How Data, Adoption, and Agentic Tools Deliver Business Value — with HubSpot’s Angie O’Dowd

Let's say I'm a marketer and I've never used HubSpot before. In the past, you had to learn, what's the campaign's function? How does reporting work? You have to learn the tool. Now you don't really have to learn the UI. You can just talk to the UI. So you can just talk to Breeze's assistant and say, hey, can you build me a report with all the leads generated in the last 12 days that haven't had a touch from my sales team? And it'll just do it for you.

Announcer:

[00:00:24 - 00:00:34]

Welcome to THRIVE, a Paychex Business Podcast. Your blueprint for navigating everything from people to policies to profits. And now your host, Gene Marks.

Gene Marks:

[00:00:35 - 00:01:11]

Hey, everybody, it's Gene Marks. And welcome back to another episode of the Paychex THRIVE podcast. You know, my company, you guys all know that I don't work for Paychex. I have my own company and I host this podcast and we implement CRM solutions. And, you know, one of the CRM applications that we do implement and that I love is HubSpot. So I'm like super happy that we've got Angie O'Dowd with us today. Angie is the Global VP of Partner Ecosystem at HubSpot. She is talking to me from Boston. Angie, by the way, you know, big fan of HubSpot. Thank you so much for joining me.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:01:11 - 00:01:52]

Thank you, Gene. I'm excited to be here today. Yeah. So you went to Northeastern. We didn't finish this conversation because I'm in, you know, I'm in Philly and Drexel is in Philly. And, you know, because. Did you. You did the whole five year program and all that, I guess, right? I did, yeah. What was the road to become VP of Partner Ecosystem at HubSpot and what exactly is a VP of Partner Ecosystem? When I was a little girl, I said, when I grow up, I wanted. So many people. Did you dream of being a manager of Risk Assurance at the Hartford when you were a little kid? Yeah, my passion is channel operations. I was an early HubSpotter.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:01:52 - 00:02:25]

I've been in HubSpot almost 12 years now. And so a lot of my career journey has been there, but always in our partnership partner program. So for those who aren't familiar, HubSpot is an agentic customer platform. We had our roots many years ago as a marketing platform, marketing automation. We moved into CRM and, you know, in recent years, we've really evolved the platform to be an agentic customer platform across marketing, sales, customer success, and from the very early days we've had a partner program.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:02:25 - 00:02:51]

I started out in that partner program and I have been with it ever since. Got it. So HubSpot has, you know, historically and you just said, I mean you started out as a marketing platform so it takes a while to kind of rebrand a little bit away from that. I always, back in the day I would describe HubSpot as like a really strong marketing platform with, with a good CRM, you know, capabilities. But I think that's changed, hasn't it?

Gene Marks:

[00:02:51 - 00:03:01]

I mean like, I think the CRM and the marketing aspect are equally as strong now. Is that. Would you agree? Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean we've been in the CRM space for many years now.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:03:02 - 00:03:25]

So you know, we're one of the top players in CRM and we got our roots really in SMB and we're still very committed to the SMB space to the mid market. But over the years we've definitely matured the platform and now we're really an enterprise ready solution as well. So we serve both ends of the market. Right, Good. Okay, we're going to get into some of that soon and AI as well.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:03:26 - 00:04:04]

But you know, the partner ecosystem at HubSpot, who are your partners? Yeah, so our partners in the early days were marketing agencies and think of a partner as, you know, in the industry you'd call them channel partners or solution partners. These are people who resell your software and really they build services on top of your software so they help your customers get value out of the tools they're using. Many years ago as marketing agencies, it's evolved alongside us CRM implementers, you know, system integrators, those type of businesses. So is your job to grow that ecosystem or to retain that ecosystem or a combination of the two?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:04:04 - 00:04:24]

Yeah, it's all of the above. It's to basically create a program that's mutually beneficial. Where we like to say that we want HubSpot to be like the best place for agencies to grow their business. And I should say our partner program is not just people who implement our software. It also encompasses the technology partners that integrate with our software.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:04:25 - 00:04:49]

