From the show
Another Orange Morning Recap: Friday, October 9, 2026
Friday opened with a special guest. Lauren Ryan, who sells HubSpot now after four years running an agency and six as a marketing operator, posted a question on LinkedIn this week that a lot of people are quietly dodging: are you tracking the ROI of what you spend on AI, and if not, what are you being asked to track? Chris Carolan had commented that none of the old KPIs are going to solve it, and Lauren agreed to come on and work the question out loud. Madelyn Donovan was off this week, so no horoscopes.
Here is what we got into: the ROI of AI with Lauren, a board with no updates on it and a rough week inside HubSpot, Beth O'Malley's post on the no-more-hubs pricing pilot in Europe, and a Will It Breeze that asked Breeze how that pilot would land on our own portal.
The ROI of AI, Out Loud with Lauren Ryan
Lauren's frame is that AI is where marketing was before attribution arrived: everyone knows it is working, nobody can quantify it, and the bill keeps growing. Her warning is that the question is coming whether or not anyone is ready for it. As she put it, a CEO is going to say, "show me everything we're spending on AI and tell me why and what measurable impacts did it have?" What she sees with customers is that most are still at where and how, not yet at measurement, and her advice is to back into a problem instead of implementing AI for its own sake. The piece most teams skip is the baseline. If you want to gauge a prospecting agent, you need to know what a human SDR delivers first, or a year from now the question "is this effective" has no answer.
Casey Hawkins brought the slide from UNBOUND she cannot stop thinking about: good AI context improves outcomes, bad context diminishes them. She has brought it up to every one of her clients since. Chris pushed on the word outcomes. "Have you defined what a good outcome looks like? I hope it's not closing a thousand tickets instead of one hundred tickets because that doesn't guarantee value." His example was the customer experience and quality assurance scores HubSpot shipped in September: a dozen factors, an average of tone, clarity and empathy, and no dashboard anywhere with a KPI for any of it. Meanwhile the thing people can feel, someone saying they have never had this much fun at their job, has no line on the report. His invitation was to the finance side of the house: "CFOs need to come into the tent and help us figure this out."
Chris's three buckets are revenue influenced, revenue protected, and capability built, and the third is the new one. The way to start measuring it is to ask. He asked Breeze whether any value was created in the portal the day before, pushed past the first answer, which was all tickets, and got to Lauren's broader question: what became possible, clearer, better, or more valuable for people, and what evidence supports that. Lauren's closing advice was to define what you are solving, the options for solving it, and the upside, so that a year after the investment you can explain whether value was delivered against the metric you chose.
Why it matters: If you are a HubSpotter, this is exactly the conversation Chris and Casey want to have on air, in public, with the people who are accountable for these budgets. Five or ten minutes is enough. The industry is figuring this out together, and the answers are not going to come from the old KPI dashboard.
No Updates, and a Rough Week
Casey refreshed the product updates board live and found nothing new for Friday, which was news to Chris too. Casey noted it had been a rough week inside HubSpot, with restructuring that every HubSpotter she talked to was feeling, and that it is hard to imagine the slowdown in updates is unrelated. The show expected to reach a point where there are not ten updates a day, and the world around HubSpot is still moving, which is what the hour turned to next.
No More Hubs: The Pricing Pilot in Europe
Beth O'Malley's post laid out the three things to know this week: a new pricing model in pilot, the layoffs, and a refreshed Starter plan. The pricing model drops individual hubs for three tiers, drops marketing contacts, simplifies seats into GTM seats and operations seats, moves a load of Enterprise functionality including custom objects down to Professional, and then starts charging for what happens inside the portal, with workflow actions and email sends counting against a credit allowance. It is a pilot, and as far as anyone on the show could tell, it applies to new customers in Europe only.
Casey's first reaction to no hubs was positive. Teams on the side of the world she works in often have Marketing Hub and Sales Hub but not Service Hub, so they do not even know a tool like help desk exists, and they build workarounds or leave HubSpot for something they could have done inside it. Chris said the writing has been on the wall since Smart CRM and core seats arrived: the data model does not care about hubs, you do not need a Service Hub seat to use tickets or a Revenue Hub seat to put contracts in your data model, and customer agent being freed from Service Hub was the same signal. Casey added that seats have confused teams since seats existed, most recently the pain of needing a sales seat plus a revenue seat, and that smaller teams work across departments in ways the seat model never fit.
The hard part is the metering. Casey was plain about it: paying per workflow action intimidates her as a big workflow user, and a lot of portals have workflows that were built five years ago and are still running in the background, some of them deliberately doing things twice as a backup. Moving to this model would mean real work in a lot of portals, work that has not been prioritized because everyone has been chasing the next update instead. Chris's read is that HubSpot's whole market value sits on hub licenses that most customers use a fraction of, that the math from licensing to usage was always going to need AI to work out, and that two habits get expensive under it: workflows that only push data around, and sending email to gray contacts who stopped caring. His line was to stop unchecking the box that keeps you from sending to them. Casey's reassurance for the client who is already worried: they are testing this, not rolling it out, and it is not happening to your portal tomorrow.
Why it matters: If it is not broke, do not fix it was not wrong before. AI is breaking processes whether you want it to or not, and a usage model would make every frequently executed workflow a budget line. The move now is to look at which workflows are just moving data around and replace them with sync properties or associated records, before anyone is charging for the repetition.
Will It Breeze: How Will This Impact Us?
No wheel this week. Chris pasted Beth's post into Breeze Assistant and asked one question: how will this impact us? It is his favorite use of the segment, a question like that about something new, and the answer was better than the post. For Value-First Team, Breeze called it a potential future cost-model change, not a confirmed change to the bill, with the opportunity being broader platform access with fewer purchasing barriers and the risk being paying for routine work that currently sits inside the subscriptions. It knew the portal's subscription and its credit purchase, noted the rollout applies to new EMEA customers with existing customers staying on hub pricing for now, and pointed out what the post missed: HubSpot has published a flexible seats and credits supplement, and no more hubs describes a pricing program, not the disappearance of anyone's existing hub subscription.
Then it got specific. Custom objects on Professional could lower the entry barrier for organizations adopting a connected model like ours, which is the question that came up at Tuesday's Office Hours. Every frequently executed workflow would deserve a cost review, not just the AI features. Publishing frequency could matter more than audience size. The existing credit purchase would need explicit migration treatment in writing. And its budgeting advice read like a checklist: establish monthly execution volume rather than counting workflows, measure sends and AI usage separately, model peak months, compare packs with metered usage, re-forecast quarterly, and require a written migration comparison. Its principle for the day was that paying for work can make sense and paying for unnecessary repetition does not.
Chris's takeaway was that once Breeze identifies the workflows to retire, you can ask Breeze to do the migration, and it will probably tell you how many credits you are saving as it goes. If the pricing change concerns you, get into a conversation with Breeze about it now, because a HubSpot admin or marketing leader has never been in a better position to be ahead of the game on costs. Will it Breeze? It will.
The Rest of Friday's Updates
Nothing shipped on Friday's board. Everything that shipped earlier in the week is in the HubSpot updates feed.
The Sign-Off
Monday is a holiday, so the show takes it off and is back on Tuesday. You probably already own the value you are looking for in HubSpot. You just need to wake up to it. We will see you Tuesday morning.
Produced by Value-First Media