HubSpot announced a push into AI this week at its annual Inbound marketing conference, launching “Breeze.”

Breeze is an artificial intelligence layer integrated across the company’s marketing, sales, and customer service software.

According to HubSpot, the goal is to provide marketers with easier, faster, and more unified solutions as digital channels become oversaturated.

Karen Ng, VP of Product at HubSpot, tells Search Engine Journal in an interview:

“We’re trying to create really powerful tools for marketers to rise above the noise that’s happening now with a lot of this AI-generated content. We might help you generate titles or a blog content…but we do expect kind of a human there to be a co-assist in that.”

Breeze AI Covers Copilot, Workflow Agents, Data Enrichment

The Breeze layer includes three main components.

Breeze Copilot

An AI assistant that provides personalized recommendations and suggestions based on data in HubSpot’s CRM.

Ng explained:

“It’s a chat-based AI companion that assists with tasks everywhere – in HubSpot, the browser, and mobile.”

Breeze Agents

A set of four agents that can automate entire workflows like content generation, social media campaigns, prospecting, and customer support without human input.

Ng added the following context:

“Agents allow you to automate a lot of those workflows. But it’s still, you know, we might generate for you a content backlog. But taking a look at that content backlog, and knowing what you publish is still a really important key of it right now.”

Breeze Intelligence

Combines HubSpot customer data with third-party sources to build richer profiles.

Ng stated:

“It’s really important that we’re bringing together data that can be trusted. We know your AI is really only as good as the data that it’s actually trained on.”

Addressing AI Content Quality

While prioritizing AI-driven productivity, Ng acknowledged the need for human oversight of AI content:

“We really do need eyes on it still…We think of that content generation as still human-assisted.”

Marketing Hub Updates

Beyond Breeze, HubSpot is updating Marketing Hub with tools like:

• Content Remix to repurpose videos into clips, audio, blogs, and more.
• AI video creation via integration with HeyGen
• YouTube and Instagram Reels publishing
• Improved marketing analytics and attribution

The announcements signal HubSpot’s AI-driven vision for unifying customer data.

But as Ng tells us, “We definitely think a lot about the data sources…and then also understand your business.”

HubSpot’s updates are rolling out now, with some in public beta.

Featured Image: Poetra.RH/Shutterstock

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Check out this executive panel on-demand, as we show you how we do it. 

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This B2B leadership forum provided insights you can use in your strategy tomorrow, like:

• The importance of the customer journey, and the keys to matching content to your ideal personas.
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• Methods to measure ROI and determine if your strategies are delivering results.

While the case study is SaaS, these strategies are for any brand.

Watch on-demand and be part of the conversation. 

We’ve passed the high-water mark of content marketing—at least, content marketing in its current form.

After thirteen years in content marketing, I think it’s fair to say that most of the content on company blogs was created by people with zero firsthand experience of their subject matter. We have built a profession of armchair commentators, a class of marketers who exist almost entirely in a world of theory and abstraction.

I count myself among their number. I have hundreds of bylines about subfloor moisture management, information security, SaaS pricing models, agency resource management. I am an expert in none of these topics.

This has been the happy reality of content marketing for over a decade, a natural consequence of the incentives created by early Google Search. Historically, being a great content marketer required precisely no subject matter expertise. It was enough to read widely and write quickly.

Mountains of organic traffic have been built on the backs of armchair commentators like myself. Time spent doing deep, detailed research was, generally speaking, wasted, because 80% of the returns came from simply shuffling other people’s ideas around and slapping a few keyword-targeted H2s in the right places.

But this doesn’t work today.

For all of its flaws, generative AI is an excellent, truly world-class armchair commentator. If the job-to-be-done is reading a dozen articles and how-to’s and turning them into something semi-original and fairly coherent, AI really is the best tool for the job. Humans cannot out-copycat generative AI.

Put another way, the role of the content marketer as a curator has been rendered obsolete. So where do we go from here?

Hunter S. Thompson popularised the idea of gonzo journalism, “a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative.”

In other words, Hunter was the story.

When asked to cover the rising phenomenon of the Hell’s Angels, he became a Hell’s Angel. During his coverage of the ‘72 presidential campaign, he openly supported his preferred candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby focused almost entirely on his own debauchery and chaos-making—a story that has outlasted any factual account of the race itself.

In the same vein, content marketers today need to become their stories.

It’s a content marketing truism that it’s unreasonable to expect writers to become experts. There’s a superficial level of truth to that claim—no content marketer can acquire a decade’s worth of experience in a few days or weeks—but there are great benefits awaiting any company willing to challenge that truism very, very seriously.

As Thompson proved, short, intense periods of firsthand experience can yield incredible insights and stories. So what would happen if you radically reduced your content output and dedicated half of your content team’s time to research and experimentation? If their job was doing things worth writing about, instead of just writing? If skin-in-the-game, no matter how small, was a prerequisite of the role?

We’re already seeing this shift.

Every week, I see more companies hiring marketers who are true, bonafide subject matter experts (I include the Ahrefs content team here—for the majority of our team, “writing” is a skill secondary to a decade of hands-on search and marketing experience). They are expensive, hard to find, and in the era of AI, worth every cent.

I see a growing expectation that marketers will document their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that often outperforms the “real” content. I see more companies willing to share subjective experiences and stories, and avoid competing solely on the sharing of objective, factual information. I see companies spending money to promote the personal brands of in-house creators, actively encouraging parasocial relationships as their corporate brand accounts lay dormant.

These are ideas that made no sense in the old model of content marketing, but they make much more sense today. This level of effort is fast becoming the only way to gain any kind of moat, creating material that doesn’t already exist on a dozen other company blogs.

In the era of information abundance, our need for information is relatively easy to sate; but we have a near-limitless hunger for entertainment, and personal interaction, and weird, pattern-interrupting experiences.

Gonzo content marketing can deliver.