So we have over 2,000 technology partners as well, which are other SaaS companies that integrate directly into HubSpot. Some companies take a direct approach and some companies take a channel approach. You guys take a channel approach for the most part. Talk to me about the pros and cons of that approach. Yeah, I mean I'd say we're a blend, right?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:04:49 - 00:05:29]

We have a large in house sales team and we have a very large partner ecosystem as well. And our partners, they're there through the whole journey, they're there through the sales process. They bring business to us, we bring business to them, and then they onboard that business. From a servicing perspective, we're nearly all channel, so we do around 80% of our servicing of customers is through our solution partners. And so, you know, the downside of that is you don't have control over the process, which is why we have such a robust sort of partner program to ensure that our partners, you know, are always up to date on the latest and greatest, that they're accredited, that they're certified in what they're doing.

Gene Marks:

[00:05:30 - 00:06:02]

Angie, tell me, like, you know, you've been doing this for a number of years and you've obviously, you know, met lots and lots of, you know, you've dealt with a lot of partners who, who makes a good, in your case, you know what I mean? Like, what is the definition of a really good partner from your perspective? And if you turn the tables and say you're a HubSpot customer or client, what's a really good partner for, you know, for that client as well? What should you be looking for? Yeah, when we're looking for partners, a lot of people think we're looking for someone to say, I'm a HubSpot shop.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:06:02 - 00:06:27]

I do HubSpot inside and out. What we really want is people who have industry expertise or vertical expertise. You know, they've been helping clients for years in X, Y and Z industry and they're absolute subject matter experts in that vertical. You know, whether they're manufacturing pharmaceutical and then we want to bring that expertise into our ecosystem. We want them to learn how to use HubSpot, how HubSpot serves that vertical.

Gene Marks:

[00:06:28 - 00:06:55]

That's what makes a really good partner. I always thought like, when it comes to like vertical for Sierra, like again, I'm, as I told you, like earlier, like, I'm an accountant, right? So like in the, in the erp, in the accounting world, vertical is like super important. You know, you're a manufacturer, you want a manufacturing application. You know, CRM, like is, to me, it's always been like just about people and companies and relationships and engagement and all that kind of stuff.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:06:55 - 00:08:00]

Like it's, there's been less of a vertical need, I guess, because every business does business with people. You know what I mean? 100%, You don't need a verticalized CRM. You don't need to buy a CRM for manufacturing. And if you do, it's probably a small product that doesn't get invested in as rapidly as we're investing in HubSpot. Our platform is highly customizable and so that's why a partner who's really good at that industry and you could do this without a partner too is, is great for your business. You can take the tool and make it custom, you know, for what you need. Yeah, it's, you're, that's exactly right. I mean I, I, I feel that Most good mainstream CRMs and I don't want to not to throw shade on you know, some good vertical CRMs because there are out there particularly you know, I don't know if you like financial services has a few good vertical secrets and they're like really tied into like investment managers and you know, funds and things like that. But for the most part, yeah, I mean we've been able to take a HubSpot or other CRMs and customize them.

Gene Marks:

[00:08:00 - 00:08:27]

It's just kind of regardless of the business as well. So yeah, I haven't really seen it being that big of a thing. Talk to me about small business versus enterprises. I mean how do I know what type of partner I should be working with and what type of version of HubSpot I should be working with? Based on, Is it based on size or is it based on something else?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:08:27 - 00:09:38]

Yeah, I mean it's based on your business needs. If you don't have a lot of business complexity you can set up HubSpot for yourself, you know and, and it's, it's very easy to use. We have always been known for being easy to use. Right. A lot of people don't get value out of software they buy because they never end up using it. So adoption is key to results and that's a big differentiator for us. So for our really small customers who don't have a lot of legacy systems, don't have a lot of things to integrate into HubSpot it can be pretty self serve whereas our more enterprise customers like in the mid market you have a pretty big tech stack. You have an ERP system and you want that ERP system to integrate directly into HubSpot. We have a lot of integrations off the shelf that you can click to integrate but there's you know how many ERPs exist in the world? A shocking number. Yeah. And so you'd probably work with a partner who do a custom integration to your system. They'd make sure that you're mapping it properly, that you know that you have all the data coming across that you want the systems are working together well,. Yeah, it makes sense. It really does make sense.

