How HubSpot Scaled AI Adoption
25 comments
·September 24, 2025aabajian
raincole
It's not that I don't believe you, but the "top-10 X" format is so easy to replicate that I highly suspect that it was pushed by one single company.
truetraveller
Proof / refs?
bschne
Not proof, but the term to look up is "inbound marketing".
HubSpot was very big on pushing companies to publish lots of content like blog posts and then having calls to action for people to submit their info in exchange for a whitepaper download or similar. Predictably if your main goal is to consistently publish blog posts and whitepapers to generate leads, and you don't have a strong culture of quality and good writing, it's going to lead to lots of slop (even before you could automate writing it with AI).
That being said, I'm not sure how much to blame HubSpot vs. this just generally having been a marketing approach/idea that was "in the air" while it sort of worked (for some definition of "worked").
z0r
The mention of "HubSpot" triggered a memory... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11369632 - wow, can't believe how long ago this was! Anyways, not surprised that a company where 1 + 1 = 3 would be big on AI.
dorkrawk
I think this became this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26030703-disrupted right?
Esophagus4
I remember this book well.
I also remember thinking “this guy kind of seems like a self-impressed jerk,” while reading it.
Not that HubSpot didn’t earn their portrayal as a hype-driven business run by clowns, but the author lost me when he described himself getting into a passive aggressive Facebook comments argument with coworkers as an indication of how stupid they were… when all I could think was “you’re all idiots, cut the FB drama and get back to work.”
It seemed like he was kind of looking for a fight the whole time. Like… if you’re shocked a marketing tech startup runs differently than a newsroom, that’s on you.
noodletheworld
If someone wants to pat themselves on the back with how great they think they are, thats cool, but I dont think its really worth talking about.
…unless they have something to show, specifically?
Demos? Code? Details?
Nothing?
zek
This was just our first post FWIW, and we definitely want to follow up with more concrete demos/details/etc here. I am working on another post specifically about how we leverage our internal RPC system to make adding AI tools super easy so expect more from us.
noodletheworld
You know that thing that you get when you ask a model to summarize and page or come up with a plan and you get:
- generic advice heading 1
- generic advice content
- generic advice heading 2
- provide better tools
You know how thats the kind of response that you copy paste in a slack message and your co worker is like “If I wanted an AI summary Id have done it myself. I was asking why…”
Yeah. …yeah.
Could you be less generic about the process you went through?
What tools do you use? How did you get past the critics?
Are you 90% “uses AI for 50% of coding” or 90% “codes via claude code”?
More AI coding, no extra incidents? How are you measuring that?
The post under this one on your blog is literally called:
> HubSpot Incident Report: August 7th 2025
Come onnnnn~
tempoponet
I was really looking for tangible, actionable advice since I'm facing slow adoption in my org. This post seems to hide behind the "secret sauce" that it claims made all of the difference.
dangus
The article isn’t providing a lot of convincing data that AI improved much of anything, only that it didn’t cause incidents.
I really don’t understand why AI usage is mandatory for roles. Nobody’s doing anything like that for other productivity tools even when they’re proven to be helpful. Hell, a lot of employers can’t be bothered to provide basics like nice keyboards and monitors that exceed 1080p.
The current era of tech has way too many corporate losers.
jmuguy
The monitors thing is funny to me because I love using dual monitors at work, and my coworker doesn't, and this forced AI adoption would be like if I forced him to use dual monitors.
CyberMacGyver
It’s the same trend of executives claiming RTO increases user productivity according to their data but could never show the data.
jf22
>Nobody’s doing anything like that for other productivity tools even when they’re proven to be helpful.
Isn't mandating IDE usage a perfectly reasonable and common thing?
It's a productivity tool after all.
gdulli
I'd never have worked at a place that mandated a specific IDE. Luckily it's something I never encountered, if it's ever done this is the first I'm hearing about it.
kylereeve
I've never seen an IDE "mandated", I've seen officially supported development setups where you're on your own if you do anything different. Is that not the standard?
jmuguy
But there's other reasons for that - makes support easier, can have same linting setup etc, its not done to increase productivity.
th0ma5
People that don't code think that something can do code 98% correct is surely better, without seeing the hard enforcement of a 2% error without manual intervention. I think all of the jokes about stupid computers and weird behavior of languages when you use them out of spec (famously labeled wat) gave people the wrong impressions about why those problems exist or how they can or cannot be fixed. You'd think they'd be able to transfer that cynicism quicker to models since they are also dumb computer things but apparently they say "hello" and that is tricking them out of that?
2OEH8eoCRo0
Is this the company that hacked and attempted to extort a journalist who wrote about them?
catigula
>measurable but modest productivity improvements
No mention of how this was measured.
bognition
> We pulled metrics on code review burden, cycle time, velocity comparisons before and after adoption, and production incident rates.
catigula
This is not how statistical analysis works. You need to know how the comparison was done to know if it's valid. You can't merely tell me the data points you've used as evidence of the success of your methods. With claims like these, a citation is truly needed.
I'm very skeptical on this because I know there is competing research suggesting AI use makes tasks take longer but feel less burdensome. Also, you'd need to account for regression rate over time. Also, you'd need to ensure your methodology is correct. It's not trivial and great claims require great responsibility.
bognition
Honestly its been pretty wild to see this company succeed over the years. They took on Salesforce and everyone predicted they were going to fail. Yet year over year they've continued to succeed.
Michael_Keller
[dead]
If you're looking for a company to blame for the endless Google results of "top-10 ways of doing X" or "the best new vacuum cleaners review", look no further than HubSpot. Their business model was based on helping small business gain traction by writing a a lot of verbose blog posts. So now when you're looking how to fix a leaking faucet, you first have to read about the history of faucets.