Value-First AI Daily - Mar 5, 2026

[00:03] **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. Chris Carolan: 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. Chris Carolan: If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. Happy Thursday, March 5th.

[00:36] **Casey's Comments** Casey Hawkins: Happy Thursday. Casey Hawkins: Happy Thursday. Casey Hawkins: I'd like to be honest, and I feel like I've been catching up from Monday all week, but I stayed up till 1:00 a.m. last night, and I'm I'm feeling like I'm feeling like I'm back.

[00:53] **Ryan's Comments** Ryan Ginsberg: Mm, there you go. Ryan Ginsberg: All right. Uh, well, hopefully you guys don't hear the lawnmower, uh, that's right outside my my window right now. Ryan Ginsberg: Um, Casey Hawkins: Your mic setup's great, better than mine. George B. Thomas: Yeah. George B. Thomas: Yeah, I don't I don't I don't hear it. Ryan Ginsberg: I'll do my best to uh, continue through this uh, situation, and let's uh, let's get to some updates. Um,

[01:34] **AEO Updates** Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, share my screen here. Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, we've got AEO. Create a blog post from a recommendation. What is it? You can now generate an AEO optimized blog article directly from a visibility recommendation, making it easy to create well structured content designed to close answer engine visibility gaps. Ryan Ginsberg: This feature currently generates listicle style articles. Example: top 10 or best tools for a format commonly surfaced in AI generated responses. Over time, support will expand to additional content types.

[02:23] **Why It Matters** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? The AEO tool shows you where your brand is lacking visibility in answer engines. Previously, you had to manually apply recommendations into new content and figure out how to structure it to actually improve answer engine visibility. Casey Hawkins: This feature removes that friction. With just a few clicks, you can turn AEO recommendations into ready to edit blog posts that are already structured for answer engine optimization. It helps you move from insights to impact faster. Casey Hawkins: Um, I would like to ask George a question about AEO.

[03:01] **Casey's Question About AEO** Casey Hawkins: Yeah. Casey Hawkins: Which is going to show how little I know about AEO. Casey Hawkins: Um, but is the so the what this is saying is they're helping you find places where AEO where AI tools or could blah blah blah. AI tools could recommend your article.

[03:30] **George's Explanation** George B. Thomas: Yeah, so well, so here's the thing. If you go, well, if you get into this beta, and also, I think there was a beta previous to this one as well. But if you get into this beta, in your content tab, Casey, there will be a search strategy. It used to be called SEO, and you'd click on it and it go to like the pillar page, uh, topics tool, and cluster topic clusters. George B. Thomas: But it's now called search strategy, and what they give you is there's a dashboard which it it talks about brand visibility, and brand visibility reveals when and how AI models talk about your brand. And what it allows you to do is track the when and how of your brand and its mentions across major AI tools like Chat Chat GPT, Gemini, so on and so forth, so that we as marketers, business owners, whatever, can understand the presence that we have in AI generation. George B. Thomas: Um, there's a dashboard, there's literally a prompts tab, there's citations tab, and there's a recommendations tab, which is new, um, and then now based on what you're reading or based on this update because of the recommendations, you're going to be able to create content to fill the gap. What's really nice about when you set it up, there's like a competitor's landscape. George B. Thomas: And so for me, I can look at um, share of voice, it's called in here. So like I might be looking at maybe, aptitude 8, Blue Leads, New Breed, Smart Bug Media, like and be able to look at them as well.

[05:17] **George's Final Comments** Casey Hawkins: Even see their marketing. George B. Thomas: Yeah. George B. Thomas: A a large, a large presence. George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So, um, so yeah, it's it's a very interesting set of tools that they're building around AEO. And what's nice is now it's like AEO is a tab. By the way, it's the first tab. Pay attention to that. And the second tab is SEO. But they're all in the same place.

[05:59] **Chris, the Last Update** Casey Hawkins: Um, Chris, am I going to ruin your life if I suggest we go to the last update just so we're talking about it all together? Ryan Ginsberg: The one that I have up on the screen right now? Casey Hawkins: Sure. Casey Hawkins: Oh, you and I. Ryan Ginsberg: Um, Casey Hawkins: You know what, we don't even we don't even have to talk anymore. Ryan Ginsberg: Yeah. Casey Hawkins: It's just the brain waves are here. Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, closely related, maybe the parent update of the one that we just uh read, um, AEO Track and Improve Your Brand Visibility in AI Powered Search.

[06:39] **HubSpot New AEO Tool** Ryan Ginsberg: What is it? HubSpot's new AEO Answer Engine Optimization tool lets you measure, track, and improve your brand's visibility in answer engines like Chat GPT, all in one place.

[06:58] **Why It Matters?** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? How people discover brands is changing. Instead of clicking through traditional search results, buyers are increasingly asking questions directly in answer engines and trusting the answers they get. Casey Hawkins: These AI responses often summarize the market, recommend vendors and cite sources before a customer even visits a website. The challenge: you can be doing great SEO and still be invisible in AI generated answers. The AEO tool helps you close that gap by giving you visibility into a channel that's otherwise a black box. Casey Hawkins: Just as SEO tools help marketers adapt to traditional search engines, AEO helps you adapt to AI driven discovery with real data and now actionable recommendations to improve your results.