Gene Marks:

[00:09:38 - 00:10:07]

You mentioned adoption as well. So the biggest issue that I have with our clients, and by the way, this is big and small, is getting their people to actually use the freaking thing, you know what I mean? And you know, like, historically it's like you have to use your accounting system because you want to get paid, you got to pay bills and you got financially, you got to file tax returns. You have to do that. CRMs is like a little bit less, you know, and then, and you know this as well, I mean, because again, you've been doing this for a bit.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:10:07 - 00:10:40]

I mean, there are some people that have been doing it the same way for a thousand years and you know, they're just, they're not going to change and they don't want to hear. But what advice do you have for both your customers and your partners to increase adoption so that people are actually using HubSpot, you know? Yeah, well, AI has really changed the game here because now the tool can do everything for you, really. You know, it used to be that you have to log in, you know, you have to progress your deal to the next step stage. You have to log your deal notes.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:10:41 - 00:11:13]

Now the system does all of that for you, right. If you set it up, if it's syncing with your emails, syncing with your calls with customers, it's going to give you an AI summary at the end of that call and give you all your action items. It's going to suggest what deal stage to move it to for you. So AI has really changed the game here in terms of taking all that unstructured data from your day to day and started doing all the admin work of the job for you as a, as a sales rep in particular. Yeah, I think that does.

Gene Marks:

[00:11:13 - 00:11:45]

And so let's pivot to that. So HubSpot did release. Now, I told you before we started speaking, like, I don't even know if I'm going to look at my notes, but I am looking at it because I want to give, I want to give a shout out. There's the State of Ecosystems report. Right. So tell us a little bit about that report and tell us what somebody reading it. What would we take away from that report? Yeah, that was a report by idc. And what they did was try to understand the ecosystem opportunity around HubSpot. And so how are partners in the market making money around HubSpot?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:11:45 - 00:12:27]

What are they offering? They did this a couple of years ago and they did it again this year. And what's really Interesting between the two things is in the past we used to talk about what is like the servicing opportunity around HubSpot and what's the technology opportunity. Build a services business or an integration business. And that line between those two things was not very clear when they went to do it this time. And what they did differently is they said, what is the AI first opportunity and the non AI opportunity. They're framing the entire opportunity in our ecosystem around what is AI enabled. Makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. When we talk about AI.

Gene Marks:

[00:12:28 - 00:12:57]

Is the idea here that applications and platforms like HubSpot are going to ultimately have just their own AI interface? Or is the idea that it will integrate with Claude and ChatGPT and Copilot and Gemini instead, or will it just be options for your users? Where do you see that going? Our posture on it is customer choice. We want our customer to be able to work wherever they want to work.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:12:57 - 00:13:44]

So we are already, we have an MCP with the big four LLMs that you mentioned, you know, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc. So if our customer wants to use Claude to run their day to day, they can already do that, right? They can interface conversationally. On the flip side, we have what we call Breeze Assistant. So if you log into HubSpot, you'll see a chat pane on the right that says Breeze. That's your conversational interface within HubSpot that basically serves the same function. And so you can now, you don't need, let's say I'm a marketer and I've never used HubSpot before. In the past, you had to learn, you know, what's the campaign's function, how does reporting work? You have to learn the tool. Now you don't really have to learn the UI, you can just talk to the UI.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:13:44 - 00:14:37]

So you can just talk to Breeze Assistant and say, hey, can you build me a report, you know, with all the leads generated in the last 12 days that haven't had a touch from my sales team and it'll just do it for you. I've seen that the integration, I do a lot of speaking on AI and I have, I actually show HubSpot. HubSpot has a really cool little video on your site that just shows the integration that it has with ChatGPT and, and you know, and the video is where, you know, you said like, hey, show us my most profitable customers in the past year and compare them to, you know, how we did the year before. And it's just, you know, you know, it's just because you're connected into HubSpot's data, so it's pulling, I mean, it's amazing stuff. So the reporting issue, which is always vexed so many CRM users getting data out of the system, I think, you know, I think generative AI is, is solving that right now and it's making it more of like a natural language interface, which is great.

