Value-First AI Daily - Jan 27, 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-hosts, Casey Hawkins and George B. Thomas. 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 27th, 2026. How's it going?

[00:50] **Topic: Cold Weather Check-in** Casey Hawkins: Is the temperature above or below the date? [00:57] **[Inaudible]** Casey Hawkins: Below here for the record, below 27 degrees. George B. Thomas: Yeah, my mine is below. Uh we're sitting at a uh blistering 16 degrees right now in North Carolina. Chris Carolan: 23 in Houston, Texas. George B. Thomas: No, the whole country's cold. Chris Carolan: Is that lower than you, Casey? Casey Hawkins: Um 12, so no. Chris Carolan: Oh, you're 12. Dang it. George B. Thomas: Thank you very much. Casey Hawkins: Winner! Chris Carolan: Oh, I don't like this competition or game, whatever game we're playing right now. George B. Thomas: No, I I like the spring and summer game. Can we get to that? Chris Carolan: Yeah, uh in in the meantime, we'll uh we'll get to this updates game. Uh before we dive in though, don't forget uh the admin's hug in a little bit at 10 Central today. Goodbye data gaps. Uh join HubSpot Product Manager, Maggie Mursky, giving us recent updates to the data model. Uh and tomorrow, uh the HubSpot helpline is now on Wednesdays. 10:00 a.m. Central. Had a great conversation uh last week as Addison joined us live uh to talk through uh deal pipelines and pipeline stages. And you can forward that to tomorrow.

[03:02] **Topic: Customer Agent Message Insights** Casey Hawkins: Could be on next. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah, that was not planned. Uh she joined uh after we started the show and it was a great conversation. George B. Thomas: It really was. Chris Carolan: You know who else is having great conversations? George B. Thomas: Jero. Chris Carolan: Customer agent uh in HubSpot. Now with customer agent message insights, see how your agent updates records and qualifies leads. What is it? When the customer agent generates a response, people naturally ask, why? An audit card shows what actions the agent took in order to answer the question or when it performs actions like identifying customers for CRM and when the agent has discovered a lead. Within the tester experience, this audit card shows when the agent has identified, matched, and updated customer records in the CRM system. The card displays which specific properties were modified and provides transparency into the agent's CRM actions. Additionally, the audit card will surface if the agent determined a visitor's lead qualification status between qualified, partially qualified, or unqualified based on predefined criteria and the qualification properties collected during the conversation. Why does it matter? Users can verify that agents actually performed the CRM updates they requested, building confidence in the agent's capabilities. Two, lead quality transparency. Sales teams can immediately understand why a lead was categorized as qualified, partially qualified, or unqualified. Three, qualification criteria validation. Shows which specific properties were collected, job title, city, that influence the qualification decision. Four, process improvements, helps teams refine their qualification criteria by seeing what data points are being captured, and five, data protection, ensures email collection requirements is met for secure lead qualification processes.

[06:21] **Topic: Discussion of the Customer Agent Message Insights Feature** George B. Thomas: Yeah, there's a there's a nice uh GIF GIF GIF GIF. Uh down by the who gets it. Um I like this idea of qualified, partially qualified, unqualified. I'm super curious, which it's probably in the how does it work, which you should check out. Um uh after this uh after watching this or learning about this of like what properties you can actually use to deem the qualified, partially qualified, or unqualified. Um because I think that's a place where people might want to put a lot of thought into versus just slapping some properties in there and hoping for the best. Um yeah. I don't necessarily know if city and email are my my qualification properties in my Chris Carolan: Yeah. I I think I'm just gonna move on uh from this topic. Risk to risk to not risk spending the next 17 minutes on One one update. Casey Hawkins: I'm choosing not to a devil's advocate today, so uh we can move on with the explanation. George B. Thomas: Yeah. That's what human growth looks like, ladies and gentlemen, human growth. Chris Carolan: Uh picking the battles, picking the battles. Um

[08:15] **Topic: Map Visualization Feature** Chris Carolan: Number two, map visualization for CRM index pages. Yeah. Chris Carolan: This is something I can get excited about. George B. Thomas: Yep. Chris Carolan: Uh in private beta. Please review the knowledge based article for current functionality, limitations, and restrictions. What is it? Map view allows you to visualize your contacts and companies on an interactive map, helping you uncover location-based insights and make smarter decisions. Why does it matter? Location data often lives in spreadsheets or requires exporting to external mapping tools, making it difficult to connect geographic patterns to your sales and marketing activities. Map view solves this by bringing location context directly into your CRM workflow. Uh targeted outreach, identify contacts near event locations and send targeted invitations, territory optimization. Understand customer concentration patterns and identify coverage gaps, regional analysis, filter and analyze data by geographic region to uncover opportunities and trends. George B. Thomas: I mean, there's so many reasons that they're going to talk about this for sales, but I can't help but just think about if you are a podcaster and you happen to use HubSpot as your CRM and you get people into a flow where they're actually signing up for like show notes or something like that and being able to see like in a map view a list of humans that are engaging with your content, I just think this is like I think there's some sexy reasons to use this out of sales and marketing but also in the content world. Events, oh my God. Anyway, I'll shut up. We got a lot. We got a lot of updates. Chris Carolan: No, it's uh the number one reason I see it mattering uh in conversations right now is this this kind of view and the calendar view. Like it's like all of a sudden people who aren't used to using software and CRMs, like they see something they know. Like inside of HubSpot and it's just it there there's thing happening where it's like, oh, this is no longer this foreign rocket science equation that I have to figure out. I know what maps look like, I know what calendars look like. And just the guard comes down and it's it's a wonderful thing. So these visuals. Uh seen the same thing happen with Gant charts too. Like these visuals are super, super powerful. So even if you don't have an immediate use case. Um you probably have addresses in your CRM. Pull this thing up. It is only available at the enterprise level. But uh very, very cool functionality.

