Show recap — Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Another Orange Morning Recap: May 12, 2026

Tuesday morning, halfway through May, and the show opened on Casey realizing she has two HUG events scheduled back to back next week. The kind of planning decision that makes sense at the time and looks different on the calendar a week out. Chris cheered her on, the way co-hosts do.

Here is what we got into: a run through Monday's five updates with four worth pulling forward, a Will It Workflow segment that turned into an Object of the Day in disguise when nobody could agree on what HubSpot means by “communication,” and a real Object of the Day on Quotes that ended with Casey demonstrating how to go from product update to working custom code module in about an hour without writing any code yourself.

Four Updates Worth Pulling Forward

Five updates landed Monday. Four got real airtime on the show. The one that did not, Help Desk email address sending permissions, is a useful admin tightening but not the kind of update that needs a deep conversation. Help desk has been getting daily love for the past year. This is one more piece of that.

GPT Image 2.0 for AI Image Generation

HubSpot's conversational AI image generation tool in the file picker now runs on GPT Image 2.0, OpenAI's latest image generation model. The upgrade brings more accurate text rendering inside images, multilingual support, and better prompt adherence. The piece that landed hardest in conversation was edit fidelity: the model preserves visual details like facial likeness when making edits rather than regenerating from scratch. This is live for Content Hub Starter, Professional, and Enterprise.

Why it matters: Chris made the bigger point. If you are building on AI, sometimes AI just gets better and your product gets better with it. The interesting part is whether HubSpot is ready when that happens. There are other places in the platform still running older models, and image generation is the bright spot here because OpenAI shipped something good and HubSpot picked it up quickly. Casey, who has been using nano banana from Gemini for her image work, pointed out that nearly every fix she makes is word-related. Being able to edit text inside an image instead of regenerating and hoping is the practical win.

For more details: GPT Image 2.0 for AI image generation live

Customer Portal Experience Update

The customer portal got a refreshed design, improved search, sorting and filtering, and full conversation visibility. The bigger structural change is underneath: the portal is now powered by HubSpot CMS. Portals activated for the first time on or after February 2, 2026 automatically have the new experience enabled. Existing portals can opt in, and the migration takes about five minutes. This is in public beta for Service Hub Professional and Enterprise.

Why it matters: The honest take is that the visible update is the small half of this. The big half is the move to CMS underneath, which is what enables everything else that comes next. Customer portals have been limited to tickets for years, and it is rare for a customer to only want to see their tickets. They want to see quotes, invoices, projects, conversations, everything in one place. The CMS shift is the foundation for that. Chris connected it to the Quotes object of the day later in the show: custom-coded modules for quotes are also now supported by HubSpot CMS, which is the same story playing out in a different surface. The HubSpot CMS is quietly starting to power the rest of the platform, and that is the pattern to watch.

For more details: Customer Portal experience update public beta

Marketing Studio: Chat to Plan Your Campaign

Marketing Studio now lets you chat directly inside the canvas to plan campaigns, get asset suggestions, and generate content. The chat asks clarifying questions, suggests assets aligned with your campaign goals and brand identity, and drafts emails, blog posts, and social posts so you can spend less time on setup and more on execution. This is in private beta for Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.

Why it matters: Casey lit up on this one. The previous flow required filling out a campaign brief upfront, even when the idea was still half-formed. Most marketers do not work that way. They start with a loose thought and refine it as they go. Chris talked about his actual workflow: an idea hits while he is driving between places, he types or speaks it into Claude on his phone, and by the time he gets to his desk, there is a cleaner draft waiting. That is how marketing happens now, for better or worse, and Marketing Studio bringing the chat surface inside the canvas matches the way people are already working. The honest read is that this is HubSpot meeting marketers where they are rather than asking them to change their process.

For more details: Marketing Studio chat to plan your campaign private beta

Onboarding Plans

Customer success teams can now plan, execute, and track onboarding and success projects inside HubSpot with structured tasks, milestones, and reporting. A new Onboarding pipeline is created by default for new Service Hub customers, along with a new Service - Onboarding project type and five out-of-the-box reports covering project count by stage, time spent in each stage, plan versus actual timeline, status distribution, and engagement distribution. This is in public beta for Service Hub Professional and Enterprise.

Why it matters: This is the other half of the Customer Success Rooms story from Friday. Onboarding Plans gives the customer success team the pipeline and project structure to manage the work. Customer Success Rooms gives the customer the shared surface to see it. The Service - Onboarding project type is the connective tissue, because tasks on a project with that type automatically surface in the customer's room. The bigger pattern is that HubSpot has historically not had real project management tools where the marketing and service work actually happens. Teams have been running onboarding through Asana, spreadsheets, or whatever else they could string together, and it has always felt like the forgotten hat. Now the tools are in the same place as the customer record, which is the version of this that actually scales.