Gene Marks:

[00:14:38 - 00:15:29]

Agentic is the next thing, you know. So I'm like, so you're a HubSpot user, so like, and I'm sure you've got the same thing. I, you know, I use a competitive product, we won't name the names. Okay? But on my CRM, to me, Mecca is if I can say to my CRM application, hey, make a list of everybody with blue eyes and green hair who's an Eagles fan and send them an email reminding them that, you know, I've got a ticket for an Eagles game next week, you know, that kind of thing. And it just does it, you know, it because right now I've got to go through 87 steps to make that happen. And it's just very time consuming. How far away do you think we are from that happening? You're going to say like, we're there right now, Right there. The thing is, we are there.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:15:30 - 00:15:51]

Are we? Yeah. Is it reliable? Well, that's, that's the question. And that's where partners come in, which is if you have everything set up right and you have, you know, your data is clean, right, everything's well organized, you have all the right integration set up, you are fully AI ready, you have given it context and instructions.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:15:52 - 00:16:24]

We are, we are there. We have, we have pre built agents. So these are agents that HubSpot has built and we just launched custom agents. So custom agents is the ability to design anything you want to do an agentic work flow. So we are there. The technology exists. But if you have, you know, most, what I find is most customers still really want a human in the loop, so to speak. Right? They want to be able to say that. Then they want to see what it generates, vet the list, vet the criteria, look at the email copy.

Gene Marks:

[00:16:24 - 00:17:22]

Did it use the right tone of voice and then press send themselves? Right? Yeah, I think it's, listen, I mean we're, we're still getting our arms around social media, for God's sake. I mean, which is relatively new. The world, it's only 10 years old, I mean, or 15 years old, you know. You know, the agentic AI is just, it's a big leap for a lot of people to take it really. Do you find a lot of pushback from clients? Listen, the average small business owner, you know, Angie, I don't think I need to tell you, is over the age of 55. You know, I mean, it's, there's still a bunch of like old people like me running businesses. It's changing. The demographics are changing, obviously, but we are still very much the majority of majorities and so kind of tough to change our old ways. And we're cynical and distrusting human beings, you know, so we're terrified that, yeah, HubSpot is gonna, you know, if we ask it to do this, it's just gonna not do it. Right. And then we've got problem. How do you address that?

Gene Marks:

[00:17:22 - 00:17:31]

What are your thoughts on that? A lot of thoughts on that. So one. You know, there is a typical adoption curve we're seeing right now. And this isn't a HubSpot thing.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:17:31 - 00:18:12]

This is the whole industry, right? And you've got your bleeding edge folks, your early adopters pushing things to the max. They're using an agent to run their entire life, their personal life, up and down, everything. And then you have people who are much more risk averse, who are skeptical, and you also have people in the middle who are just overwhelmed and don't know where to start. So our philosophy is really meet people where they're at. Right. We have. And custom agents is interesting because you can do that for internal processes, right? Like business process optimization. That's much lower risk than sending an email to prospects, for example, sending something out publicly to your customers.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:18:12 - 00:18:37]

And so what we find is, let's start with a use case that feels comfortable and let's have checks and balances in place. So you're not just letting the AI run wild, you know, you're letting it run a process, you're checking the output, making sure you're comfortable with it before you let it just run in the steady state. Okay, fair enough. I have a million more questions for you. So you're not, I'm not letting you go yet.

Gene Marks:

[00:18:38 - 00:19:21]

You keep mentioning agents and using agents to do, you know, a lot of these types of tasks. Okay. And I'm, I'm so sorry because now I'm going to say it again, that you've been doing this for a while. Like everybody's thinking like you're kind of an old lady and you're not, but you've got a lot of experience. So I'm here to hear your thoughts. We hear about agents. Before there was AI, it was workflows and HubSpot had tons of workflows. And yes, you could go into the workflow manager at HubSpot and you could create workflows that would do, you know, very much the same things that we've just been talking about. You know, how do you, how do you separate that? Like what is the difference between an agent and, and a workflow?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:19:21 - 00:19:44]

