Here's the short version. The last HubHeroes before UNBOUND 2026 wasn't really an event preview. George B. Thomas and Chad Hohn spent the episode on something bigger: there's a new way to work, your AI agents can hold the fort while you're in Boston, and the single most valuable thing you can do on the plane is spend 15 minutes turning on your HubSpot betas.
Chad was already in Boston when they hit record, working from the Omni across the street from the BCEC, getting ahead so he could go play hooky all week. George was at home packing, and quietly wrestling with the guilt of shutting down for a week. It's also the first UNBOUND he's walking into with an agent drafting his email for him, which changes the math on what a week away actually costs.
The Anxiety of Shutting Down For a Week Is Real
George named it out loud before he asked Chad a single event question. He woke up wanting to be excited, and instead got hit with a list: pack, buy shoes, finish the work, and worry about the new work that shows up at the door while he's gone. His actual question was whether humans should feel guilty about that. Chad's answer was calmer. He isn't getting ahead because he's anxious. He's getting ahead so he can deliver this week's work on time without staying in the loop all week.
Chad's focus in Boston: the relationships, the connections, and the conversations with humans from HubSpot that you simply can't have any other way. In-person human connection is the point, not a bonus.
George's honest read on himself was that it might not even be anxiety. It might just be energy. Excitement and obligation showing up in the same body at the same time, with the switch flipping once he's on the plane.
Let Your Agents Hold the Fort While You're Gone
Chad's practical fix came fast, and it's the kind of thing you can stand up before you fly. Set up a scheduled morning brief so something else surfaces the high-priority items that genuinely can't wait.
“The earlier you can get on some kind of like morning brief or end of day summary type automation in your preferred AI platform of choice ... that just really helps take a lot off.”
His reasoning is refreshingly unglamorous. He'll tell you straight that he isn't the world's best project manager, and the assistant is. It pings him when something's urgent, and he gets to go on about his day without holding the whole list in his head. That landed for George, because this is his first UNBOUND with an agent that reads incoming email and writes first drafts. He runs it through Grokbot, connected to his second brain, so the drafts come back with real context instead of generic filler. He also runs a project management agent and one that sends follow-up emails an hour after a meeting.
Why it matters at an event: the draft is already sitting there. George tweaks it, sends it, and gets the rest of the night back for the humans in front of him. They're both deep in Grokbot, and George does some of his work in Claude Code in the terminal, but neither of them is arguing for one tool. They're arguing that something should stand between you and your inbox while you're sitting in a keynote.
HubSpot Isn't Just a Marketing Platform Anymore
The HubSpot Spotlight runs Wednesday, September 16 at 9:30am, with CEO Yamini Rangan joined on stage by the chief product and technology officer and the chief customer officer. George read the session description on air: the latest trends in AI, marketing, sales and service, plus innovations from across the HubSpot platform.
Then he asked the question everyone was thinking. Is AI listed first because it's the most important, or did an AI assistant put that list in alphabetical order? Joke aside, his point was serious. We've all said HubSpot is a marketing platform, a sales platform, a service platform. The sentence he wants humans to start saying is that HubSpot is an AI platform.
“The place that they're really trying to go is any action that you can perform inside the CRM an agent should be able to do.”
Chad expects agentic permissions to be a big piece of the conversation: separating out which actions an agent is allowed to take autonomously, whether that's through APIs, MCP connectors, or plugins. He pointed at what's already shipped as the tell. Pipeline governance API endpoints let you hit an endpoint and ask what a deal stage requires, whether you can move backwards, and who's allowed to edit after a certain point. Agents can configure that now.
The gap HubSpot is closing: right now you have to be a super McWizard to give an agent the access it needs to administrate a portal, with significant browser fallback whenever something isn't reachable by API or MCP. The vision is that you don't.
Chad also expects more talk about connecting your own tools directly into Breeze, so you can work with the Breeze agent from the HubSpot home page, the sales workspace, or the service workspace, and possibly from your preferred agent somewhere else entirely.
Turn On Your Betas Before You Fly
This is the most actionable thing in the episode, and it takes about 15 minutes on a connecting flight. Go to the product updates page and work through the betas. There are something like 300 you can turn on, and Chad says roughly 5 to 10 percent of them unlock additional API scopes you can't enable in an API key unless you flip the beta first. That last part is the trap. HubSpot used to gray out the scopes you couldn't access. Now you go to save an API key for your agent, it refuses, and you're left reverse engineering which scope broke it.
“If you haven't turned on the betas, your portal is severely lacking in capability, believe it or not.”
George added the amendment that keeps this from going sideways, because he's watched humans do the opposite. Turn on, turn on, turn on is not a strategy.
“Read those updates ... and make wise decisions on what you do need, what you don't need.”
A useful filter: public betas are the ones you can just join, and Chad's read is they're well enough along not to cause you major problems. Private and request betas are a different conversation. Look at the screenshots, read who the beta is for, and watch the Loom video when there is one.
- Skip anything built for a vertical you're not in, like an Epic healthcare beta when you don't run an Epic healthcare portal.
- Turn on API scopes fairly freely, since Chad's take is those are the ones you can probably just enable.
- Remember the page only shows betas relevant to your portal, so a Pro portal with one hub never sees enterprise-only items.
George's caution on that last point is worth repeating: relevant to your portal is not the same thing as relevant to you. And Chad's reminder is that there's always another wave of betas right after the keynote, so check again on the way home.
Are We Getting a Jarvis-Style Breeze This Year?
George asked it directly. Chad's answer was a thoughtful maybe, with a clear explanation of what's in the way. Real-time voice agents are duplex, meaning the conversation runs forward and backward at once instead of transcribing you and then speaking back. The hard part isn't the voice. It's what happens behind it. When you spool up a voice agent, it knows some of what you've been talking about, but it still has to make calls into the system for the rest: the piece of memory, the connector, the tool call. Even on the most performant real-time voice models available right now, including OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, that round trip can feel sluggish enough that clicking would've been faster.
