UNBOUND 2026 is in the books, and the HubHeroes crew came home wrecked. Boston, September 16 to 18, the event formerly known as INBOUND. George B. Thomas, Max Cohen, and Chad Hohn hit record the Monday after for the debrief half of last week's prep episode. Three humans. Three completely different events. One uncomfortable pattern running through all three.
Nobody Came Home in One Piece
George opened by asking how everybody was doing, and nobody performed for the microphone. Max was surprised he still had a voice at all.
“I don't think I've ever been more exhausted after inbound slash unbound in my entire life. I am a shell of myself from what I was last week.”
Chad's energy was uneven, up and then down, but good. George got home late Friday and spent Saturday cutting down a tree instead of resting, which is what a new house does to a weekend. His verdict on the week: UNBOUND was unchained.
Max Heard the Same Problems He Heard Ten Years Ago
George asked Max for the one conversation that still pops into his brain. Max's answer wasn't a person. It was a pattern. Almost every problem humans described at the booth was the same problem he heard ten years ago onboarding humans into Marketing Hub. Crazy and validating, he called it, because hapily built a lot of what it ships out of exactly those complaints. The part that stuck: it's all the same stuff, and in his read, nobody's tried to solve it.
Why that lands: a decade of unchanged complaints says the humans doing the work keep getting handed tools instead of systems. If you've been duct-taping event registration together, you're in the majority.
Both Rooms Raised Their Hands
George ran two sessions at UNBOUND and opened both the same way. Hands up. Who has more tools than they used to? More AI? More tactics? Hands stayed up. Then the last question: who still feels stuck? About 95 percent of the room kept their hands in the air, both times. So he told them to look around, because alone in your office you assume it's a you problem.
“It's not a you problem. It's like an industry problem. It's like an everybody problem.”
That's the through line between the booth and the stage. Max named the mechanism. Inside HubSpot you often can't see what a whole eight-person ops org is wrestling with, so getting out of your own head is hard. George has been building speaking sessions around that loneliness for years.
HubSpot's own keynote put numbers on it. Yamini Rangan opened the Spotlight keynote with a pair of them: 90 percent of the companies HubSpot surveyed are using AI, and only 6 percent are seeing transformational results. The magic isn't in the models, she said. It's in the context of your business. Nearly everyone has the tools. Almost nobody has the context wired in, and closing that gap is most of what HubSpot consulting actually is.
Chad Went Straight to the Product Booths
Finding Chad at UNBOUND is a game of Where's Waldo, except the answer is always a product booth. That was George's setup, and it's accurate. Chad shows up with real blockers and asks whether the product team has thought about them. They almost always have. What struck him was how badly those humans wanted the feedback, good, bad, and ugly. So he told them what he actually wants: to administer a portal remotely without dinking around in the UI.
“The goal that they ultimately want to achieve is anything you can do in the UI you should be able to do with an agent if you're a super admin.”
That's why a trustworthy agent that knows your portal stops being a side project. The admin job Chad describes is less clicking, more validating. Does the report work? Does the data pass the sniff test?
The Tool Chad Said to Go Tinker With
The tool he knew as Teamwork is now just Work, Chad said, and it's the one he came away wanting to play with. Picture Asana or ClickUp living inside HubSpot. The architecture is fully decoupled, in its own container, and it can still see your whole CRM database. Drop into plan mode with an agent, describe the process you want to manage, and it builds the columns, tables, and views for you.
- You can trigger items off CRM activity, so internal process work lands on a board without a CRM admin restructuring properties.
- An agent can read the comments on those boards, which is the whole reason Chad got excited.
- It's a credit piggy, in Chad's words. It really enjoys dipping into that credit pool.
George watched the demo and caught the detail that matters. The human running it typed nothing. The entire build happened out loud.
Two Honest Gripes From Inside a Real Portal
Chad didn't leave it at applause. Two things bug him, and both are the kind of friction a portal audit catches long before a release note does.
“Comments are basically invisible to AI assistants in HubSpot activities. If you put it in a comment, your agent will never know.”
