Session Summary

Dive into the key moments from Finbar’s session, where he explored how AI is transforming customer experience, internal operations, and the way teams work. These highlights capture the most important shifts, tools, and insights shaping the future of AI-driven businesses.

Opening the Conversation on AI Adoption

Finbar opened the session by connecting with the audience through the familiar experience of discovering AI for the first time—often through light-hearted or unexpected moments. These early encounters, while simple, reflect how quickly AI has entered both personal and professional life. He used this to highlight that although AI experimentation is happening everywhere, it’s often isolated and unstructured within organisations.

He emphasised that these scattered “that’s cool” experiments, while exciting, don’t automatically translate into meaningful operational change. To unlock value, businesses must shift from novelty to strategy—moving from individual curiosity to shared, scalable outcomes powered by their own data and context. This framing set the tone for the rest of the session, anchoring the conversation in both practicality and opportunity.

The Reality Check: What Leaders Are Facing Today

Finbar presented two significant survey insights that illustrate the current pressures facing leaders in an AI-driven marketplace. With nearly half of business leaders feeling unprepared for the drop in website traffic caused by AI-powered answers, he underscored that digital behaviour is changing faster than most organisations can adapt to. Websites must now deliver deeper value, faster, to remain relevant in a world where AI often becomes the first point of contact.

He also highlighted that two-thirds of leaders lack confidence in their data infrastructure to support AI. This gap is critical, because AI cannot function effectively without unified, high-quality, connected data. Finbar made it clear: without strong data foundations, even the best AI ambitions will struggle. These datapoints framed the urgency and importance of adapting internal systems before the market forces organisations into reactive change.

HubSpot’s Cultural Shift: From Certainty to Experimentation

A key part of the session focused on the cultural transformation required to embrace AI at scale. Finbar described HubSpot’s shift from a certainty mindset—waiting for perfect clarity—to a scientist mindset rooted in testing, iteration, and curiosity. He shared how leadership embraced ambiguity and reframed innovation as a continuous learning process, rather than a fixed path with predetermined answers.

This mindset shift empowered teams to explore, experiment, and share insights openly. Rather than protecting ideas or seeking flawless outcomes, teams were encouraged to run quick pilots, gather data, and adjust. Finbar explained that this cultural evolution allowed HubSpot to innovate faster, adapt more confidently, and build AI solutions that aligned closely with real customer needs and internal experiences.

Building AI Fluency and Real-World Tools

Finbar shared how HubSpot invested intentionally in building AI fluency across the organisation. This included company-wide initiatives such as prompt-writing practice sessions, hackathons, learning modules, and dedicated Slack spaces where teams could share discoveries, experiments, and tools. These activities not only strengthened internal knowledge but also created an environment where teams felt empowered to engage with AI confidently and creatively.

These foundations supported the development of practical tools like Breeze Assistant, built directly on top of HubSpot’s CRM. Finbar explained how this tool streamlines the daily workflow of customer success managers by pulling together usage insights, past conversations, follow-up actions, and more into a single conversational interface. This allows teams to save time, access context instantly, and focus on more strategic, high-value work with customers.

Transforming Customer Support and Success with AI

To demonstrate AI’s tangible impact, Finbar discussed how HubSpot’s support organisation is already using AI agents to deliver fast, contextual answers around the clock. With AI resolving 50% of incoming tickets and handling 75% of chat interactions, teams can now focus on complex queries that require human judgment. This shift improves customer experience while allowing support teams to specialise and deepen their expertise.

He also shared an early look at the Outreach Agent—a new AI-powered tool designed for customer success teams. This tool will identify customer engagement opportunities, craft tailored outreach messages, and help CSMs stay ahead of changes such as usage drops or new stakeholders. Finbar concluded by emphasising that in an AI-accelerated world, taking action—even imperfect action—is more valuable than waiting for certainty. Organisations that experiment, iterate, and adapt will be the ones to lead.