Author: Yamini Rangan

The biggest topic on everyone’s minds this year at INBOUND was the same as last year: AI. But the nature of the conversation has changed.

In 2023, headlines indicated that AI would change everything, for better or for worse. It was going to bring an economic revolution, usher in a gold rush, and destroy humanity, all at once.

One year later, the headlines say the opposite story: the AI revolution is losing steam and the AI hype bubble is deflating. So what’s the truth? Is the recent wave of AI disruption false hype, or a true revolution?

At INBOUND, I made the case that these are not the right questions to ask or answer. Because first and foremost, go-to-market professionals are asking themselves a simpler question: how do I drive growth?

After all, everyone seems to feel the same way: lately, it’s been harder to grow. So it’s worth understanding why it’s been so tough, what has changed in the customer journey, and answer the question: where do we grow from here?

3 Reasons Why the Growth Formula Is Broken

The growth formula is simple: More traffic * Higher Conversion * Better Retention = Higher growth. But unfortunately, it is broken.

Across the board: traffic, conversion, and retention are down, and therefore, so is growth. According to our research, only 50% of reps are hitting their quotas, compared to 66% just two years ago.

But why? We’ve seen three big trends that have contributed to this downturn.

1. Search has fundamentally changed. Search engines used to provide bluelinks that get customers to your website. But with AI overviews and soon SearchGPT, customers are getting more answers without leaving search. That means fewer visitors to your website.
2. Social platforms are holding on to customers longer. They’re becoming destinations themselves, where customers are spending more time. That means fewer visitors still.
3. More than ever, people want to talk to people. Not brands. Customers check Reddit, visit G2, watch YouTube videos, and talk to their peers first — so by the time they come to your site, your customers know more about you than you know about them. That means the bar for sales and service teams is incredibly high when talking to customers. And if that bar is not met, conversion and retention will go down.
   

Two Paths for AI to Drive Growth: Acceleration and Transformation

So how do go-to-market professionals address these challenges? History has the answer: when technology solves old problems in new ways, it leads to profound change.

That’s why the internet and smartphones were so transformative — they addressed fundamental needs like information access and human connection.

AI might just achieve the same kind of change for growth. We see that potential firsthand from surveying hundreds of our customers who have embraced AI. And we came away with two overarching observations: Today, our customers are using AI for acceleration. And soon, they’ll be using it for transformation.

Acceleration means taking what’s feasible, and making it fast, while transformation is taking what’s impossible and making it possible. From customer conversations, we’ve seen how both types of use cases apply to marketing, sales, and service.

How AI Is Accelerating and Transforming Marketing

Marketing is one of the biggest use cases for AI and customers are already using AI to accelerate their work by creating, personalizing, and distributing content.

65% of HubSpot users are now using AI to create content, and they do it well by understanding what the technology is good at: researching topics, delivering decent first drafts, and iterating for different audiences. Then human experts take the drafts from good to great.

Within HubSpot, our marketing team has excelled at personalizing content with AI. When we started reaching out to prospects with AI-personalized emails, it increased our conversion rate by 82%.

And when it comes to distributing content, we saw huge adoption when we launched our AI-powered Content Remix feature a few months ago — which allows you to take one piece of content, and quickly convert it into social posts, videos, emails, and more.

Soon, marketers will be able to transform their work using AI. And they’ll do it with agents — software that uses AI to accomplish goals with multiple steps.

Content agents will prioritize, personalize, and distribute content; social agents will analyze social content and tell you when, where, and how to share it; and a campaign agent will tell you where to invest and what to amplify within your campaigns.

How AI Is Accelerating and Transforming Sales

In sales, the everlasting challenge has been increasing time in front of customers. The average sales person spends only two hours a day selling!

They’re stuck the rest of the day buried in prep for the next call or drowning in follow-ups from the last one. Nobody has figured out how to shrink this time—until now.

AI is accelerating prep and follow-up. Salespeople can now research prospects in seconds, generate high-quality personal messages to connect with them, summarize calls, and create insightful follow-ups.

The result: across our customers and HubSpot, AI has saved time spent in discovery by 30%, and cut follow-up time by 20%.

And soon: AI will transform sales with prospecting agents — AI-powered software that finds leads for you and makes outreach as simple as a couple of clicks.

How AI Is Accelerating and Transforming Service

Finally, in customer service, a huge source of frustration has been when service professionals are stuck being human band-aids — chasing problems reactively.

Here, too, AI is accelerating the process with great results. It can answer customer questions better than ever; HubSpot has been able to resolve nearly 30% of tickets this year with AI.

It can accelerate self-service by strengthening your knowledge base, allowing customers to resolve their own questions. And it can analyze customer sentiment in real time, suggesting specific actions based on the trends it observes.

Agents are coming to transform customer service, too. Support agents will be able to answer increasingly complex customer questions, 24/7 — and knowledge base agents will recommend and update knowledge base articles so your team doesn’t have to.

How AI and Humans Can Work Together To Drive Growth

Based on everything we’ve learned from our customers, the way to grow is not to underplay AI or overhype AI — it’s to understand and co-create with AI.

Because co-creation catalyzes growth. We believe that across go-to-market functions, we need to co-create with AI to drive growth:

• In marketing, AI creates, and people curate.
• In sales, AI offers context, and people offer connection.
• And in service, AI handles simplicity, and people handle subtlety.

In all three cases, AI isn’t being used instead of people — it’s empowering people and helping us scale. And if we can unlock its potential to help us drive traffic, conversion, and retention, we might just be able to fix the growth formula. And that effort is perfectly aligned with our mission at HubSpot.

HubSpot’s Mission, What Will Change, and What Will Always Be True

HubSpot exists to help millions of organizations grow better. And we are doubling down on that mission as we reimagine our platform with AI. To fully leverage AI, you will need support for structured and unstructured data.

You’ll need to gather insights from text content as well as audio and video. You’ll need your apps and agents to work well together. And we’re excited to help our customers adapt to these changes!

But we also have to remember that some things will always be true!

Customers will always want things to be easy — so we work hard to make things intuitive and efficient. You’ll always want to realize value fast — so we are laser-focused on repeat usage and immediate impact. And you’ll always want your customer and context data to be unified — so we’re bringing together all the data you’ll need to drive insights with AI.

Our mission is to help you grow. Our passion is to make it easy, fast, and unified. And what’s so motivating about this moment is that everywhere we look, there is promise that AI can help businesses scale like never before. With AI, we can help all businesses play big.

And to learn more about the features and services we introduced at INBOUND 2024 to do just that, check out our latest Spotlight.