For more details: Onboarding Plans public beta

Will It Workflow: Communication, Gmail, Personalized Message

The wheel landed on a configuration that immediately raised a question nobody on the show could answer cleanly: what does HubSpot actually mean by “communication”? On the data model editor, there is a communication object that appears to be replacing LinkedIn messages, SMS, and WhatsApp as separate object types. On the first screen of the data model, all three legacy types still show. On the second screen, they are gone and only “communications” remains. It is not confusing at all, Casey said, with the specific tone of someone who finds it confusing.

By the end of the segment, the definition surfaced. Communications log one-to-one messages between users and customers across SMS, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, postal mail, and custom channels. Email is not in there, which is the other piece of the naming puzzle. The use case the hosts landed on was an SMS confirmation flow: someone replies “confirmed” to an appointment SMS, that fires a contact-based workflow, the workflow sends a confirmation email back with the meeting link. Will it workflow? Yes. Should it? Probably, although Casey made the fair point that if the personalization is light enough, you might not need to dive into workflows at all. Tokens cover a lot.

The bigger takeaway is one Chris kept coming back to. The text confirmation experience you get from your dentist or your bank, the click Accept and things happen flow, has felt like consumer-only tech for years. HubSpot can do that for B2B. The tools are sitting right there. The reason it does not happen more is that people do not realize it is possible.

Watch the episode for the full conversation on what communications actually is, and where it sits in the data model relative to conversations, which is the next naming question waiting to happen.

Object of the Day: Quotes

Quotes is one of the objects that has been getting quiet, consistent work for months, and it has reached the point where if you have not been in there lately, you are probably missing things. The most cool stuff requires Commerce Hub Professional or Enterprise, or the new Commerce Hub seat model. Sales Hub still has access to legacy quotes for now.

The first thing Chris pulled up was the association list. Quotes can now be associated with basically every object in HubSpot except tickets, with projects, services, listings, and appointments still coming, possibly by the end of the year. The strategic read is significant. A lot of businesses, especially ones coming from QuickBooks or other accounting systems, do not think in terms of deals and opportunities. They think in terms of quotes. Quotes are the pre-sale object they have always used. When a HubSpot implementation tells them they need to use deals, the first reaction is often “why do I need this extra object?” Now that quotes can be associated with contacts, companies, line items, and the rest of the CRM directly, transactional businesses have a clean path: quote against the right object, invoice against it, skip the deal pipeline if there is no real sales management work to do.

Then Chris pulled up the Hub Heroes podcast episode from yesterday with Chad Hyer demonstrating a custom-built ROI card embedded into a quote. The card was built using the HubSpot developer platform and lives inside the quote as a buyer-facing experience. George B. Thomas called it a buyer experience page. The reason it works is the data model. The ROI card pulls dynamic data from the CRM, which means it stays accurate, requires less maintenance, and costs less in the long run than the alternative of hand-built static content that drifts out of date. If your data model is right, you can build this kind of thing. If it is not, you can still build it, but it will be more expensive to maintain over time.

The custom-coded modules for quotes update Casey and Chris covered last week is what makes all of this possible. Quote templates now support custom-coded React modules through HubSpot CMS, which is the same underlying technology that supports UI extensions on the developer platform. Ten updates have hit Quotes since the beginning of March: personalization tokens directly in the quote editor, writing guidelines on templates, quote rules, e-signature reassignment, workflows to create quotes, primary quote on a deal record, one-time invoices from quotes, PDF page break settings, automated sales tax calculation, capture buyer details from quotes. Casey called out automated sales tax specifically. Companies pay serious money for sales tax software off HubSpot because they do not know they can do it in HubSpot. They do not even think they should. The right conversation with your team could turn that into a meaningful efficiency gain.

Then Casey demonstrated the actual workflow. On her morning walk, she opened Perplexity and asked it to do deep research on the new custom-coded quote modules and the most recent UI extensions and developer platform updates. Perplexity flagged the modules as new in beta as of May 2026 in the response. Casey then asked for a handoff prompt for Claude Code to build a custom module in a new GitHub repo connected to her HubSpot portal. By her estimate, she was thirty to sixty minutes away from having a working custom-coded module without writing the code herself. The point landed cleanly. Anybody can do this. No special context, no secret instructions. If you see the update and want to be there, this is how you get there with no developer experience.

The caveat Chris added is the right one. Be careful in your own HubSpot portal when you start doing this kind of work. But guess who can help you be careful? The same AI. The bigger frame Casey pulled in from the Hub Heroes show: Max made the point on that podcast that “do I need a developer for this?” should not be the first question anymore. The first question should be “have I asked AI yet?” Developers still matter for the last-mile work. Ryan Ginsberg, Chad Hyer, Bill Barless, the wizards. But for the layer below that, where admins and partners have wanted to build experiences for years and have not been able to, the bar just dropped considerably.

For more details: Custom-coded modules for quotes public beta

The Rest of Monday's Updates

Full breakdowns of all five updates from Monday are on the updates blog.

Looking Ahead

Maggie Philbin joins the show next week. Thursday's lineup is packed: Davis, Becca from the Breeze Studio team, Trisha, and possibly Riley pending a vote. Don't miss it.

The Sign-Off

You probably already own the value you are looking for in HubSpot. You just need to wake up to it. We will see you tomorrow morning.