See also: “What Is Growth Context, HubSpot’s New Talking Point, Explained Without Jargon,” by Rafael Lima. That article explains the concept. This one is my take on how it changes the way HubSpot users operate.
TL;DR
In its September 16, 2026, keynote, HubSpot introduced Growth Context as its theme of the year and began describing itself as an Agentic Customer Platform, organized into three layers: context, action, and coordination. My take is that inbound marketing grew out of the idea that “content is king,” and the era of agents revolves around another: “context is king.” An AI agent delivers results based on the context it can glean about your business. The work of marketing, sales, and RevOps now includes organizing this context, both in the CRM and on the website.
Long live the new king
I’ve been in Boston since Monday, two days before the event. This year, the conference changed its name: after fifteen years as INBOUND, it's now known as UNBOUND. The change is just one letter off, but today’s keynote showed that the shift goes far beyond the name.
HubSpot popularized inbound marketing, and inbound grew out of an old saying. “Content is King” is the title of a 1996 essay by Bill Gates, and the event’s own blog credits him with the phrase. The logic was simple. You publish useful content; the buyer searches, finds you, and arrives ready to talk.
This model assumed a human reader. Today, a growing portion of the reading is done by machines: the agent who qualifies the lead, the assistant who summarizes the account history, ChatGPT that answers the buyer’s question before they even visit your website.
I’m leaving these two days with one phrase in mind: context is king. HubSpot calls this same idea “Growth Context,” and Duncan Lennox, the company’s CPTO, had already summarized the reasoning back in April at Spring Spotlight: “If data is what happened, context is why.” Data records what happened. Context explains why.
What HubSpot Announced About Context at UNBOUND 2026
This year’s official theme is Growth Context. In practice, context is everything an agent needs to know before taking action: who the ideal customer is, what sales methodology the company uses, what has already happened in each deal, and what the customer said during the last call.
To put this front and center, HubSpot has redesigned how it presents its platform. It’s now called the Agentic Customer Platform and is organized into three layers:
| Layer | What Goes In | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Context | Smart CRM and Context Home | Store and curate what the company knows about customers, the market, and processes |
| Action | Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service Hubs, agents, and Breeze Assistant | Carry out the work: campaigns, prospecting, negotiations, customer service |
| Coordination | Agent Hub, integrations, permissions, and governance | Monitor what each agent does, with what data, and at what cost |
The order of the layers speaks volumes. The context layer comes first because the other two depend on it. A well-configured prospecting agent working with an outdated ICP will only make mistakes faster.
The context layer: Smart CRM and Context Home
Of today’s announcements, these are the two I’d look at first.
Smart CRM now automatically captures and syncs what happens during calls, emails, and meetings. Anyone who’s implemented a CRM knows where this is a pain point. Recording this information depends on the salesperson remembering to fill it out, and the information that matters most (the objection, the competitor mentioned, the real reason for the delay) stays in their head. With automatic capture, this history reaches the CRM without relying on each person’s discipline.
Context Home is the space where the company organizes the context that agents will use: business summary, ICP, sales methodology, and qualification stages. It also assigns a score to the completeness of this data and highlights the gaps that limit the AI’s performance.
To me, this score is the most important announcement of the day, because it transforms an abstract conversation into something measurable. Until now, “our data is poor” was just an impression. Now there’s a number to track—and a place to make corrections.
In his post, Rafael draws attention to an issue I see on the portals we audit: the context is outdated, superficial, or unrevised. An ICP written three years ago, a sales methodology that no one follows, a company description that still refers to the old product. The agent reads all of this as fact.
The operational layer: Breeze Assistant and agents
HubSpot has also retired the Breeze brand as the umbrella term for AI. Agents now have role-based names (Customer Agent, Prospecting Agent, Content Agent), and only Breeze Assistant has kept the branding. The message behind the change is that AI permeates the entire product.
Breeze Assistant has become HubSpot’s work interface. You describe the objective, and it triggers agents to put together a proposal, report, or campaign plan using data from the CRM. It respects each user’s permissions, cites the sources it used, and connects to external tools such as Asana, Notion, Amplitude, and Linear.
On the sales front, the announcements include:
- Prospecting Agent, which monitors more than 40 buying signals and crafts a personalized outreach.
- Mobile Notetaker, which records in-person and online conversations via cell phone.
- Deal Progression, which extracts updates from transcripts, prepares follow-up messages, and maintains a plan for each deal.
- Revenue Hub, which generates quotes based on deal data. HubSpot cited Workleap, which now takes less than 15 minutes from quote to signature.
Notice what they all have in common. Each of these agents reviews the CRM before taking action. Deal Progression can only maintain a solid deal plan if the transcript, history, and deal stages make sense. Duncan Lennox summed up the customer’s expectation this way: “They don’t want to think about which AI tools to use; they just want outcomes.” The outcome the customer wants depends on the context they provide.
The Coordination Layer: Agent Hub and Agent Builder
With multiple agents working at the same time, someone needs to decide what each one can do. Agent Hub brings together all agents assigned to an account in a single dashboard, complete with permissions and metrics such as response rate, win rate, and resolution time.
