Event held by HubSpot in Boston presented different points of view on the impact of technology on business
After showing media headlines such as “The AI revolution is losing steam” (The Wall Street Journal) and “What happened to the AI apocalypse?” (New Yorker), HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan opened the annual event held by the business management and CRM platform in Boston, Inbound 2024, this Wednesday (18), making an interesting analogy about what really matters in this context of artificial intelligence.
“When consumers wake up, they don’t think about how artificial intelligence affects their lives. They think about their work, the next deadline, brushing their teeth and getting the kids to school. The right questions to ask are: ‘How do I drive growth for my customer?’ and ‘What’s changing in my customer journey?’” According to the executive, after answering these questions, the market needs to understand what has changed and how to fix the scenario.
“The truth is that the growth formula is broken. It’s hard to generate traffic, conversion and retention. The numbers reflect that. The number one challenge for marketers is generating traffic with qualified leads. And this is a change that will continue. People want to talk to other people, not brands. Seven out of ten consumers trust people more than companies. Customers know more about you than you know about them. The bar is incredibly high. What now? Time and time again, we’ve seen technology solve old problems in new ways. And now, we need new ways to access insights to accelerate brand growth, and AI has the potential to do that,” highlighted HubSpot’s CMO.
According to Yamini, HubSpot’s platform has improved customer conversions by 82% with personalized content. “AI provides context, and people provide connection and curation. Co-creation with AI catalyzes growth. The right way to use AI empowers people. At HubSpot, our mission is to help organizations grow. And what hasn’t changed is that customers want simple processes and unified data. What we’re excited about is how AI will help us accelerate our customers’ businesses.”
Following the CEO’s keynote, HubSpot’s new artificial intelligence platform, Breeze, was introduced, integrating information from different hubs across the company. The new functionality is part of a package of over 200 new product updates brought by HubSpot, incorporated throughout the platform.
“We realized, through research, that some companies are still afraid of implementing AI tools due to their complexity,” says Camilo Clavijo, VP of sales for Latin America and Brazil at HubSpot. The study ‘The State of Marketing in Brazil’, published by HubSpot in September, indicates that one of the main concerns is the difficulty of integrating technology into their routines, with 20.2% classifying this aspect as the most critical in decision-making regarding the use of AI.
In the same survey, 17.9% of respondents pointed to data privacy and security as the most sensitive point in the AI integration process; while 15.6% reported fear of low accuracy in relation to data, worried that they would have inaccurate or biased information at hand.
AI Agents
The company’s co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, defended the concept of AI agents to help accelerate companies’ business. According to him, marketing teams in companies will soon be made up of AI agents and people. “Our vision is that AI agents are the new apps. If you think of agents as team builders, we are going to see major transformations,” he pointed out.
In one way or another, artificial intelligence was the topic of the day at Inbound 2024, which runs until Friday (20), and is expected to bring together more than 11,000 participants. Under the theme ‘Unleashing your marketing team’s potential with AI’, Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir, who is ranked among the top 100 executive women in tech to watch in 2024, stated that her goal is to unlock the vision of marketing teams on how to work in collaboration with AI.
“There are many reasons why marketers are wary of AI. One of the challenges is how to manage knowledge, and technology can help us do that. One of the advantages of AI is that it can summarize content for us,” said the CMO of Atlassian, a software company for product developers.
The executive reinforced the idea that AI is a partner in the workplace. “For marketing leaders, AI helps raise the standard of content, of course with human supervision. We will always modify the content; human creativity is deeper.”
Zeynep said that Atlassian conducted a survey with five large companies in the United States about the application of artificial intelligence and one of the main conclusions was that 89% use the technology regularly, with 95% of marketing leaders responding that the tool is used to conduct research and create content. “One in seven people still fear losing their jobs because of artificial intelligence. At the same time, the industry is embracing the technology,” she said.
One of the tips the executive gave to the audience at the event is that people should personalize their interactions with AI. “We are going to improve the way we ask questions to artificial intelligence. And don’t be shy about learning and consider technology as a partner,” she reinforced.
