assistant builder from scratch writing their own instructions, setting up inputs and selecting tools from a recommended list. This was a time consuming process and often customers did not know how to get started with a blank slate. Anyway with prompt based assistant building the customer's prompt is processed by our machine learning solution and the assistant builder template is automatically populated with instructions, inputs, and tools. The customers should review the results however to ensure that the assistant is set up in the way that they intended. So it's a start button not an easy button Chris is what I'm hearing and everybody should pay attention to. Chris Carolan: And I have so many other thoughts but so min limited time with the updates that we have. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Um this is awesome. I think it's really important that Hubspot does stuff like this because uh often if you try to bring in um habits that you might have picked up from from GPT or Claude and you try to give breeze the same instructions, um doesn't always work the same. So uh good to see we are getting some direction there. Uh but please double check that output. Uh [10:52] **Custom Views on Reports List** Chris Carolan: Yes. Number four today custom views on reports, list and dashboards list. What is it? New custom views on the reports list page help you quickly find and access reports using personalized filters and pinned tabs. George B. Thomas: Nice. Why does it matter as your report library grows finding specific reports becomes challenging, leading to wasted time and inconsistent naming conventions. With custom views you can organize reports and dashboards more efficiently. Filter and retrieve relevant reports and dashboards faster and improve collaboration and reporting adoption across your team. Chris Carolan: And if you haven't figured it out by now, uh the um the CRM Index page experience making its way all over the Hubspot portal right now. We saw users on the users list last week get that update as well. So um take advantage. [11:56] **Sunset of Test Mode for Payment Links** Chris Carolan: Sunset of test mode for payment links. Uh oh. What is it? Removing test mode for payment links due to changes in our payment processing integration. Effective March 3rd, 2026, the option to open link in test mode will no longer be available. George B. Thomas: Hmm. Why does that matter? I'm going to read these uh two short sentences and say that there's probably more reason than this. But why does it matter? You can still preview the checkout experience with the payment links editor. However, you'll no longer be able to test actual transactions using payment links in test mode. I'm not sure that's really why it matters. But okay. Uh it's going away folks. Bye bye Sunset. Hasta Lavista. Bye bye. Chris Carolan: Wow. Yeah. More like a why it matters or why we need to tell you this but not actually. Uh yeah, hopefully they're going to come up with a new way to test uh in the future because that is an important part of payment links. George B. Thomas: Yes. [12:55] **Sync SSO Settings to Sandbox** Chris Carolan: Number six today sync single sign on also known as SSO settings to sandbox and developer accounts. What is it? Easier security setup for your sandbox and developer accounts. When setting up single sign on on your production account or creating a new sandbox or developer test account, your SSO settings will sync between accounts. George B. Thomas: Why does it matter? Elevates the security of your non-production accounts without additional administrative overhead in configuration. That's it. That's the only reason that matters. Chris Carolan: Makes sense. Uh one lock and to rule them all. Always appreciated. Now the one that I mentioned in my post today uh I was looking forward to talking about. I'm not seeing it here. Uh it is customer agent. George B. Thomas: Try try searching that bad boy. Or do you have also just because do you have the new user level permissions? If you type in new. Which I have the update if we want to show it, but yeah you don't have uh that one either. So the Assign Customer Agent third party SMS Slack Instagram, is that the one you're wanted to talk about? Chris Carolan: Yeah. And I will pull it up momentarily here. because it's really uh really powerful. I'll just head over to the production side of the world. Um so assign customer agent to the third party SMS Slack, Instagram, Telegram, Line, WhatsApp. Uh you can build your own channel integration with the custom channels API or click here to discover which marketplace apps offer this out of the box with more integrations on the way. George B. Thomas: Mhm. Why does it matter? To provide truly Omnichannel customer service, companies need to be able to connect with their customers on their preferred channels, whether those preferred channels be popular or niche. Historically those channels were limited to the ones that Hubspot directly maintains like live chat, email, WhatsApp. Now customers have even more choices over the communication channels they can offer to their own customers. Chris Carolan: Nice. Nice. Um I'd say more often than not those channels were limited to the ones that the humans could manage themselves. Uh uh and I love how they put emphasis on the word truly. Um, Omni Channel has been one of those things that you know, it would be nice. It'd be nice if we could pull that off we're hearing everybody say but unless you're like enterprise fortune 500 of a teams for every channel, right? You're either not touching every channel and you're listening to um you know, voices like Marcus Sheridan said like get good. Like pick one channel, get really really good at it and then maybe think about your second channel. Um or you're you're you're doing you're trying. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh and you're just putting the same stuff out to every channel and it's not doing the things that that you want it to do. Now again, it's not just plug and play. You still need to understand how all these different channels work. But now you can you know, set up customer agent to be there uh for you. And uh this is an example of that the AI native mindset we're trying to help you get into um because well Omnichannel was kind of you know, pie in the sky something you hear about, never experience yourself. It it's possible. It's possible now with with tools like this. George B. Thomas: Yep. Chris Carolan: Um and this relates like uh you mentioned on your recent podcast episode of Hub Heroes. Like one of the most powerful updates to customer agent has been the the expressions. Right? And if you get that right, custom instructions, tone, voice, all that stuff, then uh I think we're going to see a lot of value coming from customer agent as it can show up that way in all these different channels. George B. Thomas: Yeah, I literally have um there's a weekend coming up where uh some people are not going to be in my home. And I have a block on my calendar on a Saturday. Don't judge me that says spend quality time with customer agent. That is literally what the title of my calendar invite is because there's been so many updates lately and there's so many things that I want to try to do from an organizational system but also external website communication on sidekick strategies. Um because we've got the clone on GBT and I'm like let's use customer agent on Sidekick strategies and let's see how powerful we can make uh it be for that that site. Chris Carolan: I'd like to help you with that journey. Uh uh me and Zach Hushan who do the Value First Revenue show on Wednesdays, we're starting back up tomorrow. He's been going hard on on customer agent stuff. He did a hug uh a local hug last month. Um it's been building out this Willy Wonka like use case. Uh it's really cool. Um we're going to be going over it tomorrow on the show and you know, even that that nuance at the value first revenue we're talking about customer agent. Like customer agent now like can apply to every stage of the journey. Yeah. Right? And and should apply. Um because that's what customers they're across the whole whole journey. They're not just asking for for help desk stuff. George B. Thomas: Go figure. Chris Carolan: So uh very cool. Um thank God for dog shows. Am I right George? George B. Thomas: Are you right or are you right? [18:12] **New User Level Permissions Requirement** Chris Carolan: Last on the list today new user level permissions requirement for AI connectors on the Hubspot Marketplace. What is it? AI connectors are defined as apps that primarily connect Hubspot directly to general purpose generative AI assistance or agents. Due to the importance of user level permissions to customer data security and privacy in AI systems, we require all new AI connectors on the marketplace to support user level permissions via the Hubspot developer platform. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Why does this matter when Hubspot designed and built its own connector such as the Hubspot connector for jet GPT? We built them to enforce user level access from the beginning. Learn more in this blog post. There's a link that you should maybe click on if this is for you. This model ensures that any action token by an AI assistant or agent on a user's behalf is strictly limited to that specific user's existing permissions with Hubspot, preventing unauthorized data access and maintaining compliance to maintain high quality and trust of the Hubspot Marketplace. The same user level access guard rails uh implemented in our own connectors will also apply to third party AI connectors. Hubspot's always thinking about keeping us safe I think. Chris Carolan: They are. They are. So if you want to connect in, you got to do the work now. Um Remember folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in Hubspot. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning live at 7:30 a.m. Central or catch us anytime on Spotify, Apple Music and the profoundly Hubspot updates blog. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want to wake up to next. Until then, I'm Chris Carolan. George B. Thomas: And I'm George B. Thomas. Chris Carolan: And this has been Wake Up Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.