The Rising HubSpot Breeze

AI agents are all the rage right now. Or at least they are if you're in the business of running a marketing technology platform. Hubspot is no exception, but as usual, they have taken a different approach to the challenge of embedding AI into marketing production flows. Rather than promising extensive flexibility and development capabilities, they have focused their AI functionality on the most promising uses for the technology.

Content AI

The full suite of AI functionality has been labelled Breeze, mirroring a unified naming scheme adopted by other technology companies. Many of the announced capabilities aren't actually new. Chatspot, the HubSpot AI assistant, has been rebranded as Breeze CoPilot. Breeze isn't just limited to Generative AI either. It also encompasses HubSpot's existing predictive and machine learning features, such as Predictive Scoring.

Rather than pitching a general-purpose AI agent, HubSpot have created a suite of dedicated AI agents for specific use cases, primarily related to content marketing. There is the expected content generation agent, which leans heavily into content remixes and format-shifting of existing content already published in HubSpot. This includes creating videos from blog posts, as well as writing case studies from CRM opportunities, which will definitely be helpful for overstretched SMB marketing teams. Dedicated prospecting and customer service agents can also remix the same content for sales and support scenarios too. All these features do require companies to use HubSpot for sales as well as marketing though, which will limit their adoption.

Data AI

For marketing users, the most notable announcement is the launch of Breeze Intelligence. This is a suite of data enrichment capabilities that significantly expands the rather limited capabilities available today with HubSpot Insights. In particular, Breeze introduces intent data into the HubSpot platform for the first time. HubSpot users can now configure their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which is then used by the new data Breeze Intelligence platform. Using this new intent data service, companies are able to see the overall size of their total addressable market (TAM), in addition to the proportion of that market already present in your HubSpot database. Then, against each company in your database, HubSpot will provide a hygiene rating, highlighting recent intent signals from that company, as well as suggesting accounts for marketing teams to go after in campaigns.

All this is available even within the free tier of the platform, although there are limits to the number of accounts highlighted to users. As such, every HubSpot user is now getting some very useful market insights built into their marketing database for free. Even if the intent data model heavily relies on first-party intent data alongside the input from third-party Clearbit data. This is because data enrichment and import of new accounts from Breeze are not free. Breeze Intelligence is intended to be a paid add-on built upon last year's acquisition of Clearbit. Any data enrichment usage must be paid for using a credit-based pricing model. This is actually a significant change for HubSpot users, who are used to a basic level of free data enrichment from HubSpot Insights. That free enrichment capability is going away.

Evolving Features

HubSpot Insights is being sunset. The timeline for its removal hasn't been confirmed, but new HubSpot instances don't have access to it. The platform will no longer enrich account records with additional profile information for free. That now requires Breeze Intelligence credits. Instead, the free HubSpot CRM will display ICP fit and buyer intent information against your accounts. That ICP can be defined using the same technographic and firmographic criteria available using HubSpot Insights, but you can't see the underlying technographic information against each account, nor can you use it for more granular marketing segmentation.

For all the complaints about the quality of HubSpot Insights data, this change will be a significant loss of functionality for HubSpot customers. Third-party data can be prohibitively expensive for many SMBs, and Breeze Intelligence looks to be no exception. The features that HubSpot users with Breeze are getting do look to be useful, but it does represent a significant change of approach.