XEN | Insiders | July 2026
A look at what we're focussing on at XEN
(This is a slightly edited version of an internal newsletter I sent to the XEN team this week. I’ve removed private team and client specific items, but kept the gist of it intact.)
Hey team,
I wanted to share some of what I’ve been seeing and hearing in the market, with a few thoughts.
I’ll touch on:
industry trends
HubSpot releases
client insights, and
XEN company news.
The AI conversation is shifting as companies weigh up costs versus benefits.
AI Pushback
We’re continuing to see increased pushback against AI content slop, process slop and reporting slop (which is a good thing).
What’s surprising is the speed at which the conversation has changed - as costs are scrutinised and ROI is considered challenging to prove. Inflation is hitting home and agentic ‘initiatives’ have been underperforming.
The useful outcome from all this is that the blind ‘pilot programs’ are winding down, and the assumption that teams can easily just use AI to replace all expertise is being challenged. No one doubts the incredible advances, but careful application rather than blanket, carefree trust is now the norm.
Ignorance is bliss
When it comes to AI competence, there’s an interesting human behaviour where we easily dismiss answers in domains we have expertise in, yet trust answers in domains we’re ignorant in. Ignorance is bliss in some situations, but can be dangerous as well, especially as AI scales that result.
This is of further concern as we see the move from AI just ‘answering’, to AI ‘doing’ things. Trusting an answer when we are ignorant is one thing, trusting it to do things when we are ignorant is another level.
Customer Agent and HubSpot Assistant
Out of all the HubSpot AI releases over the past year, the two key tools we are most recommending are Customer Agent, and HubSpot Assistant.
Ian and I covered this in detail back in episode 317, but as a quick recap: both of these tools are actually good now.
Customer Agent helps free up teams from all the basic support queries. It requires careful provision of knowledge sources (eg FAQs, knowledge bases, etc) which is the hard part, but once in place the AI models provide highly accurate answers.
HubSpot Assistant (top right menu) is polished now. Had you asked me 6 months ago I was pretty dismissive, frustrated with the bloated AI slop answers. But these days, I am using it all the time, it has improved remarkably.
AEO Tool
HubSpot rolled out their AEO tool, and while we’ll continue testing it extensively over the coming months, the earliest takeaway is that the main problem for most users is: ‘what AI prompts are my ideal customers using?’
The AEO tool is good at analysing and reporting on how sites ‘rank’ in AI, but isn’t much help in uncovering what an ideal customer might be searching for. It’s the SEO problem all over again - tons of tools for checking keyword ranking, but very little insight into what keywords are important. That’s the real value unlock, and for SEO, often running paid ads in Google was the only way to really confirm. What the equivalent for AEO is, still remains to be seen.
Further, the AEO tool recommendations are often suspect. In our portal we get recommendations for creating all kinds of content slop (listicles and articles), but I know from experience that our biggest driver of AI visibility is reviews on credible sites (eg Google reviews, HubSpot Partner directory reviews, etc). We need to be really careful with how we advise our clients on using this (and other) AI analysis tools.
Fixing AI slop
We’ve seen a few companies pop up again after going quiet last year. Some of them relied too much on AI guidance and now find themselves trying to unravel AI process slop (eg workflows that were created that they have no idea how they work, or even what problem they are solving).
I don’t find this particularly surprising, and it seems to fit with broader industry pushback against AI (see earlier).
Data Cleanliness
Data ‘confidence’ is a key focus for many clients now. They understand that incorrect data is training AI to head down a misleading path.
Sometimes getting the basics in place is the biggest problem to solve.
Having everything logged in HubSpot, ensuring properties are updated and formatted correctly, sets up a portal for gaining ‘actual’ insights.
AI models can be brilliant at gaining insight from unstructured data, but not if the data is wrong.
We’ve had a few clients plan out internal projects focussed solely on data enrichment (and correction), lifecycle stages accuracy, lead scoring and owner rotation. We’ve seen clients ‘unlock’ opportunities simply because they realised segments of contacts were still assigned to a sales rep who had left the company months ago...
HubSpot renewals
Contract remorse, and cost containment is another area of focus. Platform subscriptions are firmly in the sights.
Our latest episode of HubShots covers how to prepare for a HubSpot subscription renewal. We’ve had a number of clients reach out to us lately to help tailor their renewals to best match their needs (often with significant reductions in subscription costs). See also YouTube and Substack.
Streamlining processes
We’re seeing a push towards streamlining processes and tech stacks. Less is more, as the concept goes. Less complexity means more time to focus on valuable work.
Client websites
There’s been a bunch of new websites going live. I particularly like how clients are embracing personalised experiences with their sites with smart content and membership functionality implementations. See also our Showcase page.
A big welcome to new team members who started with us in May (Graphic Designer), and June (Marketing Strategist).
I’m looking forward to our next book club that Dona has organised - we’ll be going through The Checklist Manifesto.
Roselen prepared a full course on Service Hub onboarding, available in our HubShots community.
We’ve been using Claude design to help accelerate our design process with clients. Allen wrote a blog post covering our initial thoughts.
Allen has also put together a full internal course on using ChatGPT Work, and coding AI agents.
Erika and Audrey have been extensively testing HubSpot’s AEO tool, full WIP details here.
Keren covered the ‘sales pipeline in HubSpot is greyed out’ issue on our XEN KB.
I wrote a (long) article on Overwhelm, spelling out the challenge we (and our clients) all face. Consolidation is one of the solutions.
Proactive
One key opportunity for us at XEN is to evolve how proactive we are with clients, especially during the planning stages.
I think the customer experience we provide is excellent (responsive, helpful, take stuff off a client’s plate, etc) and is often commented on by clients.
However, since many of our engagements are on-demand (and thus tend to be reactive), we often aren’t taking enough initiative with clients (IMO).
We can be guiding our clients on process (sales pipeline management, service pipeline streamlining) and financial areas (eg renewals, seat optimisation). We also need to be actively looking for issues (eg when integrations expire, tracking stops, reports aren’t accurate, users have left, etc).
I consider this one of our biggest opportunities for moving up the ‘value chain’ with our clients. We are planning out how to systemise this further.
What people buy
It’s worth remembering that businesses are usually engaging us for one of three outcomes: money (saving or making money), time (saving or freeing up time), or status (positioning, perception or credibility) - I cover this in a video here.
We need to be listening for which of these is most important to a business (eg sales teams usually focus on money, service teams often focus on time, and website rebrands are usually about status - sometimes money, as conversion rates are part of the discussion).
I recently read ‘I eat the stars’ by Sarah Wilson. It’s a heavy book in many ways, covering the (fringe?) idea of collapsology and systemic over-complexity. I found this a challenging, yet deeply absorbing read. It really got me thinking.
Most companies are a micro-expression of this - overly complex, and buckling under the weight of legacy processes. I try to consider where we can help - reviewing their processes, prioritising the clean up of workflows, data, pipelines and functions they don’t need. More signal, less noise.
Part of the problem with today’s software platforms is their accelerating output of new features. HubSpot released more than 1200 updates in the last 12 months alone. We’ve refreshed our HubSpot Updates that Matter offering to select clients to help guide them through this - highlighting just the new features that are actually useful for their specific portals.
Feel free to suggest this to clients where appropriate (or tag me if you’d like me to reach out to specific clients that could benefit).
Michele and I watched Project Hail Mary on the weekend. I loved this so much. I’d read the book a while back and was looking forward to the movie. Such a beautiful friendship story. Two thumbs down from me (IYKYK).
As always, health is your #1 priority.
Till next time,
Craig