Chad's sequencing: the frontier labs solve real-time performance and tool-call efficiency first. Then HubSpot gets to adopt it.
The detail most humans missed: the HubSpot mobile app already has duplex voice. Chad saw it there. It's limited by the same thing, because Breeze may need two calls to get an answer and you're sitting in silence while it works. George's counter-question was whether humans would even mind a little sluggishness, and it's a fair one.
What Chad wants layered on top is a planning meeting. Ten or fifteen minutes where the AI talks with you and you talk to it, it asks smart follow-up questions, and then it builds what you asked for in one shot, in draft mode, ready for you to review. George has a name for the missing piece. He calls it a slash grill me skill, and he uses one every day outside HubSpot.
What that looks like inside a portal: you describe the campaign, and Breeze pushes back with five to seven questions before building anything. Then it returns a plan that says it can handle seven of the nine steps, and names the two you have to do yourself.
Talking Versus Typing, and Why Humans Resist It
Chad's diagnosis of the adoption gap is generous and probably right. Most humans aren't going to research how to best work around the current limits of AI, which shift every five and a half nanoseconds, because they'd rather live their lives and do their work. His read is that humans get intimidated and feel like AI is a black box, when really it's turning into a coworker.
The same resistance shows up with voice. The objection is that if I'm typing, I could just do the thing myself. Chad's answer is simpler: talking to your computer feels weird until it doesn't. George is all the way past that line, to the point where it leaks. He's caught himself on client calls talking at his browser bar out loud, then apologizing because the other humans on the call thought he was addressing them. He uses WhisperFlow, and he isn't precious about which tool you pick. Build your own, use something else, use the built-in one. The freedom is in how much context you can hand an assistant by talking versus typing.
Chad's version of the same workflow: he almost exclusively talks to his assistants now, and he's built his system so his job at the end is approving a draft with a click.
Teach the Agent Once, Then Go Do Something Else
George's clone-a-deal story is the best proof point in the episode, because it starts with a genuine HubSpot gap. You can clone a deal natively in HubSpot, and you've been able to for a long time. There's no API that gives an agent access to do it for you.
Sidekick Strategies bills through partnerships (some humans call them retainers) which means recurring monthly deals with the line items and details already in place. The work is cloning the deal and moving it to November, then cloning it again and moving it to December.
So George hit the record button and taught Casey, his HubSpot agent, not Casey Hawkins the human. He showed it how to clone a deal and shift it from September to October, then told it to understand that the pattern applies to whatever the next month happens to be.
The result: every November and December deal cloned into the two holding pipelines they needed, in minutes. By hand George figures that's 30 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an hour.
The part he kept circling back to isn't the time saved. It's that he walked away, did something else, and came back to check on it. Same shape as the sidekickstrategies.com/expert page he built while walking around his yard on his phone, going from no page and no idea to research, an agent-team conversation, and a live page with an offer on it in about 35 to 45 minutes. Grokbot tied into Riley, his developer agent, and Riley built the page.
Buying Back Time, and What You Do With It Is Yours
George framed the tension honestly. If you're willing to do the nerdy work of setting up API scopes, a job takes 10 minutes. If you'd rather stay in-platform and skip all that, the same job takes 40. Is the nerdy part worth the 30-minute buyback? His answer is yes, and then he refuses to tell you what to spend the 30 minutes on. Be more creative. Be more innovative. Start the passion project. Go swim in your pool. Take a nap, and both hosts meant that one literally. Some humans have been working so hard for so long that a nap is the highest-value thing they could do with an hour.
George's own rhythm is a cycle: 20 to 30 minutes setting up context, drop it into plan mode, read the plan, hit enter, then go do something for 30 minutes to an hour and come back to see where it's at and set up the next cycle. And the honest read from the call is that the credit still belongs to the human, because you are the one who set it up to work that way. Which is the least AI-hype sentence in the whole episode.
“But nevertheless, you're still the one doing both the works.”
Chad's One Thing For UNBOUND
Asked for the single thing he'd tell humans heading to Boston, Chad went straight at the trap that catches him every year. Be intentional about your sessions, and don't skip choosing them. But don't let the fact that you have a booked, limited-capacity session stop a human encounter from happening, the kind where you help somebody or they help you.
George's reflection back was three words: take time to be. In a world where we're all talking to our robots all the time, connecting with other HubSpot humans is good for the soul.
George's addition for the trip itself: make the journey there as relaxing as possible, so you've still got the energy to last all three or four days.
The Real Takeaway: There's a New Way to Work
Here's the thesis George landed on, and it's the reason this episode is worth your time even if you're not going to Boston.
“I don't know how many people are going to translate it into this, but this is what I really feel like. I want to tell everybody there's a new way to work.”
The second half is the part humans skip. Realizing there's a new way to work isn't the finish line. Your brain needs time to get comfortable with it, because the new way means you live and manage and move a little differently than you historically did.
Talking instead of typing is one piece of that. Intense blocks followed by real relaxation is another. Neither of those is a feature anybody announces from a stage. They're habits you build after the announcements land.
If you're not at UNBOUND: the HubSpot YouTube channel and the socials will be full of it. Humans will be posting and creating all week, so the FOMO is optional. Fun fact from the recording: they made it through the entire episode and never played the intro song. No intro, no outro, just two humans talking before an event.
Heading to Boston and want a plan instead of a packed calendar? The UNBOUND 2026 Survival Guide is the shortcut version of everything above, so you can spend your week on the humans instead of your schedule.
Be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy HubSpotting.