You know, typically the biggest difference is that because you can have an agentic workflow, like a workflow with steps that are agentic. But typically a workflow is deterministic. Right. You tell it if these, all these myriad of possibilities happen, do these things. Whereas with an agent it's non deterministic.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:19:45 - 00:20:14]

And so understands more and theoretically could take actions. You allow it to take actions that might be outside of the rigid structure that a workflow might have had. Is that a fair, is that a fair way to describe it? Yeah, but you can put, I think when people think about agents, it can be scary because you think, are they going to go out there and do something I told them not to do? You can put rails on your agents, you can put guardrails, permissions.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:20:14 - 00:20:39]

And that's the value prop of HubSpot is we have permissioning built in someone. You give your employees who use HubSpot permissions. Not everyone can see billing information, for example. Those permissions cascade to agents. Someone shouldn't be able to pull data from Claude that they don't have view access to in HubSpot, for example.

Gene Marks:

[00:20:39 - 00:21:02]

All right, that's great. That is a great answer. Rolling things back a little bit, you mentioned a few minutes ago about data and you know, and every one of my clients, CRM databases and my databases is a disaster. You know, I mean, they're all, you know, I mean they're all things are out of date or their fields that are open or you know, whatever misspellings. It's the whole thing.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:21:02 - 00:21:24]

And so people get very concerned about running automation on data that's lousy because then there was a problem. What are your thoughts on addressing that issue? Yeah, so definitely like the cliche garbage in, garbage out. If you give bad data to your AI, they're not going to be able to do a good job. Right.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:21:24 - 00:21:52]

On the flip side, AI is great with data, right? AI is great at analyzing data sets, removing duplicates, calling out discrepancies. We have a tool called Data Agent, we have a whole data product and a lot of others have tools like this as well. So although getting your data in order is key for AI, AI is also very helpful at helping you get your Data in order. I was hoping you would say that because you're right.

Gene Marks:

[00:21:52 - 00:22:38]

And it's funny, when all the Gen AI stuff was rolling out back in 2022 and 2023, people were nervous. I was nervous about, like, all right, well, if it's lousy date, it's whatever. But I've actually spoken to a few data data people that have said, mirrored what you've just said, like, and AI is getting better and better, you know, as it gets more and more trained, it start, starts recognizing that, like, no, no, no, this is Bloomington, Illinois, not Bloomington, Indiana. You know that it starts understanding and fixing things. So I do, I just, I guess I want to just be clear for people watching or listening that although data is an issue and the integrity of the data is an issue, AI is finding ways and figuring out to solve that problem so that we don't have to freak out about it.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:22:39 - 00:23:12]

And what people benefit from, our customers benefit from, is, let's say you're a new HubSpot customer, you're using other systems, maybe you're using spreadsheets for a lot of your life. Once you bring that data in, you want to bring in a good foundation, you want to bring in a message, clean it up on its way in, bring it in. But then after that point, the system itself is capturing your data, right? It is capturing unstructured data, your emails, your phone transcripts, all of those things. And it is porting that unstructured data into structured data, into fields.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:23:12 - 00:23:41]

And so now you have good data hygiene. Yeah, that's great. And also, and I'm not sure this is out of the box with HubSpot, but I know there are third party applications that even if it's bringing data in, it can go to the outside, to external sources and validate data as well. And that's just sort of happening behind the scenes automatically, which is also hugely helpful. So, yeah, I actually think that AI is solving that problem really well.

Gene Marks:

[00:23:41 - 00:23:58]

Okay, next question is privacy. I can't tell you how many times you're smiling because you know where I'm going here. Oh, now I'm going to put it in HubSpot. And you know, my competitor is going to see my pricing, you know what I mean? Or, or you know, or my customers that I'm talking to, you know.

Gene Marks:

[00:23:58 - 00:24:07]

Yeah. And my response always is like, number one, nobody really cares about your pricing. Get over yourself. Number two is like your competitors, not that smart. You know what I mean?

