Software platforms are all integrating AI to some extent. As with most things, some are doing it better than others. HubSpot Breeze AI is without a doubt the most comprehensive AI implementation into a CRM system to date.
How is AI adoption in CRM reshaping the CRM industry?
Anywhere we have large stores of data, we can benefit from AI tools to quickly make sense of it. AI is enabling us to automatically gather data, fill in the blanks, analyse, and update CRM records. And all in real time. This process enables us to hyper-personalise marketing, sales and customer service efforts like never before.
Tangled CRM Databases and the Customer Journey
Traditionally, customers followed a linear path to purchase, making it easier for businesses to predict leads and use third-party data. However, the customer journey has evolved into a complex, nonlinear, and multi-channel experience that is difficult to track. This shift has created challenges for businesses in accessing and compiling data about their customers across the internet.
Using multiple third-party intelligence software solutions can result in a messy network of databases, leading to duplicate data, inefficiencies in targeting, and difficulty in driving revenue. This situation often leads to increased costs, wasted time, and a negative impact on the customer experience
Functionality like routine task automation, predictive analytics, and form length reduction become far more attainable due to a stronger underlying CRM dataset and, equally, a better understanding of the dataset.
That being said, the best CRM AI’s have been out of reach for most due to high cost. Think Salesforce Einstein 1 at $500 user/month. Additionally, the affordable CRM integrated AI’s are—well, terrible.
Enter Breeze, HubSpot's AI.
What is HubSpot Breeze AI?
Breeze AI is an AI suite built into HubSpot’s core. It includes three AI companions:
- Breeze Copilot
- Breeze Intelligence
- Breeze Agents
- Prospecting Agent
- Customer Agent
- Content Agent
- Social Agent
Breeze has been in development for a few years and was launched as a beta product called ChatSpot. Breeze is the polished version that is ready for real-world mass deployment.
Let’s jump in and unpack Breeze’s AI companions.
Breeze Copilot
Breeze Copilot is like ChatGPT, but its built into your CRM system. Unlike Chat GPT, it can leverage the data you store in the CRM to provide insights and answers. Copilot is accessible across the entire CRM, including marketing, sales, and service teams, to create content and to provide context and efficiency to every day processes and tasks. It’s available on both your browser and in the mobile app.
Breeze Agents
Breeze Agents, of which there are four (Customer, Prospecting, Content and Social) AI-powered experts designed to automate tasks. They work fast to get things done faster by leveraging the data you have in your CRM. They are easy to use, have a fast time to value, and are unified within the HubSpot customer platform.
Prospecting Agent
This agent engages leads by researching and personalising communications and automating the outreach process. Users have the option to review and approve communications before they are sent or let the agent run on its own.
The prospecting agent will identify prospects by researching external data sources, your CRM data, prospects activity on your website to craft sales outreach and even schedule and send it at the best times.
Outcome: Greater reach by your existing sales team in a hyper-personalised manner.
Customer Agent
The customer agent is an AI and data led chatbot. You start by training the customer agent with content in your knowledge base, website, and blog. This training, along with the data in your CRM, enables the customer agent to be the first point of entry for all of your customer support queries 24/7. More complex queries are routed to available and relevant support agents
This agent only uses approved content, eliminating the possibility of fabricated information. It cites sources, boosting customer confidence
Outcome: 24/7 customer support and less pressure on your support team.
Content Agent
The Content Agent is designed to help marketers create, optimise, and revise content across multiple channels such as blogs, landing pages, podcasts, and case studies. It uses the information you provide, as well as data from your CRM and AI to create high-quality content in your brand voice. This can save marketers time and effort, allowing them to focus on other tasks like strategy and analysis. It can also help to improve the consistency and quality of content across different channels.
Outcome: Cross-platform content reach and higher productivity for marketing teams
Social Agent
The Social Media Agent analyses a business' social media presence (including target audience, sentiment, and engagement) to provide suggestions for personalised, engaging posts that will help the user reach their social media goals. one agent is provided for all connected social accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram).
Examples of questions that a user might ask the agent include:
- What are the top trending topics in my industry?
- Suggest a social media post about [topic] that will resonate with my target audience.
Outcome: Time saving with highly targeted social media posts that are tailored for each connected platform.
Breeze Intelligence
Breeze Intelligence provides AI led data enrichment, website visitor intent, and advanced segmentation for the most complete view and analysis of your CRM contacts possible.
Breeze Intelligence can add over 40 attributes like firm phone number, annual income, website URL, contact roles, and employers to new HubSpot contact and company records.
Refresh old CRM data with re-enrich. The firm or contact information you selected is evaluated and updated. You can set when you want this process to be run manually or automatically.
Key Features of Breeze Intelligence
Breeze Intelligence offers three key features to assist customer-facing teams:
Data Enrichment
Breeze Intelligence uses a database of over 200 million B2B buyer and company profiles to automatically enrich contact and company records in your HubSpot CRM. This feature enhances records with information such as role, employer, location, social media links, annual revenue, and industry.
You can automatically enrich new records or enrich entire lists. The automatic enrichment feature is only available to those with 1,000 or 10,000 credits.
Automate the entire process.
Buyer Intent
Breeze Intelligence identifies companies in your target market that are actively researching solutions like yours, even if they are not already in your CRM. You can use this feature to create targeted lists of high-intent companies and automate actions to engage them.
A funnel provides a visual representation of your entire addressable market (TAM), including which organisations from that TAM are expressing intent and which are currently engaged with your company and in your HubSpot Smart CRM.
