Show recap — Friday, July 17, 2026

Another Orange Morning Recap: July 17, 2026

Friday morning, and Chris Carolan is back in the co-host chair after a week away, with Madelyn Donovan alongside him. A new energy drink had entered the chat, the week had that shocking-at-first-then-fine quality to it, and Chris opened by catching everyone up on where he had been. It felt, in his words, like a year since he had talked about updates.

Here is what we got into: Chris debriefing the AI-augmented HubSpot bootcamp he ran with Nico, a redesigned product updates page that lets you finally hide what you do not care about, real-time import progress tracking, a dedicated transactional SMS lane and a lesson in what 10DLC actually stands for, deployment config drafts for Customer Agent, the deprecation of Marketing Control Center, a big private beta that lets you describe an app and deploy it into your portal, and Madelyn's zodiac reading of the week's releases.

Chris Debriefs the AI Bootcamp

Chris spent Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday running an AI-augmented HubSpot stack bootcamp with Nico Lafakis, ninety minutes a day for three days. Over a hundred people showed up on day one, and the room narrowed from there, the way bootcamps go. What mattered to Chris was the six or seven people who really got activated by the end of the week.

The reflection underneath it was about how you teach AI at all. A six-week course on AI is fighting a losing battle, because a month and a half is long enough for the ground to move under the curriculum. If you are certifying people on what you taught, the short high-intensity burst almost forces honesty about what still holds up. Chris was grateful HubSpot is willing to lean into that format at all.

One human missed it who wanted in. Zach Hussion had hoped to join on Wednesday, and the community changes HubSpot made earlier this year, the ones that bit a lot of us, got in his way. Chris is hoping to run the bootcamp back and activate more people the next time around.

The Product Updates Page Learned to Hide Things

Personalized Product Updates

The most meta update of the morning was the page the show reads every single day. The Personalized Product Updates redesign, still in private beta, now lets you hide recommendations inside the Discover tab that are not relevant to you while keeping them reachable in All Updates, and it lets you customize the order things appear in. If you are opted into the beta, the tabs sit across the top; if you are not, the experience still lives on the side.

The honest question the hosts sat with was when you would actually hide something. The example that landed was the daily drumbeat of enterprise-level Service Hub help desk features for someone with no clients and no thousand-person team, the updates you cannot relate to right now. Being able to tell the page never show me this again is a real quality-of-life win, and it almost certainly means AI is learning your preferences behind the scenes as you dismiss things.

Why it matters: a show built on reading this page every morning has a specific stake in it getting better, and this is the page getting better. The small catch, said with a smile, is that the people who click every beta button and poke every corner of the portal are exactly the people the page recommends almost everything to.

For more details: Personalized Product Updates.

Imports Get a Progress Bar

Import Progress Tracking

You can now see real-time progress on your imports: which processing stage you are in, a percentage complete for each stage, and your position in the queue if the import is waiting to run. It also tells you why you are waiting, whether every concurrent slot is taken or just the large-import slot, and imports under ten thousand rows can move ahead when only the large-import slot is full.

Casey made the sharp observation of the segment. On her own work, it is exports that tend to take a while, not imports, especially when most of your data already lives in HubSpot. So the feature reads a little surprising at first. Where it earns its keep is migrations and portal-to-portal moves, the all-or-nothing records situations, or a complex import between an ERP and HubSpot where the process really is involved.

Why it matters: the real value is knowing nothing is broken. Chris tied it to a larger pattern, the association-limits update from the day before and HubSpot's steady positioning to move up market. When you are selling to bigger organizations, visibility into a queue stops being a nicety. Knowing your import was accepted and is being processed, rather than sitting and wondering whether to wait, refresh, or start troubleshooting, is the kind of clarity that has been missing for a while.

For more details: Import Progress Tracking.

A Real Lane for Transactional Texts

Transactional SMS 10DLC Add-On

Businesses can now purchase a dedicated transactional SMS SKU, a campaign and a number, to send non-marketing operational or one-to-one messages under a transactional subscription type. The point is separation. Today, workflows force all messaging into a marketing-only model, which creates compliance risk and customer confusion, and this lane lets transactional messages run independently or alongside the marketing SMS queue. If a customer opts out of marketing texts, you can still send them the essential ones.

Casey drew the line for anyone new to the distinction. A marketing text is we are having a sale, use this code for ten percent off today only. A transactional text is your package has shipped, here is your tracking number. They are operated differently on the back end because of the opt-in and opt-out compliance rules that apply to marketing and not to transactional, the same way subscription types work in email.

The segment also produced the morning's best small mystery. Nobody in the room knew what 10DLC stood for, the update copy defined it with itself, and Chris finally asked Breeze, which came back with ten-digit long code, the standard for sending texts from a normal local phone number. Somebody's shorthand became a real acronym at some point in history, and no one on the show is confident they will remember it in two years.

Why it matters: maybe ten percent of HubSpot teams truly need this, but the teams that need it, need it badly. Untangling transactional from marketing is how you protect the overall customer experience when someone unsubscribes from promotions but still has to hear that their order shipped.

For more details: Transactional SMS 10DLC Add-On.

Customer Agent Gets a Save Button

Save Deployment Configuration Drafts for Customer Agent

You can now save draft changes to a Customer Agent deployment configuration before publishing, keeping your edits separate from the live deployment until you are ready to go live. Previously every configuration change deployed immediately, which made it hard to control when updates became visible.

