Co-creating with AI to Drive Growth – InstantFollowerz

The biggest topic on everyone’s mind this year at INBOUND was the same as last year: AI. But the nature of the conversation has changed.

In 2023, the headlines indicated that AI would change everything, for better or for worse. He should have brought economic revolution, introduce the gold rushand destroy humanityall at once.

A year later, the headlines tell the opposite story: the AI ​​revolution is losing steam and the AI ​​hype bubble is deflation. So what is the truth? Is the recent wave of AI disruption false advertising or a real revolution?

I said in INBOUND that these are not the right questions to ask or answer. Because above all, professionals entering the market ask themselves a simpler question: how do I start growth?

After all, everyone seems to feel the same way: it’s getting harder to grow lately. So it’s worth understanding why it was so hardwhat it changed in the buyer’s journey, and answer the question: where do we grow from here?

3 reasons why the growth formula is broken

The growth formula is simple: more traffic * more conversion * better retention = more growth. But, unfortunately, it’s broken.

All in all: traffic, conversion and retention are down, and so is growth. According to our research, only 50% of repeats meet their quotas, compared to 66% just two years ago.

But why? We saw three big trends which contributed to this crisis.

1. Search has fundamentally changed. Search engines are used to provide blue links that bring customers to your website. But with AI reviews and soon SearchGPT, customers are getting more answers without leaving their search. This means fewer visitors to your website.
2. Social platforms keep customers longer. They themselves become destinations where customers spend more time. This means even fewer visitors.
3. more than ever people want to talk to people. Swimming stamps. Customers check Reddit, visit G2, watch YouTube videos and talk to their peers first – so by the time they land on your site, your customers know more about you than you know about them. This means that the bar for sales and service teams is incredibly high when talking to customers. And if that limit isn’t met, conversion and retention will decrease.
   

Two paths for AI to drive growth: acceleration and transformation

So how do go-to-market professionals address these challenges? History has the answer: when technology solves old problems in new ways, it leads to profound changes.

This is why the internet and smartphones have been so transformative – they have addressed basic needs like access to information and human connection.

AI could just achieve the same kind of change for growth. We see that potential firsthand from surveying hundreds of our customers who have embraced AI. And we came to two overarching observations: Today, our customers are using AI to acceleration. And soon they will use it for transformation.

Acceleration means taking what is feasible and acceleratingwhile the transformation to take the impossible and make it possible. From talking to customers, we’ve seen how both types of cases apply to marketing, sales and service.

How AI is accelerating and transforming marketing

Marketing is one of the biggest use cases for AI and customers are already using AI speed up their work by creating, personalizing and distributing content.

65% of HubSpot users now use AI create content, and they do it well by understanding what technology is good at: researching topics, delivering decent first drafts, and iterating for different audiences. Then human experts take drafts from good to great.

Within HubSpot, our marketing team excelled at this personalization of content with AI. When we started reaching out to potential clients with AI-driven emails, increased our conversion rate by 82%.

And when it comes to content distributionwe saw massive adoption when we launched our AI Content Remix feature a few months ago — that lets you take a piece of content and quickly turn it into SOCIAL MEDIA posts, videos, emails and more.

Soon merchants will be able to to transform their work using AI. And it will do so with agents — software that uses AI to achieve multi-step goals.

Content agents will prioritize, personalize and distribute content; social agents will analyze social content and tell you when, where and how to share it; i.a campaign agent will tell you where to invest and what to boost within your campaigns.

How AI Accelerates and Transforms Sales

U sales, the eternal challenge was increasing time in front of customers. The average seller just spends two hours a day selling!

The rest of the day they are stuck preparing for the next call or drowning in follow-up activities from the last one. No one has figured out how to reduce this time – until now.

HE is acceleration preparation and monitoring. Salespeople can now research prospects in seconds, generate high-quality personal messages to connect with them, summarize calls, and create insightful follow-ups.

The result: AI has for our customers and HubSpot saved discovery time by 30%and reduce tracking time by 20%.

And soon: HE will to transform sale with research agents — AI-powered software that finds leads for you and makes outreach simple in just a few clicks.

How AI accelerates and transforms service

Finally, inside customer service, a big source of frustration was when service professionals got stuck in life human plasters — reactively hunt down problems.

HE is here too acceleration process with excellent results. It can answer customer questions better than ever; HubSpot was able to resolve nearly 30% of tickets this year using AI.

It can speed up self-service by strengthening your knowledge base, allowing customers to solve their own questions. And it can analyze customer sentiment in real time, suggesting specific actions based on the trends it perceives.

Agents are also coming to transform customer service. Support agents will be able to answer increasingly complex customer questions, 24/7 — i knowledge base agents will recommend and update knowledge base articles so your team doesn’t have to.

How artificial intelligence and humans can work together to drive growth

Based on everything we’ve learned from our customers, the way to grow is not to underestimate AI or overintelligence—but understand and co-create with AI.

Because co-creation catalyzes growth. We believe that in all go-to-market functions, we need to partner with AI to drive growth:

• in marketing, AI createsand people curate.
• for sale, AI offers contextand people offer connection.
• And in service, AI manages simplicity, and people handle subtlety.

In all three cases, AI is not used instead people — it is empowering people and helps us expand. And if we can unlock its potential to help us increase traffic, conversion and retention, maybe we could just fix the growth formula. And that effort aligns perfectly with our mission at HubSpot.

HubSpot’s mission, what will change and what will always be true

HubSpot exists to help millions of organizations grow better. And we’re doubling down on that mission as we reinvent our platform with AI. To take full advantage of AI, you’ll need structure support and unstructured data.

You will need to gather insights from the textual content not good either audio and video. You will need your applications and agents to cooperate well. And we’re excited to help our customers adapt to these changes!

But we must also remember that some things will always be true!

Customers will always want things to be easy — so we work hard to make things intuitive and efficient. You will always want to understand the value quickly — so we’re laser-focused on reuse and immediate impact. And you’ll always want your customer and context data to be unified — so we gather all the data you need to create insights with AI.

Our mission is to help you grow. Our passion is to succeed easy, fast and unified. And what’s so motivating right now is that everywhere we look, there’s the promise that AI can help businesses scale like never before. With artificial intelligence we can help all businesses play big.

And to learn more about the features and services we’ve introduced at INBOUND 2024 to do just that, check out our latest Spotlight.