Gene Marks:

[00:24:07 - 00:24:34]

You know, they're going to thirdly, like, tell me if you think I'm wrong. Like, you know, like HubSpot operates, it's a cloud based application. You know, you've been in the cloud for over a decade as most application haven't seen this issue come up yet. I mean, like, I don't, you know what I mean? Like, so anyway, how do you, how do you just with clients, when customers come to you and say we're concerned about privacy, what's your response to that?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:24:35 - 00:24:57]

Yeah, I mean you don't have to be concerned about privacy. And HubSpot. Right. Your, your data is your own. We don't share your data with anyone. And so anything, you know, financial institutions, health care institutions where we have HIPAA compliant functionality. So it's a secure platform. So I wouldn't worry about that. Right. Yeah, it's fair enough.

Gene Marks:

[00:24:57 - 00:25:50]

You know, and I again, I just think the risk, there's always a risk that's out there, but it's, to me, I feel like it's really, it's really low. So Angie, you know, what do you think is the tipping point for serious AI adoption in CRM? You know, we were talking about, you know, old people using the platform, but I know what I think the tipping point is going to be. But before I even share that with you, I'm curious to hear like, when will it just be like, and by the way, let me also preface this. When I remember when the, when the cloud was rolling out and all my clients are like, there's no way I'm putting my accounting data on the cloud or my payroll information or my, and now everybody just is because it's, that's. The way it is. Yeah. What, what do you, when do you think a similar, you know, when will that happen? You know, when it comes to AI and relying on it. Yeah.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:25:50 - 00:27:18]

I mean it's hard to have a crystal ball because the biggest, you know, what you hear people talking about when they talk about AI and the transformation we're going through is how rapid it is compared to parallels in the past and that this is just happening at such an accelerated rate. So it really is human adoption and human acceptance of the new ways of working that is slowing down the evolution. It's not the technology itself. I mean, the technology is really already there. I think for someone who's technical, the bar on what you can do, the ceiling is, is limitless now. Right. And I think in many cases we have really raised floor for non technical folks as well. But there is an in between stage we're in right now where non technical folks can do a Lot of things out of the box. That's much easier with AI. And I'm not talking about our platform, I'm talking about industry as a whole. Technical folks can do anything, really. Like, the efficiency gains are incredible, but your, your average person doesn't know how to use Claude codecs. Right. And so there is a middle, a middle ground, which cowork, you could argue, is starting to serve that. But I think, you know, you still need pretty good technical skill sets to get the full benefit of most AI in the market.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:27:19 - 00:27:34]

I don't know what the tipping point is. Well, I, what is your. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you, by the way, I'm going to get back to the Claude Codex thing in just a minute and then we'll wrap things up. But tipping point is when you guys at HubSpot don't give me a choice when it comes to the interface. That's the tipping point.

Gene Marks:

[00:27:35 - 00:28:26]

The tipping point is, you know, you open up HubSpot and then you've got the contact screen, you've got your account screen, you've got your account or whatever. No, no, no. The only screen is like a Claude or a ChatGPT prompt and you're talking to it just like, I've got a marketing expert here in front of me. I'm like, hey, okay, yeah, I need to see my list of activities for today. Okay, I need to send an email to this guy. And you're either typing or talking and you have no choice. It's just. And then that's, that's how Microsoft and Google forces people into. They just say, listen, you're going to, you know, you can buy any car, you can have any color you want, as long as it's black. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that will be the typical tipping point. And then people just adapt and get used to that. And then suddenly it's just, it's, it's AI all over the place. So you take that back to your product development tool. We've certainly had that debate, right?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:28:26 - 00:28:41]

But I think our point of view is choice. You don't have to abandon a traditional UI that people are comfortable with. Right. When we make a UI change, we're really thoughtful about it, even when we know the UI changes better. People are used to their patterns.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:28:41 - 00:29:13]

If they log in and the old UI isn't there, they lose some productivity that day trying to find the new spot. So we're conscious of not disrupting, you know, we have 300,000 customers that I know it's such an easy problem to solve. You just settle with price. I mean, like, hey, you know, you want the old UI or you want. You're comfortable with this, then you'll pay X. But if you'd like the AI interface, which, by the way, is more powerful and, you know, better, for you, it's X dollars less. Yeah. Or give people both. Right.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:29:13 - 00:29:55]

So Breeze Assistant is that interface. I just got a demo from our head of product for Breeze this week, and I was like, whoa, it is just getting cooler every day. And I use it myself. And I always test, can it do this now, can it do that now? And so that's, you know, that is definitely the strategy. Right. Make it super easy. Everyone wants to interact in a conversational way, but users, often, they want to do something conversationally and then, you know, build me this report, then they want to jump to that report. They. They still use decks internally. They want to screenshot it, put it in a deck for their CEO. No, people. People want to interchange between the two, and I think that's okay. Okay. It's okay for now, but we'll see.