Form Shortening
Breeze Intelligence helps you create shorter forms by dynamically filling in fields with data from HubSpot's enrichment database. This feature simplifies form completion for potential customers, leading to higher conversion rates.
Breeze Intelligence Pricing
This is the only offering on this page that requires an additional subscription. As with other data-sourcing services, HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence enrichment requires credits. Multiple monthly credit subscriptions exist. These apply to all enriched records.
HubSpot offers bundles of Breeze intelligence credits per month.
- 100 Credits: $30/month $0.30 per credit
- 1,000 Credits: $150/month $0.15 per credit
- 10,000 Credits: $700/month $0.07 per credit
Finally, HubSpot offers a backfill enrichment. Up to 1 million records for $5,000.
Breeze AI Use Cases across your organisation
Breeze AI features are embedded in over 80 places across HubSpot’s CRM. So let’s dive into some of the most important ones and outline a few uses cases.
Use Cases for Sales
The Prospecting Agent accesses the CRM to generate insights about leads, contacts and companies.. Using context from the smart CRM, Copilot can help salespeople create relevant sales content and emails, as well as research companies. It will even send the emails at the right time. Use Copilot to summarise tickets, long email trails, or deal information.
Here are some queries one might ask the Prospecting Agent and Copilot:
- How many deals do I have in my pipeline that are close to closing.
- Give me a list of companies that fit our ideal customer profile and have recently been on our website.
- Create outreach emails that are relevant and personalised to recent visitors to our website.
- Summarise the customer sentiment of customer xyz across all our interactions and especially an tickets that are open or have bbeen resolved in the last three months.
Use Cases for Customer Service
The Customer Agent optimises the support process and enables the answering of support queries on a 24/7 basis. The systems can be trained using your brand tone, knowledge base, website, and blogs. Additionally, Breeze AI can tailor its responses to each customer based on their individual needs and history in HubSpot CRM.
In cases where a more nuanced answer is required, the AI Customer Agent will hand off the customer to a real sales or service agent. But, by automating many routine customer service tasks, Breeze AI frees up human agents to focus on more complex and demanding issues.
Here are some support queries customers could ask the Breeze AI Customer Agent
Query: "I need help resetting my password."
Customer Agent Action: The agent would access the user's account information and guide them through the password reset process, providing step-by-step instructions and answering any questions they may have.
Outcome: The customer can quickly and easily reset their password without needing to contact a human support agent, improving their experience and freeing up support staff to handle more complex issues.
Query: "What are your business hours?"
Customer Agent Action: The agent would provide the company's business hours, including any variations for different departments or regions. Additionally, it could offer information on alternative ways to contact support outside of business hours, such as email or an online contact form.
Outcome: The customer receives the information they need quickly and efficiently, without having to wait for a human agent to become available. This improves customer satisfaction and reduces the workload for support staff.
Query: "I'm having trouble connecting to the internet."
Customer Agent Action: The agent would initially try to troubleshoot the issue by asking the customer questions about their setup and guiding them through basic troubleshooting steps. If the issue is more complex, the agent would seamlessly transfer the customer to a live chat with a human support agent who has the expertise to handle the situation.
Outcome: Customers receive immediate assistance with their issue, even if it requires escalation to a human agent. The AI-powered initial interaction saves time for both the customer and the support team, ensuring a smoother support experience.
Use Cases for Marketing
Breeze Intelligence can automatically enrich contact and company records in the HubSpot CRM, providing marketers with more information about their leads and customers. This data can be used to improve segmentation and targeting, personalise marketing messages, and increase conversion rates.
AI-Assisted Lead Scoring that combines the power of AI with unified CRM data can surface leads that need to go on nurture, be moved into a targeted email list, or be handed over to sales to be qualified.
Here are some goals that a marketer could use Breeze AI to achieve:
Goal: Increase engagement on social media.
Social Media Agent Action: A marketer could ask the agent: "Suggest a social media post about [topic] that will resonate with my target audience." The agent would analyse the marketer's target audience and current social media performance and suggest a post that is relevant and engaging, including suggested copy and images.
Outcome: Increased engagement and brand awareness across connected social media platforms.
Goal: Create a high-quality blog post.
Content Agent Action: A marketer could ask the agent, "Help me write an introduction for a blog post about [topic]". The agent could then use AI, data from the marketer's CRM, as well as the marketer's input, to write a compelling and informative introduction.
Outcome: Improved content quality and consistency across various marketing channels, which could lead to increased website traffic and lead generation.
Goal: Identify companies in the target market that are actively researching solutions.
Buyer Intent Feature: A marketer can use Buyer Intent to identify companies in their target market that are actively researching solutions like theirs, even if they are not already in the CRM. They can use this feature to create targeted lists of high-intent companies and automate actions to engage them. For example, the marketer could set up a workflow to automatically send an email to these companies or add them to an audience to target them with personalised ads.
Outcome: By targeting high-intent companies, marketers can increase their chances of generating qualified leads and closing deals.
Final Thoughts
I play with many AI tools; most of them don’t make the cut for sophisticated work and need ‘a lot’ of careful hand holding and attention to detail to get a usable result. Breeze AI is not this; by combining the power of AI with unified data from the HubSpot CRM, Breeze provides actionable insights and automates tasks with uncanny and slightly eerily accurate accuracy.
This is a major update from HubSpot that has entirely surprised me with its sophistication and completeness, and many of the components are still in beta. I can't wait to see the production agents and functions.
Breeze AI gets a two thumbs up from me.