Reinvent Your Strategy with HubSpot INBOUND 2024 - A Look at Fall Updates [LIVE Coverage]

Welcome to SmartBug’s Live Blog Coverage of INBOUND 2024!

INBOUND 2024 is here, and it’s HubSpot’s most anticipated event of the year—and SmartBug’s largest presence yet (Stop by booth #24 to check it out). As HubSpot’s most decorated Elite Solutions Partner, we’re here to deliver the most important information, insights, and updates in real-time.__

We’ve got two of our own HubSpot Correspondents, Paul Schmidt, and Samuel St-Amour, on the ground, bringing you daily recaps and expert insights directly from the event floor. Whether it’s product announcements, thought-provoking sessions, or actionable takeaways, you can count on SmartBug to keep you in the loop.

What to Expect:

• Stay ahead with updates on HubSpot’s most exciting product releases and innovations as they happen at INBOUND24.
• Get key takeaways from top sessions, distilled into practical advice and insights.
• Learn from SmartBug’s elite team on how to implement HubSpot’s latest tools and strategies to drive sustainable growth in your business.

Stay tuned as we dive into HubSpot’s Fall Spotlight, which focuses on Reinvention—reinventing growth with tools that are easy to use, fast to adopt, and unified with data.

Notice – At SmartBug, we may discuss developments for HubSpot products or services, but these are not guarantees and are subject to change. Decisions should not be based solely on these projections, as they reflect current plans that may evolve without notice.

Correspondent Daily Recaps

Day 1 | Daily Correspondent Recap

Day 2 | Daily Correspondent Recap

Day 3 | Daily Correspondent Recap

The 3 Core Themes &  Updates

As part of fall spotlight, HubSpot is focusing their attention on three core themes:

Exciting new updates to Marketing Hub and Content Hub

The introduction of Breeze.ai - HubSpot’s new brand name for their suite of AI tools The launch of a new product -  Breeze Intelligence. 

Today’s go-to-market teams are held back by challenging market conditions hindered by slow and disconnected tools that impede growth. This is where HubSpot’s teams are focusing their efforts on and why they have selected the three core themes above to be this year’s INBOUND focus.

Marketing+ | Marketing & Content Hub Updates

HubSpot is once again unveiling groundbreaking AI-powered tools that will  enable marketers to effortlessly create, manage, and automate their content and lead generation. In today’s rapidly changing market, where efficiency and personalization are key, these innovations allow businesses to attract and engage customers more quickly and effectively—helping them stay competitive and adapt to shifting consumer behaviors.

Breeze.ai by HubSpot

HubSpot is rebranding and enhancing its AI tools to better equip customer-facing teams with smarter, faster solutions.  These updates provide businesses with intuitive, AI-driven capabilities embedded directly into the platform—empowering teams to streamline workflows, improve customer interactions, and respond to market demands with agility.

Breeze Copilot - works with you

“A virtual assistant that works with you everywhere you go in HubSpot” 

HubSpot’s AI suite is undergoing not only a rebrand but also significant updates to enhance its functionality. What was formerly known as ChatSpot is now being relaunched as Breeze Co-Pilot, signaling a shift towards a more comprehensive, AI-powered assistant designed to optimize your entire HubSpot experience.

In addition to the rebrand, HubSpot is introducing a brand new feature called Breeze Agents—a set of four AI-driven specialists, each tailored to specific areas of your business. These agents are designed to help teams work smarter, faster, and more efficiently by automating key tasks and streamlining workflows across marketing, sales, content, and customer service.

Breeze Agents & AI across Hubs & Smart CRM - works for you

“Designed to automate manual tasks and work for you, so you can focus on more strategic work.”

1. Social Media Agent (Available in Marketing Hub Pro+)

The Social Agent is designed to assist marketing teams in managing social media efforts. From automating posts to optimizing engagement strategies, this AI-driven agent helps ensure your social media presence is always aligned with your overall marketing objectives. Say goodbye to manually scheduling posts, and let the Social Agent handle your marketing campaigns with ease.