[07:55] **Chris and Casey Talk, Acronyms** Ryan Ginsberg: Yepers. Everything George just said. Casey Hawkins: I was going to say, I think if I had read this, I wouldn't have made George. Ryan Ginsberg: And I think we need to come up with like 10 more acronyms and phrases as as various ways to describe what we're trying to do here. Ryan Ginsberg: Um, we'll leave that for another day. Casey Hawkins: . Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, yeah, get some help getting found uh in your AI friends. Um, but if you see a bunch of answers turning into listicle answers, uh, you might now know why.

[08:40] **Find Reports Not Using** Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, find reports you're not using. What is it? A view in your reports list that shows reports that haven't been viewed in six months or more.

[08:51] **Why It Matters** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? If you're managing a growing collection of reports, it's hard to know which ones are still relevant. Unused reports clutter your list and make it harder for you and your team to find reports you actually need. With this view, you can identify and delete reports that are no longer useful and keep your report list focused on what you actively use.

[09:20] **Enhanced Frozen Columns** Ryan Ginsberg: Very nice. Enhanced frozen columns. Ryan Ginsberg: is good one. Ryan Ginsberg: What is it? We've upgraded our table experience to give you total control over how you view your data. You can now freeze as many columns as you need to keep your most important information in sight. We've also made it much more intuitive. Simply drag and drop any column into the frozen area to lock it in place instantly.

[09:53] **Why It Matters - Workflows** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Every workflow is unique, and we don't believe your tool should eliminate how you organize your data. Whether you need to see two columns or 10 while you scroll, you now have the flexibility to build the exact view you need. This update is part of our ongoing commitment to quality, ensuring our tables are not only more powerful, but also easier and more natural to use. Casey Hawkins: Just a quick note, if you heard my brain break, it was because workflow in this case means the flow of the work you're doing, not the workflow tool. And I thought I was on the wrong update for a moment.

[10:35] **Played With This Yesterday** Ryan Ginsberg: I don't know, I got to I was playing with this just yesterday. The drag and drop into the frozen zone, uh, very, very cool. Um, revert to prior revision in workflows and send from Outlook aliases. Uh, we've touched both of those uh earlier this week.

[10:59] **TikTok Add Integration** Ryan Ginsberg: Um, weren't we're going to do yesterday, but I had to cancel. So I've got a list from yesterday uh that is no longer on the new to you page, um, but we're going to click over to the all uh section. Um, Tik Tok ads integration is on that list. Uh, connect your Tik Tok ads account to see all your ad data, attribution and audiences in one place.

[11:33] **Why It Matters** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Tik Tok is the fastest growing ads channel and short form video drives the highest marketing ROI. Managing it separately means missing unified attribution and first party data sync.

[11:56] **Unifying Reply Recommendations** Ryan Ginsberg: Unifying reply recommendations and customer agent. This is a major update alert. George. George B. Thomas: Oh man, I wasn't ready. Dang gosh. George B. Thomas: I forgot that I did that one day and everybody loved it. George B. Thomas: Hang on, hang on. Give me one second. [12:25] **Sound Effect** George B. Thomas: We have a major update, ladies and gentlemen.

[12:29] **Okay, Here We Go** George B. Thomas: All right, there we go. Casey Hawkins: I do really like it. George B. Thomas: I got I got to get more prepared for that one. George B. Thomas: I got to remember that. George B. Thomas: Put that in the memory banks. George B. Thomas: George @.md file. George B. Thomas: Okay, here we go. Ryan Ginsberg: . Ryan Ginsberg: Editing memory. Ryan Ginsberg: Okay, uh back to uh what's. Casey Hawkins: Offering working.

[13:01] **This Is Getting Real Nerdy!** Casey Hawkins: This is getting real nerdy. Casey Hawkins: Oh, man. Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, what's changed with this update? Uh, updated migration details. If you use reply recommendations but not customer agent, a customer agent will be automatically created for your portal on March 10th. Ryan Ginsberg: Including default settings and access to a smarter model. This migration consolidates settings and it does not activate an an autonomous customer agent. Reply recommendations do not consume credits. Ryan Ginsberg: Uh, what is it? We're unifying reply recommendations and customer agent into a single cohesive experience. This update includes reply recommendation setup now lives within the customer agent app. A streamlined rep experience in help desk with an improved reply flow. Fire quality recommendations, more personal, thorough and accurate.

[14:10] **Why It Matters - Support Team** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? The challenge: support teams need a need to move faster without sacrificing quality or control. The solution: reply recommendations give reps AI powered recommendations that keep humans in the loop. Review, edit, and send. Casey Hawkins: Reps stay in control while moving significantly faster. Why now? Reply recommendations and customer agent already share the same knowledge sources. This update makes it easier to get immediate value from customer agent without deploying a live autonomous agent. Casey Hawkins: It's a low risk entry point that lets teams respond quickly and close tickets faster, deploy AI assistance without going fully autonomous, build confidence in AI outputs through hands-on experience, improve answer quality over time as your team refines content sources and manage everything from a unified admin experience.