That one is quietly expensive, because comments are where the real human context lives. Gripe two is scope plumbing. You have to disconnect and reconnect your remote cloud connector to pick up new scopes, Chad said, even after flipping them on at the admin level as a super admin. He tracked down the human who owns API scopes for the tool and got the honest answer: they're working on it.
Hug Counts, Standby Lines, and One Voice in a Line
Then the episode went where HubHeroes always goes. To the humans. Max couldn't even estimate his hug count, and the crew noted he'd finally broken a two or three year streak of flying home sick. George is a side hug, fist bump, handshake guy.
Both of his sessions drew standby lines long enough that he walked them to greet the humans who might not get in. Halfway back, he recognized a voice. A client, telling the human beside her that she sure hoped she'd get in. He turned around and told her he hoped so too. Her eyes lit up. Small moment. Entirely the point.
His favorite night wasn't planned at all. A table of HubSpot partners had dinner seats open up at the speaker party, and George got pulled along. One of them brought his daughter, who's studying business, so she got to watch business humans do business over dinner. His takeaway: plenty of businesses do business just to do business, and there's a level of humans in this ecosystem who genuinely care about the humans they do it for. Owners weighing airfare against relationships, there's your answer.
What Actually Delighted Them
Chad's moment was a Revenue Hub product manager he'd first met at last year's event, who was every bit as excited to reconnect as he was. What Chad respects is that this one isn't a title-only PM. His own team members describe him as the guy who does the work when nobody else can get to it.
Max's delight was bigger than any single conversation. This was the first year hapily showed up with a real, shipped product instead of a promise, and he said he's never come away from an inbound more excited about the work or the humans he works with. Quote hapily used to be an idea. Event hapily used to be a strange collection of custom objects. This year the message was simple: they're an events tool. They ran their own lead capture on their own product, and by Max's rough count they pulled just south of 600 leads and created something like a million in pipeline.
The Session Worth the Seat: Agentic GTM With a Human Gate
Max skipped every session, never set foot in the keynote area, and admitted he needs a game plan for next year instead of white-knuckling the booth. Chad got into rooms. The one he was glad he made time for was a GTM session, which tracks, since his title at RAD AI is GTM Systems Manager.
The framework he described is an AI-assisted, human-powered engine for finding the humans who match your ICP. A human at the front. A human gate in the middle, approvals before anything sends. Humans on the back side. His reason for that middle gate is the best line in the segment: you want to make sure you're not sending slop out there. Then came the slide Chad is pretty sure Dreamforce showed almost identically to HubSpot's.
“AI with the wrong context is worse than no AI.”
Same claim as the keynote stage, edges sharpened. It's the argument for treating AI strategy as a context problem instead of a tool problem, and for building content systems that feed the machine what your business already knows. HubSpot's AI page and the UNBOUND agenda are both worth a scroll.
Brian Halligan, Tom Brady, and Value From Humans You Don't Root For
George misses the years when Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah would just riff on stage. His actual favorite session was the one he expected to like least, because he isn't a fan of the guest, on account of competing teams. Halligan walked out with Tom Brady, sat down, and interviewed him. Then the talk did the thing George has watched before. He walked in sure it had nothing to do with his business. He walked out inspired by what it cost Brady to become who he became.
“You don't have to be a fan of somebody to give value out of them. And people don't have to love you to give value.”
Be a Happy, Helpful, Humble Human
George closed on the struggles instead of the highlights. Max is trying to figure out how to stop saying the same sentence 150 times in a row at a booth. Chad can't pull himself away from the product booths. George can't fit it all in. All of it survivable, and you can still come out the other side as your own version of a HubHero.
So here's the one thing. Nearly every hand in that room stayed up, in a year when those same humans hold more tools, more AI, and more tactics than they ever have. That's not a tooling gap. It's a context gap. Want a second set of eyes on where your portal, your data, and your agents are losing the plot? Grab a strategy call. Marketing leaders, you're especially not the only one with a hand in the air.
Be a happy, helpful, humble human, and do some happy HubSpotting along the way.
