The biggest topic on everyone’s mind this year at INBOUND is the same as last year: AI. But the nature of the conversation has changed.
In 2023, headlines indicate that AI will change everything, for better or worse. It will bring about an economic revolution, lead in the gold rush, and destroy humanity, all at once.
A year later, headlines tell the opposite story: the AI revolution is losing steam and the AI hype bubble is deflating. So what is true? Is the new wave of AI disruption false hype, or a true revolution?
In INBOUND, I stated that this was not the right question to ask or answer. Because first and foremost, go-to-market professionals ask a simpler question: how do we drive growth?
After all, everyone feels the same way: it’s been hard to grow lately. So it’s worth understanding why it has become difficultwhat has changed in the customer journey, and answer the questions: where do we grow from here?
3 Reasons Why Growth Formulas Are Broken
The growth formula is simple: More traffic * Higher conversions * Better retention = higher growth. But unfortunately, it’s broken.
On board: traffic, conversions, and retention go down, and so does growth. According to our research, only 50% of repetitions reach their quota, compared to 66% just two years ago.
But why? We have seen it three big trends which has contributed to this downturn.
- The basic search has changed. Search engines are used to provide bluelinks that get customers to your website. But with the introduction of AI and soon SearchGPT, customers get more answers without leaving their search. That means less visitors to your website.
- Social platforms retain customers longer. They become destinations in themselves, where customers spend more time. That means there are still less visitors.
- More than ever, people want to talk to people. No brand. Customers check Reddit, visit G2, watch YouTube videos, and chat with their friends first – so when they come to your site, customers know more about you than you know about them. That means the bar for sales and service teams is extremely high when it comes to talking to customers. And if that bar isn’t met, conversions and retention will drop.
Two Paths for AI to Drive Growth: Acceleration and Transformation
So how do go-to-market professionals overcome these challenges? History has the answer: when technology solves an old problem in a new way, it leads to big changes.
This is why the internet and smartphones are so transformative – they solve basic needs such as information access and human connection.
AI may undergo similar changes to grow. We see that potential firsthand from our survey of hundreds of customers who have already embraced AI. And we came away with two overarching observations: Today, we customers use AI to acceleration. And soon, they will use it transformation.
Acceleration means take what you can, and make it fastwhen the transformation is take the impossible and make 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 accelerate their work by creating, personalizing, and distributing content.
65% of HubSpot users now use AI to content creation, and they do it well by figuring out what good technology is: research the topic, deliver a good first draft, and iterate for different audiences. Then human experts take the draft from good to great.
At HubSpot, our marketing team excels personal content with AI. When we started reaching out to prospects with AI-specific emails, it increased our conversion rate by 82%.
And when it comes distribute contentwe saw great adoption when we launched our AI-powered Remix Content 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 change his work uses AI. And they will do it with agents – software that uses AI to achieve goals in multiple steps.
Content agent will prioritize, personalize, and distribute content; social agent 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 add to your campaign.
How AI Is Accelerating and Transforming Sales
At sales, eternal challenge already increase time in front of customers. The average sales person just spends two hours a day sell!
They are stuck for another day buried in the preparation for the next call or drowned in the follow-up from the last one. No one knew how to minimize this time—until now.
That AI accelerate preparation and follow-up. Salespeople can now research prospects in seconds, create high-quality personalized messages to connect with them, summarize calls, and create follow-up insights.
The result: between the customer and HubSpot, AI has save time to find by 30%and reduce follow-up time by 20%.
And soon: AI will change sales with prospecting agent – AI-powered software that finds leads for you and makes outreach as easy as a few clicks.
How AI is Accelerating and Transforming Services
Finally, the customer service, A huge source of frustration has been when the service professionals are stuck human band-aids – reactively pursue problems.
Here too the AI accelerate process with great results. Can answer customer questions better than before; HubSpot has been able to solve nearly 30% of tickets this year with AI.
Can acceleration of self-service by strengthening the knowledge base, allowing customers to solve their own questions. And it works analyze customer sentiment in real time, recommending specific actions based on observed trends.
Agents are also coming to transform customer service. Support agents will be able to answer my complex customer questions, 24/7 – and knowledge-based 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 to not underestimate AI or overhype AI – ie understand and co-create with AI.
Because co-creation catalyzes growth. We believe that among the go-to-market functions, we must co-create with AI to drive growth:
- In marketing, AI createsand the curate.
- In sales, AI offers contextand someone offers a connection.
- And in service, AI handles simplicity, and people handle subtlety.
In all three cases, AI was not used than of people – it empowerment of people and help us scale. And if we can unlock the potential to help us drive traffic, conversions, and retention, we may just be able to fix the growth formula. And that effort aligns with our mission at HubSpot.
HubSpot’s Mission, What’s Going to Change, and What’s Going to Be True
HubSpot exists to help millions of organizations grow better. And we doubled down on that mission when we reimagined our platform with AI. To fully utilize AI, you need structured support and unstructured data.
You need to gather insights from the content of the text also audio and video. You need your application and agent to work together well. And we’re happy to help our customers adapt to these changes!
But we also have to remember that some things are always true!
Customers always want to be easy – so we work hard to make things intuitive and efficient. You always want to find out the value fast – so we are laser focused on repeat use and immediate impact. And you always want your customer data and context united – so we collect all the data you need to create insights with AI.
Our mission is help you grow. Our passion is to create easy, fast, and unified. And what motivates us in this moment is that everywhere we look, there is the 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’re introducing at INBOUND 2024 to do just that, check out our latest Spotlight.