Agent Builder, in public beta since July 23, now supports external triggers (Slack messages, Google Sheets updates, webhooks, recurring schedules) and one-click migration of legacy workflows to agent-based workflows. The general availability date has not yet been announced.
Here, Rafael’s recommendation is worth its weight in gold for anyone with a large portal. Before converting, choose the workflows that run most frequently and that make poor decisions due to rigid ownership, record the current metrics, test without using credits, and run both versions in parallel before shutting down the old one. Agent-based workflows consume credits with each execution, so migrating everything at once is expensive and difficult to audit.
Context also extends beyond the CRM: AEO and AI-powered search
One announcement directly relates to our work in AEO. Marketing Studio highlights, among other things, where the brand has low visibility in search engines. HubSpot also announced the first CRM integration with ChatGPT Ads and a connection to Microsoft Advertising, which reaches Bing, Copilot, MSN, and Outlook.
This broadens the picture. The context that determines the outcome lies in the CRM, which feeds your agents, and on your website, which feeds other companies’ agents. When a buyer asks ChatGPT who can solve their problem, the model responds with the context it found published online. Loose, unstructured content becomes poor context.
We tested this on EPIC’s own website. In our internal AEO audit, the homepage scored 54.3 out of 100 on September 13, before the launch of the new website. After the deployments, it rose to 74.9 on the same day and reached 81.4 on September 15. The gains came from the context that a machine can extract from the page: structured data about the organization, headings in the correct hierarchy, and accessible markup. The same principle applies to CRM, where properties with clear meaning yield better results than free-form fields.
What to Do with Your Company’s Context Moving Forward
None of these tips alone can fix a poorly managed context. If I were to plan the upcoming week for a team using HubSpot, I’d start here:
- Read your context as an agent would. Open the company summary, the ICP, and the sales methodology listed on the portal. If a new employee read only that, would they understand the business?
- Assign an owner to the context. Someone from RevOps needs to be responsible for reviewing the Context Home at set intervals. Context without an owner becomes outdated.
- Clean up the fields that agents will read. Duplicate fields, dropdown menus that no one uses, and deal stages that don’t reflect the actual process confuse agents just as much as they confuse managers.
- Measure before onboarding any agent. Response time, sales cycle, win rate, hours of manual work. Without a baseline, you won’t know if the agent helped.
- Treat the website as context as well. Run an AEO audit on the pages that matter most and fix the structure before producing more content.
What still needs proof
It’s worth separating the announcement from the results. HubSpot released strong numbers: early adopters of Marketing Studio created 81% more campaigns, and Breeze Assistant users generated 2.2 times more leads. This data comes from HubSpot itself, with no methodology published so far. Agent Builder is still in beta, and the cost in credits for an operation with many agents is still difficult to predict.
None of this changes the direction. HubSpot has decided that its customers’ competitive advantage will lie in context, and it has built the platform accordingly. Those who start organizing their own context now will be ready for the general availability of these features, with agents already set up to perform well.
Content remains important. It’s just lost its crown.
Frequently Asked Questions About Context and UNBOUND 2026
Growth Context is HubSpot’s theme for 2026. The term encompasses everything an AI agent needs to know about the business before taking action, such as ICP, sales methodology, interaction history, and customer intent. HubSpot has started calling the platform the Agentic Customer Platform, with context as the first of three layers. The full explanation can be found in Rafael Lima’s article.
Context Home is the area within HubSpot where the company organizes the context used by agents, such as business summaries, ICP, and sales methodology. It rates the completeness of this data and highlights gaps that limit the AI. It was unveiled as a new feature at UNBOUND 2026, within the Agent Hub.
The context layer brings together Smart CRM and Context Home. The action layer brings together the Marketing, Sales, and Support hubs, agents, and Breeze Assistant. The coordination layer brings together the Agent Hub, integrations, permissions, and governance. Order matters: action and coordination depend on context.
HubSpot retired Breeze as its AI umbrella brand at UNBOUND 2026. Agents now have role-based names, such as Customer Agent and Content Agent, and only Breeze Assistant has retained its name. Current contracts, pricing, and features remain the same; what’s changing is the message that AI is woven throughout the entire product.
Response engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity respond based on the context they can extract from published pages. A website with structured data, a clear hierarchy, and direct answers is more likely to be cited. In EPIC’s internal audit, the homepage’s AEO score rose from 54.3 to 81.4 between September 13 and 15, 2026, following structural adjustments.
Start with the Context Home: read the company summary, the ICP, and the sales methodology as a new employee would, and update any outdated information. Then, assign ownership for the review, clean up the properties that agents read, and note the current metrics before onboarding any agents. The website goes on the same list.
The workflow changes. Before activating Marketing Studio, Deal Progression, or any agent, the portal needs its context revised, because agents take what’s recorded as fact. Based on EPIC’s experience with Brazilian portals, most come with outdated ICPs and empty methodologies. Getting this in order now is what will enable agents to perform at their best once they exit beta.
