Welcome to the outcomes era, a time when customers buying behaviors have changed to support the adoption of AI.
That was the key message from HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan as she delivered her keynote address to the firm’s Unbound user conference in Boston. She confirmed:
Customers are buying AI very differently than they bought SaaS. There’s a fundamental shift that’s happening here as well. They don’t start by comparing feature lists. They start by asking a simpler question: Will this work for my business?
So, the outcomes era is here, she told delegates:
The last few years, we’ve seen one of the largest investment cycles in technology, trillions of dollars invested in building the foundation for AI. But the next wave of value is actually going to come from applications that take that intelligence and convert it into measurable customer outcomes and growth. That is the outcomes era, and HubSpot is built to win it.
Customers care deeply about outcomes, she insisted:
The conversation is changing really rapidly. A few months ago, it was all about tokenmaxxing; now our customers don’t talk to us about tokenmaxxing, they want – and care deeply about – the outcomes that they want to drive within their go-to-market teams. And we love that because the outcomes within go-to-market are just incredibly clear. We help our customers build demand, win deals and delight their end customers. That is the focus for us.
Customers also want proof of value as well as predictability in cost as they adopt AI, she added:
In SaaS, the typical process was you evaluate features, you then implement the software, you drive change management and user training. And once the users begin to drive, they get the growth and the value out of software. But AI is changing that dramatically. You can just turn up a trial and look at what the value you get and the outcomes that you get within your environment. And that means that there is need for proof of value.
There’s just been a lot of debate on what AI means for SaaS, who gets to capture the value in the ‘SaaSpocalypse’, she went on, adding:
We don’t believe that AI eliminates the value of platforms and applications. We believe it does raise the bar for how you convert that intelligence into real customer outcomes.
Context driver
Intelligence is necessary, but it is not sufficient, she warned:
Context is what turns that intelligence into measurable customer outcomes within businesses. Now AI models are trained on vast amounts of publicly available information, and they’re going to continue to get better, absolutely no doubt about that.
But no matter how intelligent a model gets, it does not know what’s happening within a business, what’s changing in the pipeline today, which deal is stalled, which customer is at risk. And all of that information is not just a static, dumb database. It is a dynamic, smart substrate with workflow logic that maintains state, rules, permissions, governance and audit trails that make all of that information trustworthy for businesses.
AI with bad context is worse than having no AI at all, she suggested:
As humans, we know how to control for this bad context, but AI does not, right? It might recommend a product that is no longer in your product catalog, might actually use an inaccurate definition of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), might route an approval to a manager who just changed roles two days back.
That is why we believe that even as models improve pretty significantly, the context within a business becomes even more valuable.
And there’s another fundamental shift underway, argued Ramini:
For many decades, businesses just had to adapt the way that they work in order to fit the software that they had. Now AI, thankfully, is reversing that. And that means if you’re a Marketer, Sales person, Service person, you can actually build. You can build artefacts, you can automate workflows, you can create new experiences, all using natural language. No need to wait four weeks behind the developer’s sprint. But there is a clear way to build well. And building well actually requires connected customer data. It requires growth context, permissions, governance, security.
We are moving from delivering features to delivering measurable customer outcomes. It means in go-to-market, we’re not just selling software, we are proving value, and we are earning the right to expand and compound adoption from there. In terms of pricing, it’s not about charging for access, it is clearly aligning to how customers get value and outcomes from HubSpot.
CRM changed
Duncan Lennox, HubSpotChief Product & Technology Officer, picked up the story, declaring:
We’ve re-invented CRM for the outcomes era. It’s still the beating heart for go-to-market teams, but it needs to drive outcomes through people and agents, not just be a system of record for tools and workflows. So we added a brain to make it all work seamlessly together…The CRM is not simply a system of record. It’s a system of context, the intelligence layer for your go-to-market. That’s the bet that we’ve made on CRM for the AI era, and we rebuilt it with two defining elements: first, our new agentic harness called Aviator; and secondly, rich Growth Context built in.
He pitched what he called the new AI-native CRM:
It’s the CRM that you know and love now rebuilt for the outcomes era. This is because our agentic harness now orchestrates and manages action, which changes everything. This new CRM works on our customers’ behalf and updates itself. This will save customers’ hours of manual updating, the headache of forgetting to add details. But most importantly, it will give them accurate insights at the moment they need them. And those insights are stronger and more proactive than ever because we built Growth Context directly into the Smart CRM.
We’ve re-built the Smart CRM as the foundation that makes everything else work. Our agentic harness delivers high performance at a lower cost. Growth Context delivers accuracy and control. This is the intelligence layer, the new brain of HubSpot. Now let’s see how it powers action. When it comes to driving outcomes, agents are the most effective way to scale how businesses build demand, win deals and delight customers. In the past six months alone, we’ve built several new agents and tools in HubSpot aimed at driving these exact outcomes
Partnering
HubSpot’s strategy here also depends on building out an agentic ecosystem, said Lennox:
We’ve been executing on it for the last 18 months. Over a year ago, HubSpot became the first CRM to support MCP, so agents can interact natively with our software, and we did this first with Anthropic. Then in June 2025, we were the first CRM to launch a deep research connector with ChatGPT. In July of that same year, we became the first CRM connector with Claude. And in May 2026, we shipped the Agent CLI, a completely new layer that lets agents automate bulk scheduled work on HubSpot with no human in the loop.
My take
Somewhat overshadowed by Dreamforce in San Francisco at the same time, nonetheless Unbound had some meaty content to digest, not least a compelling pitch for the notion of the so-called outcomes era.
