Turn your challenges into successes

With UNBOUND 2026, HubSpot is changing the place of AI in its product. Until now, it sat in a few tools: a prospecting agent, a service agent, a writing button in the email editor. It is now installed underneath the entire portal, and all agents read the same reference base about the company. The consequence for a team deploying AI in HubSpot is direct: the quality of results now depends on the context provided and the cleanliness of the data, far more than on the choice of agent.

In most teams, B2B outbound prospecting still relies on an old model: a list of accounts built each quarter, purchased or exported contacts, a five-email sequence, and a response rate that falls every year. The sequence is not the main cause of this decline. The cause is the timing: you write to a company because it is on a list, not because a recent event at that company justifies reaching out.

Sixty percent of Google searches now end without a click on any website (HubSpot, “HubSpot Introduces the Loop” press release). The B2B buyer has their answer before reaching you, or they never come. Meanwhile, they move between TikTok, Reddit, podcasts and five to eight channels on average depending on the organization. The linear marketing funnel, the one that assumes a visitor who arrives, fills in a form and moves forward step by step, was designed for a world that no longer exists.

August 26, 2026 marks a major step forward in collaboration between CRMs and LLMs. Salesforce and Anthropic announce Claudeforce, Salesforce's CRM accessible directly in Claude, with 37 ready-to-use sales skills and a beta opening in September. A turning point in the SaaS world, which accepts no longer bringing users into its native interface. Marc Benioff sums up the shift in one phrase: “the UI is the AI”. The interface is no longer an application you open, it is a conversation. A CRM without a screen, queried from the outside: the market already has a name for it, the headless CRM. HubSpot is following the same path, more quietly. Since April 2026, its MCP server has made it possible to read from and write to the CRM from Claude. AI is therefore already at the door of your portal. What remains is to decide what you let it do, and where your customer data goes. At Markentive, the question has been settled for a while: connecting Claude to HubSpot is a given. We do it every day, on our own portal and for our clients. Never without safeguards, however. And this is precisely what separates a gadget from a lever.

Since April 2026, HubSpot has charged for its AI agents per completed task rather than by subscription. The predictable result: portals that had activated a prospecting agent here and a service agent there ended up with AI building blocks each running in isolation, with no overall view and no shared governance. Agent Hub is HubSpot's answer to this problem, launched in public beta on July 23, 2026: a single space to view, activate and manage all the Breeze agents in a portal, backed by Agent Builder to build new ones. Here is its actual scope, what changes compared with activating agents one by one, and what you need to know before devoting team time to it.

A CRM database degrades even when nobody touches it. Contacts change jobs, companies merge, emails become invalid, company registration numbers stay empty. Reference studies put this erosion at around 2.1% per month, meaning 22.5% of the database becomes outdated every year (MarketingSherpa research, cited in HubSpot's Database Decay simulation). Meanwhile, your teams segment, score and route leads based on wrong or empty fields.

Across the 300,000+ HubSpot customers analyzed worldwide, organic traffic fell by 27% on average year over year. The figure comes from HubSpot itself, shared when it published its first-quarter 2026 results and repeated in the webinar we co-hosted with the vendor last June. This traffic has not disappeared. It has moved to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other LLMs, where your buyers now ask their questions and build their shortlist without necessarily going through a Google results page.

The open rate has been the most closely watched email metric for twenty years. It relies on a mechanism most teams have never assessed from a legal standpoint: an invisible pixel, loaded when the message is opened. Since April 14, 2026, this mechanism falls under the same rules as cookies. In other words, for a large share of your uses, measuring an open now requires the recipient's consent.

A European leader in higher education, the AD Éducation group brings together 21 institutions present in 9 countries. Each year, AD Éducation offers more than 42,000 students programs in design, audiovisual, animation & video games, culture and luxury, music, communication, marketing and digital, management and engineering sciences.

AI in the CRM is not new. Predictive scoring, content suggestions and call transcription have existed for years in most platforms. What changes with Breeze is the nature of the intervention: we move from AI that suggests to AI that executes. A Breeze agent does not just recommend a reply to a ticket; it writes it, documents it and can resolve it on its own within the scope you have defined.

On June 16, 2026, HubSpot renamed Commerce Hub to Revenue Hub. Changing a name is rarely trivial for a software vendor, and here the word states the intention. “Commerce” suggested a one-off transaction: a payment link, an isolated invoice. “Revenue” refers to a continuous flow, that of B2B companies that constantly renew, expand and renegotiate contracts. Most of our clients live in this second world, not the first.