Gene Marks:

[00:29:55 - 00:30:53]

We'll see. All right, final question. I'll let you go. You've been fantastic, you know, and I have to ask you, you had mentioned it about using Codex or using Claude code or, you know, and obviously a few months ago, there was the whole thing with vibe coding, cloud code came out and a lot of, you know, a lot of companies, software companies, you know, were impacted by. I am of the feeling. I know my clients, okay, and you said this, none of my clients are going to do this. You know, I mean, they are literally mowing lawns and putting up drywall and making pizzas. They're not going to be. I mean, okay, there's going to be some percentage of people that are DIYers and they're going to love. But, like. Yeah, it's just that. And secondly, if I'm going to have a CRM system in my business, I'm not going to some kid from college write it for me that, like, you know, like, I need a established software company that's got governance and policies and. Right. So anyway, that's my point. I mean, how do you feel about that?

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:30:53 - 00:31:37]

The whole Vibe. Yeah, Vibe coding. I mean, vibe coding is fantastic and it. But it has a time and a place, and you don't Vibe code a system like your CRM. You don't Vibe code your erp. You don't Vibe code something that touches money. Right. You want to use a trusted platform. We have many engineers constantly working on our platform. We have a security team. Let us take care of what we're best at while you do what you're best at, which probably isn't building a CRM. Right. We have years of experience in it. And, you know, some of the vibe coding platforms, they're our customer. They use our CRM. Right. You know, and we love vibe coding. We vibe code at HubSpot, just not our core software. Right, I understand. I understand.

Gene Marks:

[00:31:37 - 00:32:05]

Yeah. It's a great response. Hey, Angie, you've been awesome. Thank you very, very much. And HubSpot is also. It's just a great platform. And I'm really glad we had you on. I don't know, the last time I talked to somebody from the CRM world on this podcast and I, you know, some. So many small and midsize businesses use CRMs. I mean, it's, it's a huge number that, you know, as I'm talking to you, I'm like, I should be talking to some of your competitors too, to get their thoughts on where the industry is.

Angie O'Dowd and Gene Marks:

[00:32:05 - 00:32:24]

But you, you really said it on. I really appreciate it. So thank you very much. Well, this has been fun. Thanks so much for having me, Gene. Yeah, it has been fun, everybody. I have been speaking with Angie O'Dowd. She's a global VP of Partner Ecosystem at HubSpot. My name is Gene Marks. You've been watching or listening to the Paychex THRIVE podcast.

Gene Marks:

[00:32:24 - 00:32:48]

If you'd like, please subscribe to our podcast on YouTube. We are approaching a million views on YouTube as well as sign up on your favorite podcast platform. And if you need any help or advice or tips in running your business, by all means go to paychex.com/thrive and sign up for our newsletter. You will then get that delivered to you frequently with help for running your business. Again, thank you so much for for joining us.

Angie O'Dowd:

[00:32:48 - 00:32:52]

We will see you again next time on the Paychex Thrive podcast. Take care.

Gene Marks:

[00:32:52 - 00:33:26]

Do you have a topic or a guest that you would like to hear on Thrive? Please let us know. Visit payex.me/Thrivetopics and send us your ideas or matters of interest. Also, if your business is looking to Simplify your hr, payroll, benefits or insurance services, see how Paychex can help. Visit the resource hub paychex.com/worx That's W-O-R-X. Paychex can help manage those complexities while you focus on all the ways you want your business to thrive. I'm your host, Gene Marks, and thanks for joining us. Till next time, take care.

Announcer:

[00:33:26 - 00:33:31]

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