Value-First AI Daily - Feb 19, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, Hubspot Nation. It is time to wake up customer platform with your unofficial Hubspot Updates Morning Show, where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carolan, join my co-host 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 Thursday, February 19th, 2026. George B. Thomas: Happy Thursday. Chris Carolan: Good. How you, how you guys doing? Chris Carolan: Wow, it's all quiet. Casey, how you doing today? Casey Hawkins: [00:50] [inaudible] muted. George B. Thomas: Oh, yeah, she's muted. Casey Hawkins: No, it looked like Chris was thinking, so I was trying to give him, it looked like he was thinking about how he was doing. So, I was trying to give him an opportunity to get his words together. How was the AI show? George B. Thomas: So, well, first of all, no, you're not escaping that. Let's just say it feels like everybody's flourishing uh this morning on this show um because we're all doing great. It sounds like Chris is thinking about if he's doing great. Casey's trying to figure out if she's great while she's figuring out if Chris is actually great. I'm great. I think we're doing good. AI show was good, actually. But it was, it was a fun one today. Chris Carolan: Yeah, I think like full transparency, I was struggling in the moment of my uh averseness to performative things because I just talked to George and asked how he was doing, and like this exchange again, it's like, all right, let's let Casey in. Casey Hawkins: You were just like, I don't know how to keep having the same. Chris Carolan: This is what I signed up for. That's the part of. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Right. George B. Thomas: Yep, yep. You built this world. Chris Carolan: Exactly. Uh and luckily, uh it's a world we get to uh experience the Hubspot belt. Um, with uh some updates every day. That's why we're here. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh, so let's dive in. Uh, we've got some kind of update to Hubspot developer MCP server local edition. Uh, what's changed? Updating for uh general access. So must be coming in from beta to live. Uh, what is it? The Hubspot developer MCP also known as Model Context Protocol, uh, that server is now generally available, giving developers a production ready, fully supported path to build Hubspot integrations and CMS experiences using natural language workflows. Installed locally via the Hubspot CLI, the developer MCP server enables you to more intelligently build, test and deploy your apps and content on the Hubspot developer platform using AI powered clients. Uh, support IDE and AI assisted coding tools include VS Code, Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, and Winsurf. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? By delivering relevant context and functionality to IDE co-pilots and AI coding assistance, the developer MCP server helps you save time, improve quality, and reduces costs while build while building for Hubspot. The developer MCP server handles the repetitive context heavy parts of development, so you can spend more time building. You can use it for assistance with common tasks like building and iterating on apps, uh, creating and managing CMS content, managing serverless functions, accessing app analytics and troubleshooting with context. George B. Thomas: Here's, here's the fun ditty that I never realized. Um, I don't know if I've ever seen it. I'm looking at the same update that you're looking at, and mine says entirely different things than yours say. So, like you're lying, Chris, when you wrote read support IDE and AI assisted coding tools including VS code. Mine says supported clients for the CLI MCP server include Cursor, VS code, Cloud Code and Winsurf. That's what my line says. The bullet points that Casey read, building and iterating on apps, creating in that's not even in my why does it matter. Right. Anyway, I digress. Chris Carolan: I think that's the update. Um, because I don't remember seeing this creating and managing. George B. Thomas: Right. Chris Carolan: CMS content from an AI tool that is outside of Hubspot. George B. Thomas: Right. Chris Carolan: I haven't seen anybody talk about and experience doing that. There's a lot of people that want it. Um, so I'm probably going to be thinking about that for the rest of the show. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I want to know what that one line really means to be honest. Chris Carolan: Yeah. George B. Thomas: Like draft, update and publish pages, blog posts and other CMS content directly from their AI tool. Chris Carolan: Yeah. George B. Thomas: Like, yeah, if that is. Casey Hawkins: Could we be any more vague? Chris Carolan: Right. But if that's as simple as it could be. George B. Thomas: Right. Chris Carolan: Then uh let's go. Like let's go. Like I can't wait to to learn more about that. Um Number two, meeting note taker, which is in public beta. Meeting note taker improvements as of uh nine days into the future. Uh, February 28th, 2026. Uh, we have made a couple of updates to the note taker based on your beta feedback. Support for rescheduled meetings. The note taker should now be joining all meetings that have been rescheduled as expected. Uh, also been a change in when the note taker joins the meeting. The note taker now joins right at the meeting start time instead of two minutes prior and will continue to wait up to five minutes in the meeting until the host joins. Casey Hawkins: Wow! Chris Carolan: And we have speaker mapping. When viewing the transcript in the post meeting experience, you should now see speaker names and identification for the participants in your meeting. Very nice. Uh if this is your first time seeing it, what is it? Admins can turn on Hubspot meeting note taker, so sales conversations and any other conversations you might want recorded in Hubspot, uh are automatically recorded, transcribed, and stored in Hubspot. This frees your team to focus fully on customers instead of note taking. The tool seamlessly joins your Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Team meetings with external contacts that are stored in your CRM. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Sales reps can engage completely in customer conversations rather than dividing attention with manual note taking. Meeting summaries are automatically logged in Hubspot immediately after each call, providing valuable context for follow ups and coaching opportunities. Um, I would also say like what makes Hubspot's meeting note taker unique compared to whatever note taker you're using, um, is that sinking of the data and there are kind of some significant features inside of Hubspot, um, smart content or um smart properties being one of the main ones that actually can take that um those transcripts and put them into kind of properties and update records and give you more context to um for your CRM overall. Um, I think it's just worth noting that like the why does it matter is like why does a note taker matter? Um, but at this point a lot of people are using note takers, myself included, um, that aren't in aren't integrated as well in Hubspot as this one. Chris Carolan: Yeah. I mean, look at this screenshot, right? Like this kind of experience, again, if you're not, if you haven't been exposed because you probably have your own note taker that you like. This kind of recording, like these kinds of media experiences now exist directly in Hubspot, right? And because it does, you have it right next to things like create a task, make updates to the to properties, because that's where we're going with this next one. George B. Thomas: Well, so I have a question. And this is the question I get asked the most and I don't know the answer and I don't know if you two know the answer or if Chris, you know somebody who knows the answer. The number one question I get about Hubspot meeting note taker is um if you're using Zoom, if you delete the Zoom videos from your Zoom account, do they go away in Hubspot or does Hubspot actually create a backup version of the videos so they're always there. George B. Thomas: Anyway, that's that's a question we need to answer because it it makes a difference dependent upon like what you do with your Zoom account or whatever the thing your Google Meet account, whatever you're using to record. And if it's linking to those videos or if it's creating its own version of those videos somewhere behind the scenes. Anyway, sorry, I digress. Chris Carolan: Right. Casey Hawkins: I'm not confident enough to provide an answer. George B. Thomas: Right. But if somebody knew the answer to that, that would be something that a lot of humans are asking me. Chris Carolan: Yeah. I feel like I've seen recordings in various spots and certainly the way that the experience works where they have to process all the information and it plays without showing any other like logos or experiences. Um, I would lean towards it's coming in somewhere, doesn't mean we can access it necessarily. George B. Thomas: Right. And they don't want to access it. The question is just so they know if they clean out their Zoom Right. so they don't get overcharged by Zoom, are they killing their Hubspot being able to go back and watch the video in Hubspot. So maybe you know somebody who knows, Chris, I don't know. Chris Carolan: Yeah. We'll, we'll get to the bottom of that. And how about we update that question tomorrow on the show? Uh, but when you're using this stuff, and this is where like even if you have other tools, like starting to test what's happening here, um, is it's very powerful. This is meeting note taker with smart deal progression. What is it? Enables sales and customer success teams to close more deals faster by ensuring every conversation leads to clear next steps and timely follow up. Smart deal progression uses your meeting transcripts and and deal history to handle the manual work that follows a customer call. After every meeting, Hubspot analyzes the conversation to suggest CRM updates, draft follow up emails and surface high value next steps such as sending a proposal or booking a follow up. Reps can quickly review and confirm these suggestions, ensuring every interaction moves the deal forward. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Reps spend hours every day on manual tasks like writing follow-up emails, creating tasks, and updating CRM records. Smart deal progression automates this busy work, so reps can stay focused on their customers. By using the actual context from your conversations, Hubspot provides accurate suggestions that ensure no detail is forgotten. This helps your team follow up faster, keep your pipeline data clean and prevents deals from stalling. When every conversation leads to a clear next step, you can close more deals with less manual effort. Chris Carolan: Yeah, and not to mention, like this email, you get, like was I even talked about in here. Like this email, as soon as I got into this beta, it started coming like to my inbox and the information in it was like dead on accurate. And it just made it even though it was in my mind and I could have come into Hubspot and do that stuff, because it came to my email inbox, now it was that much easier to just click and take some next steps to to make sure that follow up happens without anything else getting in the way. Um, so some very powerful stuff. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, I mean, it's just take like right now, my kind of workflow when I get off a sales call is I take the transcript. I give it, on my best days, I give it to Claude, and Claude, ask Claude through the MCP to update the records. Um, that's like best case scenario for me. Um, but again, that's best case scenario for me. This would just do that, um, rather than hoping that I take all those next steps myself. Chris Carolan: Right. Chris Carolan: Yep. Uh, and lots of lots of other information in the how to section uh of the update that you should come check out. George B. Thomas: I'm really surprised that this next update doesn't have a major tag next to it, but maybe it's just me. I don't know. Chris Carolan: Permission sets and seats are now decoupled. Chris Carolan: What is it? We've decoupled permission sets from seats. You can now assign any user to any permission set regardless of the seat type. Hubspot automatically grants the maximum access allowed based on a user's permission set and their seat. You'll see clear indicators showing whether a user has no partial or full access in a permission set. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Previously permission sets and seats were tightly linked. This often led to errors when assigning users to permission sets, users being blocked or removed unexpectedly after seat changes, confusing situations where users in the same permission set had different access with no clear explanation. This update removes those pain points by giving admins more flexibility to grant access per their business needs, prevents disruptive removals of users from permission sets, making it clear why a user does or doesn't have certain permissions. This uh the result is fewer surprises, less cleanup work and more predictable permission experience. George B. Thomas: I mean, I feel like that last line could also be a parent to their children. But but I digress. Uh, I'm glad that there'd be less surprises for my clients and less cleanup work uh even for myself as well. Um, again, I'm surprised that the impact and flexibility that this gives to Hubspot users Hubspot admins that this does not have a major tag on it. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Uh and I got to talk to this team earlier this week. They're doing a lot of work um to try and make this a better experience uh for admins. And a lot of it relates to decoupling like like for me, it's rare to find somebody that's in like a sales rep and doesn't need access to anything else. Right? And like you wear so many hats. Like in a lot of organizations, most people are wearing more than one hat. So the fact that you couldn't add things together and like um, you know, separate easily, uh they've been doing a lot of work, they've been doing a lot of great work on teams. Um, and they're working hard to like let us have the flexibility to match the reality of the business, right? At the end of the day. Um, so very cool stuff there. Add recaptcha V3 to forms is in private beta. What is it? Reduce spam form submissions while keeping a frictionless visitor experience. The forms tool now support Google recaptcha V3, giving you invisible bot protection and more control over how strictly spam is filtered. You can now add recaptcha V3 to your forms to detect and filter bot submissions without showing a visible challenge to visitors. Tune spam sensitivity with the global spam threshold setting, so you can decide how strict you want spam filtering to be across forms. And you can turn recaptcha on for individual forms in both the updated and legacy form editors and choose between V2, which is the visible challenge and V3, which is background protection. This upgrade builds on existing spam prevention in forms to block more bots up front and make spam easier to manage. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Forms are one of the most heavily used tools in a marketing stack and spam submissions can quickly erode trust in reports, automation and CRM data. Recaptcha V3 helps by preventing uh protecting conversion rates, most visitors no longer see a checkbox or image puzzle before submitting your form. Improving spam coverage, each interaction gets a risk score from 0.0 to 1.0, which can be used to more precisely separate likely bots from real people, giving you more control. You can adjust global spam sensitivity to tighten protection when spam spikes or loosen it if many legitimate submissions are being flagged. Together with the improved spam management experience in forms, this helps you keep bad data out while keeping a smooth experience for real leads. Chris Carolan: Or real humans. George B. Thomas: Yeah. George B. Thomas: These, this is one of them updates I would suggest that you go read the how does it work. There's literally uh steps for if in the new forms editor, if in the legacy forms editor, but more importantly, um the spam sensitivity uh that you can set as well. So just go go listen go um maybe even read the knowledge article that's uh there as well. So And and this part important note on availability to ensure compliance with regional privacy regulazi regulations. This feature will initially roll out and accept beta requests to countries not governed by GDPR. George B. Thomas: Yep. George B. Thomas: Yep, yep. Go, go dig into this one a little bit further than just watching the show. Chris Carolan: Yeah, for sure. Uh, next we've got a status change. Deprioritized uh conditionally required associations. What's changing? We've made the decision to discontinue development of conditionally required associations, a smart CRM feature we've previously shared was in development. This feature will not be released. Uh, makes sense. George B. Thomas: Yeah. If you want to know why they're making that change, you can go read the rest of the story like Paul Harvey used to say. And now you know the rest of the story. Chris Carolan: Last on the list today, approvals notifications now available in slack and teams. What is it? We're adding approvals notifications to our slack and team's integrations, so approvers get real time pings when something needs their review without relying solely on email. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Approvals often stall because approvers miss or overlook email notifications, especially in fast moving teams. Bringing approval notifications into slack and teams keeps reviewers in the tools they're already using, reducing turnaround time and preventing work from getting stuck. Uh, would it surprise you that in the pre-show when I took a screenshot and sent it to a client, this was the update. Chris Carolan: Yes, I think. I think that. Casey Hawkins: There were a lot of updates today that are probably bigger than this one, but this was the one. George B. Thomas: Yeah, that's kind of shocking that it was this one. I I thought that you would be. Because, because I would tell you that during this episode, I emailed one client twice uh two updates where it's like, and this happened. Oops, and this happened. And it was, it was, it was not this. Chris Carolan: Yeah, important note here available at the enterprise level. Uh 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 or 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 B. Thomas. Chris Carolan: And this has been Wake Up Customer platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day, everybody.