[12:02] **Topic: HubSpot MCP Server Remote Edition** Chris Carolan: Number three, looks like we've got an update to the HubSpot MCP server remote edition. What's changed? We've streamlined off for MCP off apps and projects. So it's new. Chris Carolan: Apps now only request scopes actively supported by our remote MCP tools. The impact. It ensures least privilege access and reduces permission bloat. Action, uh no action might be required. Review your scopes. No action might be required. Oh my goodness. Chris Carolan: This is a rough rough paragraph to get through. Uh we're almost done. Review your scopes and further details in our developer documentation. What is it? You can now build and manage your own AI connectors to the HubSpot remote MCP, which stands for model context protocol. It is also in beta. It's also a server through a streamlined self-service interface, allowing you to bring HubSpot context wherever you work. Why does it matter? Partners and developers need streamlined ways to create and manage AI connectors independently, enabling them to access their HubSpot context across the surfaces where they already work. The beta MCP off apps UI makes it easier to get started and manage integrations between ac platforms and HubSpot and HubSpot's beta remote MCP server. And end users permissions will also be managed automatically, providing customers with the flexibility to choose the data they want to share via the MCP server while eliminating the need for partners to manually configure. Is this it? Is this in beta still, George? George B. Thomas: Public beta is what it says, yes. Chris Carolan: Oh man. Yeah, yeah, they let us know that a few times throughout this journey. [14:02] **[Inaudible]** Chris Carolan: Yeah. Moral of the story, it's easy to bring HubSpot wherever you want to go now if you're using AI tools. So. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Take advantage. Um and you might need, you probably don't even need to know how to do it yourself, just ask your your local friendly Claude or or AI collaborator and they'll help you hack it out.