2. Content Agent (Available in Content Hub Pro+)

Creating content at scale is now easier than ever with the Content Agent. This AI-powered assistant can generate content for landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and even podcasts, helping you keep your content pipeline full and relevant. Whether you’re launching a new campaign or simply need fresh ideas for blog posts, the Content Agent is here to support your content marketing efforts with high-quality, data-driven recommendations.

3. Prospecting Agent (Available in Sales Hub Pro & Enterprise)

Sales teams can now leverage the Prospecting Agent, which assists in identifying and engaging high-potential leads. By automating prospecting workflows and providing insights into lead quality, this agent helps your sales teams focus on converting the right prospects, reducing time wasted on cold leads. Whether you're working with Sales Hub Pro or Enterprise, the Prospecting Agent is your AI-powered partner in driving sales.

4. Customer Agent (Available in Service Hub Pro+)

Customer service just got a major upgrade with the Customer Agent. This AI-driven expert helps service teams manage customer inquiries more effectively, ensuring faster response times and better customer satisfaction. With capabilities embedded in Service Hub Pro+, the Customer Agent helps you create a seamless customer service experience, from automated responses to personalized support recommendations. 

Product Updates

Breeze Intelligence

Breeze Intelligence is HubSpot’s latest AI-powered data enrichment and buyer intent tool, designed to help businesses streamline lead generation and conversion efforts. With access to over 20 million company profiles and 100+ rich attributes, including demographic and technographic data, Breeze Intelligence allows users to effortlessly discover and prioritize high-intent prospects. 

Integrated directly into HubSpot, this tool will help businesses enrich contact and company data, track buyer intent through website activity, and optimize conversion through form-shortening features—ultimately helping organizations make data-driven decisions faster and more effectively.

Product Updates

With Breeze Intelligence, inside of HubSpot, you can now:
1. Pull in enriched data from over 200 million contacts - Keep your contact and company records up to date with the latest firmographic, technographic and contact information
2. Shorten your forms - DYK your form conversion rate improves by 1-5% for every field you eliminate from your forms.
3. Gain access to buyer intent data (to see which companies are actively viewing your site)

The most common questions I've been getting from HubSpot customers is: If I'm already using Apollo.io or ZoomInfo, how does this benefit me?

Our take: 
1. Breeze Intelligence doesn't support an outbound GTM motion. So if you do lots of cold calling/email and need to build outbound lists for your sales to send unsolicited comms, then Breeze isn't a replacement for Apollo/ZI.
2. Breeze Intelligence is sold based on # of enrichment credits, whereas Apollo/ZI are sold based on # of seats, # of credits, and # of tools you have access to within the platform. It's apples to oranges when trying to do a simple cost comparison.
3. Data quality is the name of the game here. Every company should vet the quality of the data of any data provider. A great way to do this is toput the same contact record side by side to see which data is most accurate and recent based on your industry and geo.

In any case, any organization looking to leverage AI and agents, needs a high-quality data provider.

CRM, Sales & Operations Hub Updates

We’re at a time where business owners and marketers are facing the challenge of needing to personalize their marketing more than ever, to better target and segment their lists, and to really engage at the right time. 

Beyond the three core themes updates, HubSpot has also developed a ton of new updates and enhancements to their Smart CRM, Sales Hub and Operations Hub features to help navigate this massive change of disruption that marketers are currently dealing with. 

That’s not all… | Other Updates from HubSpot & SmartBug

Session Insights | Day 1

Paul Schmidt | “The AI-Powered Marketing Playbook” by Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan

👉 Use AI to reverse engineer viral videos & top performing sales pitch emails. AI can help you understand the writing formats and styles that have the best chance of resonating with your audience.