[15:13] **Comments, Live Experience** Ryan Ginsberg: A lot of things coming to mind here, George. Um, reading between the lines, uh, while your human agents and your customer agent probably do already share the same knowledge sources, they might not have the same instructions or guidelines. Uh, if we put a lot of work into building out the customer agent and um, maybe everybody else's instructions and guidelines are based on their lived experience with with less documentation to draw from. Ryan Ginsberg: Um, and this like I'm just envisioning like instead of the customer agent working over here, and our humans working over here, now everybody's working together. We got customer agent right there with us. Ryan Ginsberg: Like, hey George, seeing this come in, you might want to do this or this is what happened last time when we did it like this.

[16:10] **Team Working Together** George B. Thomas: Yep. Ryan Ginsberg: Um, but team working together. Ryan Ginsberg: Love it. Got brand support and invoices payment link, subscriptions and credit memos. Uh, if you have the brands add-on, you can assign different brands to invoices, payment links, subscriptions and checkout pages in commerce hub. Ryan Ginsberg: So each transaction reflects the correct logo and brand colors.

[16:38] **Businesses With Multiple Brands** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Businesses with multiple brands need to present the correct branding throughout the buyer journey, avoiding confusion and maintaining a professional appearance. Brand support provides a cohesive buyer journey from marketing to sales to payments.

[17:03] **Should Be Major Update** Ryan Ginsberg: This should be a major update, George, but it does not have the tag. ask. George B. Thomas: It should be. George B. Thomas: Yeah, I I mean it should be.

[17:13] **CMS APP** Ryan Ginsberg: Updated customer portal powered by CMS is in private beta. What is it? We're upgrading the customer portal to run on the CMS app, giving you a faster and more seamless experience. This change was driven by a few factors including strong customer demand for more flexibility and branding control of their portal experience. Ryan Ginsberg: This update will eventually unlock access to HubSpot CMS capabilities all within a unified environment. It also enables additional use cases in the customer portal beyond ticketing. Along with the total redesign, you'll notice new features in the new version such as multiple conversations. View all conversation threads connected to a ticket in the portal. Ryan Ginsberg: Sort and filter, organizing ticket data for viewing and reporting. Improve search, look up information in subject, ticket ID, and description. And new design layouts including collapsible panels for ticket details and attachments as well as column resizing for clients in the portal.

[18:21] **Moving To CMS Platform** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Moving to the CMS app platform gives us the speed design flexibility and extensibility, extensionability? Casey Hawkins: They're making up words. Casey Hawkins: Um, needed to create a quick branded experience. It's an experience most customers are familiar with and can navigate much more easily. This new experience also lays the foundation for future cross hub customer journeys, enabling a unified self-service experience that goes beyond ticket management to include other use cases. Casey Hawkins: Others.

[18:58] **CMS App in HubSpot** Ryan Ginsberg: Getting there, step in the right direction. Uh, we'll go ahead and and check it out. Um, but tell me, George, uh, where can I find the CMS app in HubSpot? George B. Thomas: The CMS app? George B. Thomas: I mean it it's basically talking about the CMS tools and they're using the internal.

[19:34] **I'll Show You Where** Ryan Ginsberg: Yeah. So if you're not sure what CMS app means, um, come over to content and basically website pages, landing pages, uh blog, like that's where you find CMS tooling. Um, Casey Hawkins: George hated that you put him on the spot like that so much. Ryan Ginsberg: Yeah. He was like, Chris, I'm tired of you putting me on the spot. Ryan Ginsberg: Right? Um, yeah, I just want better words to be used like CMS app like nobody calls it that. Nobody knows what that means. Um, anything CMS hub, which we don't want them calling it that because it's content hub. Ryan Ginsberg: Oh, let's see what else we might have from the list yesterday that is new. Uh, I think this one is new. Rotate record to owner action in conversation based workflows. Uh, what is it? Ryan Ginsberg: We're extending the existing rotate owner action to working conversation based workflows. The rotate record to owner action automatically moves a conversation to another inbox and assigns it to the right person or team, based on who has access to that inbox. Ryan Ginsberg: It brings a structured automated handoff experience similar to rotate owner for CRM objects to conversations while fully respecting inbox permissions.

[20:59] **Support Teams Often...** Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Support teams often reply on workflow based handoffs to move conversations between tiers, specialist groups, or from automation to a human agent. This new action gives your team the ability to automate conversation handoffs between inboxes, ensure conversations only route to users who can respond, keep ownership aligned with the right team as workflows progress and standardize the way handoff work handoffs work across your support process. Casey Hawkins: This result is clearer ownership, faster responses and more efficient conversation management.

[21:44] **Biggest Takeaway!** Ryan Ginsberg: Remember, folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in hub spots. Sometimes 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 brandly Hubspot Updates blog. Ryan Ginsberg: 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.

[22:10] **Go Build Something Amazing** Ryan Ginsberg: And this has been wake up customer platform and now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.