[14:22] **Topic: Agent Workflow Action** Chris Carolan: Number four today, run agent workflow flow action is in private beta. What is it? HubSpot Breeze Studio already makes it easy to hire, customize, and deploy AI-powered agents to help your businesses run more efficiently. But today we're taking that power to the next level, introducing the new run agent workflow action, a powerful way to orchestrate your AI agents directly within the workflows app alongside your CRM data and automation logic. George B. Thomas: Yeah buddy! Chris Carolan: This new workflow actions lets you trigger an agent directly within a HubSpot workflow. You can configure which agent to run, what information it receives, aka context, uh and how its output feeds back into your HubSpot ecosystem, whether that's updating a record, triggering a follow-up, or informing another step in your automation. Why does it matter? Until now, automating an agent was only possible through triggers in Breeze Studio, powerful but somewhat limited in flexibility. The new workflow action takes agent automation to the next level by bringing it seamlessly into the workflows app. Now you can use any workflow trigger to deploy your agents, orchestrate multiple agents together, pass outputs from an agent to any subsequent agent or automation action, easily update your CRM data with the help of agents and so much more. Yeah. Casey Hawkins: So much more. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, this came out a little bit ago. I was really excited. I'm still very excited. I think this like makes agents so much more useful than when they just kind of lived in their own vacuum. Yep. It's getting there. It's getting there. Um I think it's gonna be interesting when uh like we start designing for the AI instead of just plugging in the AI into the workflows experience as it exists now. Uh I know the team is working hard on on bringing it all together. Um because that piece of the context part, right? For your agent is so very important and thinking about it from like workflow steps and which one when is uh not the easiest thing in the world right now. Um so uh we got some more updates. Most of them repeats. Uh business days support for workflow delays. Uh we're always excited about that one. Breeze assistant, your loop marketing expert. Um uh yeah, give it a try and see if you can learn uh about loop marketing. Uh enable call recording settings by call direction. That's an interesting one. Uh inbound or outbound. You can both like set those up to automatically record uh tagging team in notes and other engagements. George B. Thomas: This one excites me a little bit. Chris Carolan: Yes, is in development. So forward looking statement at the front. What is it? You can now at mention teams directly in notes, other engagements like calls and meetings and comments. Instead of tagging individual users one by one, you can mention a team to notify an entire group at once. Why does it matter? Work with the CRM is rarely owned by a single person, whether you're looping in a sales team on a deal update, notifying a manager group about an escalation or flagging a ticket to the support team for follow up. Tagging individuals is slow and easy to get wrong. Team at mentions make collaboration faster and more reliable by letting you notify the right group in one step. No need to worry about who needs to be included or whether ownership has changed. Chris Carolan: said you're excited about this one, George. Uh have some thoughts. George B. Thomas: Well, I I would say don't overuse it, but listen, the amount of time that we spend and and by the way, the reason I'm excited about this is because also of a massive changes I made in my usage of email or Gmail. Let me explain. Uh the amount of time that if I have to tag three people and let's say those three people are on the team but I need to let all three of them know, uh it's extra time, which means I could be doing something else. And so if I can when it makes sense to at channel in Slack or at team in HubSpot or have a contact group in Gmail, where now I can email an entire org or a piece of uh you know, three, four people in an org, why not take that time to save yourself time to communicate better? That's why I'm excited about it. And I would imagine that uh there is a clear understanding about what it means to be notified with your team and what's expected of them. Like so do you have any expectations like give me a thumbs up to make sure you've seen it or anything like that? George B. Thomas: I mean it it just depends on if I am disseminating information for them to know or if I'm disseminating information for action. If I'm disseminating information on action, I as the human doing the communicating I'm just gonna ask for some type of response. Um what at what this doesn't replace is I just gave you a task. But maybe it's like at whatever team, um three new tasks coming your way just a heads up. or hey at team, I got asked this on a call. Anybody have thoughts? And now all of a sudden they can flow in their thoughts because we're virtual and not working in the same office, things like that. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah. I think it's uh what you'll want to avoid is the CC or the situation where uh you notify everybody and there's some some help requested and everybody's like, oh George is gonna get it. I'm good. I think Casey will get it. Like I don't I don't have to do anything, right? Um so that the communication what we're getting to this documented communication like expectations and structure is super important as you get the ability to just tag people. You know, every every part of the CRM. George B. Thomas: Yeah, Chris, what you're saying is if you tag everyone in the hopes that somebody will, you better believe nobody will. Casey Hawkins: I have an unread email in my inbox from Chris from two weeks ago asking if anyone had an hour to work on something and I didn't in that day. Whoopsie. Chris Carolan: It know it's still unread. Chris Carolan: I don't know if anyone helped you, Chris. I think you know the answer to that. I did not. So as as mentioned. Chris Carolan: Yeah, learn uh often my advice comes from, you know, my own, my own experiences with how not to do things. For sure. Chris Carolan: Um uh last on our news list today, block and unblock in help desk. What is it? You can now block and unblock senders directly in help desk. Blocking a sender ensures that all future outreach from that contact will go to spam automatically and that and that restriction can be lifted later if needed. Why does it matter? Block and unblock is an important tool that helps support teams stay safe, focused, organized, and efficient. Uh first for spam and abuse prevention, without blocking spam tickets can overwhelm a team's triage process and affect response times for real customers. It's critical that reps have a way to block unwanted messages, bots, or malicious actors who target support channels with junk or harmful content. Blocking supports the Q organized. Blocking keeps the Q organized, protects the team from fishing and unsafe messages and lets them focus on the important customer problems in front of them. Focus and efficiency. Blocking also saves reps time by preventing recurring non-customer inquiries like sales pitches or bots. It reduces the amount of time they need to spend on individually flagging those inquiries and manually marking them as spam each time. Block also allows admins to make it clear what help desk channels are for and who is the support team serves. And lastly, data integrity and reporting. Spam and unwanted tickets can often skew support reports, inflating ticket volume and distorting first to or time to a first response metrics. For admins and managers, blocking helps make sure that the metrics reflect the real support demand without additional spam or noise. Hmm. George B. Thomas: Woo. Casey Hawkins: Goodness. Chris Carolan: I'm interested in the sentence. Uh block also allows admins to make it clear what help desk channels are for. Casey Hawkins: I think that just means like you're gonna get blocked. Chris Carolan: Is there is there a response that gives some response that goes back to the the sender that might be, you know, looking for help in those moments where, you know, the humans get they get comfortable using certain channels uh to do things even if you tell them not to go there. One of the many reality shows I like is called the circle on Netflix and it's about social media like it's a fake social media but the the when you get kicked off the show you get this big like you've been blocked notification. So I'm envisioning that happening. That's funny. It's good. Yeah. So make sure uh we're we're just informing people we care about uh that they might need to go somewhere else. Um uh I guess there's one more. Just let me check. Persistent reply editor tab in help desk. We've been over that one as well. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Uh help desk uh updates all over the place. Did we cover the updates to starting and viewing multiple conversations on a ticket in help desk? I also missed a couple shows so that's possible that I missed that show. Uh I I think so. Okay. Great. We've done it. Chris Carolan: Yeah, starting and viewing multiple conversations on a ticket in help desk, uh easier than ever to help your support team. Um so if you're using tickets in HubSpot uh maybe move over to help desk. Uh a lot of people uh have that opportunity right now and haven't haven't taken it. Um so uh yeah folks remember you probably already own the solution that you're looking for in HubSpot. It might be help desk. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning live at 7:30 a.m. Central or catch us any time 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. Casey Hawkins: I'm Casey Hawkins. George B. Thomas: And I'm George V. Thomas. Chris Carolan: And this has been Wake Up Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.