Value-First AI Daily - Feb 26, 2026

[00:02] **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, joined by my co-host Casey Hawkins. 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. Uh happy Thursday, February 26th. Casey Hawkins: Happy Thursday, Chris. We are chugging our way through the week. Chris Carolan: Yes, we are, and this month, um, March is almost here. Casey Hawkins: I know. Um, but we had a fun call-in show yesterday. Max hopped in, um, to complete the Hollywood Squares. Chris Carolan: Yeah. That was It's uh, it's fun to think about. It's like how can we involve people that want to be involved without overwhelming the stream and having like real conversation? Casey Hawkins: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Um, uh, we'll we'll keep keep working on it, keep figuring it out. But yeah, it was cool to to have him come by. Um, and we got it, we had a voicemail, uh, yesterday, too. So everything was working yesterday. Casey Hawkins: Well, yeah, then my stream like my bandwidth just like stopped. Maybe... Chris Carolan: [inaudible] Casey Hawkins: I think it's too much. Chris Carolan: too much. Um, but not too much. Uh, today, we've only got four updates. Casey Hawkins: Pretty solid transition. Chris Carolan: Uh, thank you. Um, gonna zoom in a little bit here. We've got a new look for approvals settings. Uh, what's changed? Clear eligibility for approval settings. We've clarified which subscriptions include the approval settings page and its new design. Customers with Content Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, or Data Hub Enterprise will see the updated approval settings experience. Customers on Professional or Starter tiers won't see any changes to their settings today. Uh, what is it that you will see at the Enterprise level? Uh, a redesigned approval settings experience available on Enterprise Hubs that makes it easier and clearer for admins to configure how approvals work across their account. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? The new design reduces confusion and setup friction, so teams can get the right approvals in place faster and with more confidence. Uh, and this is approvals for like landing pages or emails and things like that. Chris Carolan: Yeah. It feels like everything but quotes. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, because I was just playing with quote approvals the other day, which is why I was like, wait, but this is not that. Chris Carolan: Right. Um, yeah, no Commerce Hub Enterprise listed here. No Commerce Hub at all. Uh, I imagine they might, um, they might bring that in at some point, but yeah, consolidating that, the management of approvals throughout the process, like definitely a very cool step in the right direction. Uh, we've got new actions and limits added to forms, simple workflows. What is it? We've expanded forms, simple workflows, so you can now add up to three actions instead of just one. Casey Hawkins: Oh. Chris Carolan: This means you can build more complete automations when someone submits a form without needing to upgrade or switch to a more complex workflow tool. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Previously, forms simple workflows were limited to a single action, which made it difficult to automate common follow-up steps. With this update, you can now handle more of the work automatically in one place. This helps reduce manual follow-up, save time on repetitive tasks, and turn form submissions into meaningful next steps more easily. Um, this is this is very nice. I mean, just last just yesterday there was another update that got released to all Hubs and tiers, but if you don't know, simple workflows are mostly workflows used in Starter Hubs. Um, but Enterprise and above can use them. Um, they're kind of workflows that you build from the forms, um, from the forms themselves or the landing pages themselves. Um, traditionally to like send a follow-up email after a form is submitted or something like that. Um, if you have Professional or Enterprise, I generally don't build them through this because they're so limited, including like this, they were limited to a single action. So, um, I'd had I had um, a client one time who had a Professional subscription and had built a bunch of these simple workflows and then we wanted to like add a add another thing and we had to rebuild all the workflows because we couldn't. So, um, very nice. Chris Carolan: Yeah, adding up to three actions. Definitely, uh, in the last year sometime, they started bringing all of the automation activity together. So I think even at the higher levels, it can be helpful to allow folks to do this and not necessarily manage the main workflows tool, um, when you're enabling, you know, your marketing team to get stuff done without having to also admin the system. Casey Hawkins: [Mhm] Chris Carolan: So that those extra actions now should allow for much more of that. Casey Hawkins: Yes. Chris Carolan: Introducing the Technology Partner Program. Discover your tier in the new dashboard. This is a major update. Uh, what is it? We're launching a new Technology Partner Dashboard in the developer platform that gives you an in-product view of your status in HubSpot's Technology Partner Program. From one place, you can see your current technology partner tier, uh, options are partner, rising, leading, or premier, a short explanation of what that tier represents, high-level requirements to maintain or move up, a summary of key benefits unlocked at your tier, links to program resources and contacts, including your partner manager if assigned. You'll find your tier on your developer overview page and in the technology partner section of developer portal. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? The dashboard is designed to give you self-serve clarity on where you stand in the program. It helps you understand what your current tier unlocks in terms of visibility and program advantages. See at a glance what matters most to maintain or progress to the next tier. Spot progress towards higher tiers when indicators are available based on key performance signals, um, and connect your program status to marketplace visibility. If your tier is rising, leading, or premier, customers will also see your tier badge on your app listing page and in marketplace filters. Tier is applied at the partner level across all your apps. By making tiering more transparent and accessible, the dashboard is meant to give you clear line of sight into how your work in the marketplace translates into program outcomes. Casey Hawkins: I'm surprised this has a major updates tag. I think I just don't understand. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Product, product updates team, if you just want to shoot us a DM about what and when, uh, what major update tag means. Casey Hawkins: I'm not saying this isn't like a big deal. It's just it feels like a bigger deal to developer partners. Chris Carolan: Right. I mean, it's a big deal to the ecosystem. Casey Hawkins: Sure, yes. Chris Carolan: Not necessarily like HubSpot functionality directly, right? It will like absolutely built and yeah, I think I feel like major update just means like please highlight this, uh, Casey, George, and Chris. Um, that's Uh, yeah. Any additional information would be helpful. Um, this makes sense in terms of like the trying to grow um, you know, the technology program. Uh it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out, you know, for the course of the year. I'll leave all of my AI commentary uh for the AI shows. Uh doing some that. You can check it out there. Um, but really, just this is how you get to like more resources for people doing great work for the ecosystem. So, uh good to see. Chris Carolan: Uh, last on the list today, we have, uh, identify Meta as paid social traffic. What is it? This update improves how HubSpot categorizes your web traffic from Meta. With this change, traffic with the UTM source Meta will now be automatically categorized as paid social in your traffic analytics. Previously, this traffic was categorized as other. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? To update this update ensures your traffic reports more accurately reflect where your visitors are coming from. Meta is a major paid advertising channel and categorizing the traffic as paid social gives you clear insights into performance of your social ad campaigns alongside your other paid social traffic. This to me reads as it never got updated when the when the name change happened, but it's updated now, which is good, great, happy. Chris Carolan: Yeah. That's uh, it now works the way it feels like it should work. Casey Hawkins: Yes. Chris Carolan: Uh, so if that's interesting for you and you have a lot of traffic coming from Meta, that should be helpful. Um, that's it. Casey Hawkins: Worth noting that the change applies to new traffic and not update historical data. So, um, yes, a good call. Casey Hawkins: Which is just how tracking things work. Chris Carolan: Indeed. Um, uh, that's it for updates today, but uh, we've got some some other events coming up. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, you're busy. Chris Carolan: Well, you're busy with me, that's sometimes. Um, starting today, uh, we're we're unboxing scoring. Uh, yeah, I'm very excited about this. Obviously Chris knows uh this has been a little bit a long time in the making. So I am very happy to have this, um, happening today. We'll be talking to both uh the product manager for lead scoring, Melody, um, and uh Renuke, who is the product manager for customer health scoring. Um, excited to talk to both of them. We're doing a joint session because the tools work in such a similar way. Um, but very excited to hear probably Chris challenge them on like some of the silos. Not that it's their fault, to be clear. Chris Carolan: I I think that I'm going to share a lot of gratitude about how it's being built out, even if the word lead is on there. It's clearly being built out for a world where scoring throughout the customer life cycle, like from start to finish, needs to work together. Um, so it's good to have them them both on. And, uh, so that's today at 1:00 Central. And then tomorrow, uh, Data Studio. I will be unboxing with Jasmine, uh, at 1:30 Central. Very excited for that. This is probably my least confident unboxing so far. Um, Data Studio is one of those places in HubSpot that I really have not done anything at all. Uh, it can be very, like when you open it up, can be very, um, uh, very intimidating and like it's very, very powerful in what you can do and not as easy to just like click around and and see how it works. So, excited to have the um, the spotter with me uh tomorrow as I unbox it with Jasmine, um, making sure I'm not screwing anything up. because it's supposed to be easy, right? Bring your spreadsheets in and bring data in and just connect all the data, right? This is the heart of when HubSpot talks about like unify your data, unify your context. Casey Hawkins: [Mhm] Chris Carolan: Data Studio and Data Hub like are real, they're building for that, right? So we're going to see how easy it is um to get started tomorrow. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, I am hoping to if yeah, I don't think I can make that one live, but I'm looking forward to rewatching it because I agree um, I'm also intimidated by Data Studio. Um, I just had a conversation with a client the other day where I'm like, Data Studio might solve this, but I'm just like I don't know. Chris Carolan: Yeah, we've heard things. Uh, like just bring your spreadsheet in. We'll take care of it. Right? So, I'm gonna test that tomorrow, um, because we often tell clients that like just show us where all the spreadsheets are. And then we'll work on bringing all that into HubSpot usually in a much more, you know, uh intentional, like architected way, but supposedly now with Data Studio, you can just bring the spreadsheet in and figure it out once it's in there. Uh, which is very, very powerful to think about in terms of not like the time to value can get much faster if you can just get people into HubSpot faster and seeing the data all together and we talk about unified customer views, just gets easier to make decisions when you're not having to switch between systems, um, have all that context in one place. Casey Hawkins: Yes. Chris Carolan: So, excited for that tomorrow. Uh, but for today, 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 later today for an unboxing, uh, or tomorrow 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. Casey Hawkins: I'm Casey Hawkins. Chris Carolan: And this has been Wake Up Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.