🚀 Look for hidden troves of data that AI can leverage for analysis and content creation use cases - Remember SlideShare? YouTube transcriptions also contain a wealth of data

⚡️Another plug for Agent.AI . Take a look at Kieran Flanagan's agent which uses Agent.AI’s agent builder and can take a YouTube video and then help you write an effective LinkedIn post/summary. (See link in comments)

Holly Koch | “Implementing HubSpot: Things Every Admin Needs To Know" by Kyle Jepson”

 HubSpot's new features and functionalities:

👉 Starting with the Objects Library, now available to all tiers. It's super flexible—you can use templates to create custom objects for things like services, lists, courses, and appointments.

🚀 Big focus: sensitive data, including updates for handling HIPAA and other highly sensitive information. Importing data is now smarter too—HubSpot makes field type suggestions based on what you're uploading, which is a step up from just filling in missing values.

⚡️Multi-step forms are now live in HubSpot, making form-building much more dynamic. However, ticket properties aren’t yet included in the new form builder beta, but they are still available in the legacy version.

📊 For reporting, HubSpot has extended capabilities with data sets, and this feature is now available in the Pro tier.

🤖 Next up was Breeze, HubSpot's intelligence tool, which comes packed with features like buyer intent (free), form shortening (Starter tier), and data enrichment (credits-based). Breeze Copilot offers free and tier-specific features like social, content, prospecting, and customer agents depending on the Hub you’re using—Marketing Pro, Content Pro, Sales Pro, and Service Pro respectively.

Ale Melara | "Content is NOT king - The New Approach to Content Marketing" by Neil Patel 

With 4.6 billion pieces of content circulating online, it’s no surprise that 94.2% of content gets no organic traffic. The truth is, most content fails to gain traction, and AI is only adding to the overload.

👉  But does this mean creating content is no longer worth it? Absolutely not! While you can’t ignore social media, even lesser-known platforms can drive impressive results. And yes, blogging is still valuable—but success no longer depends on volume. People prefer concise, quick content over endless posts.

🚀 Engagement is the real game-changer now, not just content. The most successful blogs are focusing on:

• Updating existing content (68%) rather than constantly creating new (31%).
• Human-written blogs that outperform AI-generated ones in traffic and engagement.

⚡️ Blogging has shifted toward an ultra-long-tail keyword strategy, which may not generate huge traffic, but it’s where the real revenue lies.

So, what’s the new approach?

• Test content on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to see what resonates with your audience.
• Turn winning content into short-form videos for platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Facebook.
• Use those winners to create long-form content like blogs or white papers.
• Repurpose successful blog posts into webinars to further engage your audience.

By focusing on quality, engagement, and repurposing, you can break through the noise of content overload and drive meaningful results.

Session Insights | Day 2

Ale Melara | "Optimizing HubSpot: Things Every HubSpot Admin Needs to Know" by Kyle Jepson 

This session dove into the latest updates and innovations from HubSpot products. From groundbreaking AI tools to enhanced CRM features, here’s everything you need to know to stay ahead of the curve as a HubSpot admin.

👉 Platform Updates

• Object Management & Limits: New tabs help admins track limits like contacts, custom properties, and calculator properties. Regularly check and clean up data to avoid exceeding limits.
• Analysis Tab: Monitor daily updates to your data model for more efficient management.
• Index Pages: Improved filtering capabilities allow for cross-object filtering and creating custom filters, offering better control over data views.
• Custom Records: New customization options, including association cards, interactive trackers, and action buttons for faster workflow.
• Conditional Logic: Enterprise users can now utilize custom translations and sync properties with the new property type.

🚀 Core Hub Updates

Marketing Hub:

• Lead Scoring Beta: Choose between a stable fit score or a dynamic engagement score, helping you better understand lead interactions.
• New Analytics Suite: Includes features like a marketing home dashboard, task management, and recent work for a more organized workflow.

Sales Hub:

• Pipeline Rules: Optimize sales pipeline with rule-based movement restrictions, deal tags, and lead bulk assignment. Dynamic sequences now listen for key signals like web visits or email opens for better targeting.

Service Hub:

• Health Scores: Create scoring groups for more accurate assessments of service quality. Implement skill-based routing for ticket assignments based on agent expertise, improving resolution times.

