AiThority Interview with Andy Pitre, Executive Vice President of Product at HubSpot

Hi, Andy. Welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey in the industry and how you arrived at HubSpot.

I’ve been at HubSpot for over 13 years — and so much about marketing has changed since then. I started as an Inbound Marketing Consultant before becoming a Product Manager, where I’ve grown over the past decade into HubSpot’s EVP, Product. In that time, I’ve worked on almost every part of the HubSpot product and was part of the original team that built HubSpot CRM. I’ve also played instrumental roles in launching many of our core products including Sales Hub, Service Hub and Operations Hub. Prior to HubSpot, I started two small businesses which have had a tremendous impact on my approach to product strategy. In my view, it’s critically important to always be customer-first; to think big and iterate small; and to ship software that adds value and solves problems for its users.

The last two years have accelerated digital transformation for businesses of all sizes and stature. What are the most challenging issues facing product innovation and development today?

At INBOUND 2022, our CEO Yamini Rangan spoke about how businesses today are suffering from a crisis of disconnection. Because companies needed to scale quickly over the past few years, many cobbled together various point solutions to support that growth, but now, they’re seeing the impact of having a complex, disjointed tech stack. In fact, one in four businesses today say disconnected data and systems are among their chief concerns as they grow. Now, as we look to the future of product development we have an incredible challenge and opportunity ahead: to build more connected solutions that harness the power of data to drive powerful business insights.

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How do you tackle these challenges at HubSpot?

At HubSpot, one way we’re tackling this is by helping customers grow better through connected applications. Our Hubs — Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, and Operations — are designed to connect customers’ entire front-office. They give go-to-market teams a single, unified view of the customer journey.

Your new AI-powered tools are creating a lot of buzz in the industry. Could you please tell us how you conceived the idea of developing these products?

We’ve been building, launching and learning with AI for years. This week’s launches of ChatSpot and content assistant were conceived and built based on our earlier investments into conversation intelligence, data quality tooling, data enrichment, predictive AI, content optimization and beyond. We’re lucky to have had these things in-market for a few years now and we’re always listening to what is most impactful for our customers. Our focus on AI will solve all kinds of efficiency issues for end-users — saving time and boosting productivity whether you’re in sales, marketing or customer success.

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How easy is it to build a product with a great user experience using generative AI? What kind of data engine did you leverage to build ChatSpot.ai and Content Assistant?

Both products are powered by industry-leading artificial intelligence systems from OpenAI. Advances in AI have the potential to transform customer experience, but it’s not going to be easy or automatic. We have spent a lot of time thinking about what applications of AI will help our users do their jobs easier and better. I suspect we will see many applications of AI that seem “cool,” but don’t actually make current ways of doing things easier. That’s why at HubSpot, and across the software industry, we need to stay grounded in solving real customer problems.

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What’s next at HubSpot? Where would CRM industry head with AI and Web3 models?

• We think there’s a ton of interesting use cases for content generation that makes sense for marketers, sales folks and services professionals.
• In terms of what’s next, we see some interesting opportunities to develop better ways of getting access to data and reports as well as improve how people use and interact with software – and, ultimately, that’s what we’re excited about learning with ChatSpot.

Thank you, Andy ! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.