Madelyn liked the sound of it even without leaning on Customer Agent heavily yet, because the frustration it solves is familiar. Testing conversational flows has historically felt nothing like testing a workflow. You had to click into each piece, you could not see the whole thing at once, and any change you made was live. Being able to tinker with the configuration without touching the version customers are actually talking to is the kind of safety net that makes people willing to improve it at all.

Why it matters: reducing deployment risk is really about confidence. When editing a live agent feels dangerous, people stop editing it, and the agent stops getting better. A draft state lowers the stakes of iteration.

For more details: Save Deployment Configuration Drafts for Customer Agent.

Marketing Control Center Is Being Folded In

An update Chris had not planned to cover came up on his own screen: Marketing Control Center is being deprecated. Casey had the inside line, because she had just talked with Ankur, the product manager behind Marketing Control Center and a friend of the show who joined back when it was first announced. The tool is not disappearing so much as moving. HubSpot is working to integrate its capabilities into the Breeze chat experience rather than keeping it as its own separate destination.

That change traces back to a piece of feedback Casey had given Ankur directly, that it is confusing to know when you should go to one of these separate experiences versus just using Breeze chat. The team appears to be addressing exactly that. Chris was chatting with Ankur again later in the day, with a new social tool on the way too.

The bigger thread the show kept pulling was coordination. When you hear about updates coming out of campaigns, and then you see teamwork moving in a similar direction, the natural question is why these are not developed together, since everyone is clearly heading the same way. The destination almost everyone wants is Breeze chat everywhere, and the honest hope is that practitioner feedback like this is nudging the pieces closer together.

Describe an App, Deploy It to Your Portal

Describe an App and Deploy It to Your Portal

This was the update Casey quieted down over, because her brain was already three moves ahead on how to use it. In private beta, it is a conversational no-code tool: describe a custom app in plain language and have it deployed directly into your HubSpot portal, no developer and no code. The app reads your real portal data every time you open it, using your own permissions. HubSpot frames it against reports and dashboards, which answer standard questions, and positions this for the questions that need a custom answer, a page that combines the exact objects, properties, and layout your team works from every day in a way that does not exist out of the box.

Chris was a little annoyed at the framing against reports, because what he showed was bigger than reporting. He walked through a deliverable he had built, an object profile that mixes the narrative and story of what an object does with its live schema, pipelines, and contracts that mimic the property documentation you would find inside HubSpot, right down to a sparkle that tells you when to update a property, when not to, and how to verify it. Then he called up Breeze, and Breeze could see all of it. The lineage runs back to app cards and HubCode, the vibe-coding-into-HubSpot concept Dharmesh introduced back in the spring, and this is that idea maturing inside the system with Breeze Assistant.

Casey's head went straight to her longest-running challenge. Her biggest lead scoring problem is getting the context behind a score over to the reps receiving the leads, and a custom page that presents exactly that is the shape of a real answer. The catch, for now, is that the app pages you build are visible only to you. The update says not yet on sharing, and the whole thing becomes far more interesting the moment you can hand the page to your team. There are also still a couple of steps you take inside HubSpot, the install and the not-yet-approved-app screen and its scopes, and the stated direction is to bring even those into Breeze Assistant.

Why it matters: for anyone activated on building apps outside HubSpot, there is now an infrastructure to build them directly into HubSpot instead. The advice that came with the excitement was to standardize and put guardrails around it, so Breeze is not building whatever it wants every time, and to remember you are still working inside HubSpot's architecture, so the fully designed data-next-to-narrative visuals you get from Breeze Assistant will not all carry over. It is exciting, and it is going to be worth watching what people build with it.

For more details: Describe an App and Deploy It to Your Portal.

The Horoscopes: Reading the Releases by Sign

Madelyn closed with her recurring zodiac read of the week's product updates, mapping signs to hubs. It is Cancer season until July 22, and Cancer maps to Service, the nurturing caregiver known for empathy, intuition, and loyal bonds behind a protective shell. Cancer is in a care-audit cycle: the question is no longer only whether support feels warm, but whether it is clear, timely, and dependable. Transactional SMS, the team email signature improvements from a few weeks back, and the wave of Customer Agent updates all point to the same lesson, that trust is built through reachable communication and reliable follow-through. Cancer is being asked to grow from intuition into design, not louder support but better support.

Capricorn maps to Sales, and the reading was to turn discipline into durable advantage through better engineering, not reinvention. Call recording settings per user and team, the power dialer, the payment links API, personalized navigation, and the reworked index and board views all serve the same goal: reduce drag, strengthen controls, and make repetition cleaner and more scalable.

Gemini maps to Marketing, and this sign is in a signal-amplification cycle. There is no shortage of energy or ideas right now, and the challenge is choosing what deserves momentum. Transactional SMS shows up here too, because separating it protects the marketing relationship. Custom event properties in email personalization tokens, scoring high-impact pages with AI, data-driven market discovery, and Breeze Assistant reaching into campaign data to generate LinkedIn articles all reinforce Gemini's gift, spotting a promising signal and turning one insight into many useful expressions.

The Sign-Off

You probably already own the value you are looking for in HubSpot. You just need to wake up to it. Have a great weekend, and we will see you Monday morning.