⚡️More Hub Updates

Operations Hub:

• Data Quality Notifications: Get alerted to issues like duplicate data or anomalies via the Command Center, helping you maintain data integrity.
• Datasets (Pro Only): Curate data properties for more accurate reporting and insights.

Content Hub:

• Remix Tool: Now supports multiple content formats (video, audio, images), allowing for easier content repurposing.
• AI-Generated Content: The brand voice feature ensures all AI-generated content aligns with your company's guidelines, and the new case study tool leverages AI to extract key metrics from your CRM.

These updates empower HubSpot admins to optimize their workflows, improve data quality, and enhance customer experiences across marketing, sales, service, and operations.

Paul Schmidt | "3 ways That HubSpot is Using AI-generated Video Internally." by Kipp Bodnar & Kieran Flanagan

AI video generation is one of the more innovative technologies that’s working its way into the HubSpot platform.

📍Localization: HubSpot published content in 8 different languages. Hey Gen allows them to publish videos across all languages for around $500, compared to manual translation which would cost 5-10k.

🚀Use CRM data to personalize video: With video personalization, you can send out a different video for each person to your list that is based on data in your CRM. This isn’t just swapping out {First Name} and {Company Name} tokens, this is looking at the 100s of CRM properties/objects and coming up with a new script for each video for each person.

✅Reactive concierge (in picture below) - This can triage questions from frontline sales or support reps. This feature felt the most beta to me. With this feature, you can interact with an avatar and ask it questions (within a text prompt). As AI keeps getting more realistic and natural feeling, there is a lot of potential for eliminating many of the repeat questions that bog down support/sales teams.

Maddy Wiehe | "Unlock the Power of Customizing HubSpot’s Smart CRM" 

👉 HubSpot is making it easier and faster to set up your HubSpot platform for your organization. They are introducing new data model templates designed for specific industries, currently launing ones for real estate and healthcare. These are preset data models that are optimized for those specific industries, and they will continue to create more for different industries. 

🚀 They are also simplifying the creation of custom objects and have created 4 new object templates to use, including appointments, courses, listings, and services. 

📣There are also new association label features, like association label limits and you can now require an association label in object creation. 

Samuel St. Amour | "Advancing Human Creativity with AI" by Cameron Adams

A few interesting sentences that got us thinking a bit…

 💡“I was always trying to do things in the space between design and engineering”
Although this idea of mixing arts and engineering existed for a very long time now (shoutout to Leonard DaVinci 😉), I find it interesting to think about how we mix those today.

🚀 “Help people discover their creativity”
When you think about it, we’re all creative in some shape or form, but we’re not all expressing it in the same way, with the same medium… Having tools that make it simple, and make you feel creative is amazing!

👉🏻“Ai is the next phase of helping people expressing their creativity”
Will AI destroy creativity, art? We’ve heard that before right? Or, could AI actually be a form of support to help people express their creativity? What does that mean for art in general?

What We Learned at INBOUND 2024: Key Takeaways and Next Steps

As INBOUND 2024 comes to a close, here are the top three takeaways you need to know:

1. Breeze.ai & AI Tools: HubSpot introduced Breeze.ai and Breeze Intelligence to enhance data enrichment and buyer intent tracking, streamlining automation and workflows across marketing, sales, and service.

2. Marketing & Content Hub Updates: New AI-driven tools in Marketing and Content Hubs simplify content creation, lead generation, and social media management, helping businesses stay competitive.

3. Smart CRM & Sales Hub: HubSpot's Smart CRM and Sales Hub updates focus on improved lead scoring, data management, and automation, enabling personalized marketing and efficient operations.

If you’re looking to implement these new tools and strategies into your growth strategy, now is the time to act. HubSpot’s focus on Reinvention has made it easier than ever to streamline your operations, unify your data, and grow your business. 

If you’re ready to transform your business with HubSpot’s newest tools, schedule a consultation with SmartBug today.