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- [00:00]
Yamini Rangan
Now I love our customers, I talk to our customers all the time. But someone taking probably five minutes to kind of like write it was not AI written because he was so excited and had like a humanness to it and he was like, Yamini, I just had this magical moment. I have been thinking about agents and I've been talking about, you know, all of this to people, with people and I last week I just experimented with your customer agent and it took me like 30 minutes to give like knowledge base and all of the support tickets and now it's solving, it's actually solving. Put it on our channel, it's solving. And it was magical. He was genuinely excited.
- [00:39]
Sarah McDevitt
Today's guest is Yaminy Rangan, CEO of HubSpot. She has led our company through extraordinary transformation and record breaking growth. Since 2021, Yamini has more than doubled HubSpot's customer base to over 258 billion, adding 10,000 new customers in just one quarter this year. With a background in engineering and sales and executive experience at Dropbox, Workday and SAP, Yamity brings a rare blend of technical depth and go to market expertise to her leadership. She's now steering HubSpot into the AI era, evolving our product into a leading AI powered customer platform for scaling companies and shaping an AI first culture with HubSpot while staying grounded in something remarkably human Trust. I'm Sarah McDevitt. This is owning the outcome. Yamini, welcome to the show.
- [01:41]
Yamini Rangan
I am so excited that I get to talk to you, Sarah. You're one of my all time favorite people at HubSpot and we're talking about partners. So exciting day for me.
- [01:52]
Sarah McDevitt
Thank you for being here. Right back at you. So Yamini, I think it's fair to say that you are one of the most vocal tech CEOs championing the fusion of human expertise in AI as you've been driving HubSpot strategy in AI. What's behind this absolute conviction that you have that humans and AI work better together?
- [02:14]
Yamini Rangan
Sarah, I think you're asking a very, very specific question which, which is what gives you conviction that AI is going to help and augment humans and not replace humans. So a few things that give me that conviction. First is that when I joined the tech industry I was like early in the tech industry when the on premise to cloud transition was happening. I just graduated as an engineer. I started working in 1996 and so I was starting to see the shift from on premise. 1999 is when Salesforce got started and then we went into the early part of the next decade thinking about what software as a service would do. And I saw firsthand the level of fear, uncertainty about jobs, about roles that came about in that cycle. So while all of this feels new, this is not new for technology shifts. This is not new for humanity. And back in that time, it was, what happens to my IT job? Are all CIOs going to disappear? Are all IT jobs going to disappear? Is software just going to be turned on like electricity and you, like, plug it and it happens? We had all of those questions, Sarah, and now we know with perfect hindsight that it actually created more opportunities, it created the ability to drive more productivity, it created more space for human ingenuity. And so I think we've seen these patterns. And then if you study history, like, it's not just in this cloud transition, if you go to the printing press, you go to the industrialization, every one of these cycles, it feels like there is a moment of fear, doubt, and uncertainty, and then we figure out our role and then we benefit overall as humanity. And so I think, like, having seen it, I feel that we are going through a very similar pattern right now.
- [04:26]
Sarah McDevitt
Yeah, I think me and you probably definitely agree, like a lot of people, that AI is definitely going to be a force multiplier for teams rather than a replacement in what you're seeing. Can you give me an example where you've seen, like, a brilliant illustration of that distinction?
- [04:41]
Yamini Rangan
So let's take the word force multiplier. There is a very specific meaning to it, which is whatever you are doing, it can help you do better, and it can help you do more. That's how I interpret some of these, like, bigfooting words that get thrown around. I'm like, what is that word actually mean? It means that it can help you do better, it can help you do more of technology has done it, and AI is absolutely doing it. So take the example of content marketing. This was literally one of our first use cases back in 2023. The first thing that we honed on is if AI can help create content, then what happens to the kind of content that we create and the kind of content we distribute? And hence, Content Assistant was literally the first feature that we launch in March 2023. What we have observed since then is that it is not about just more volume of content. It is about getting content to stick, getting conversion. And that requires a level of being personal, not even personalization being personal. I know Sarah, I know her likes, I know her dislikes, and I'm able to map her context of what she's trying to do and get content to her that makes it better. And we've been able to do that with AI and if you look at our best customers and you observe the patterns of the best customers. I was actually talking to one of our customers last week and he said he has a team of two marketeers and they are now able to, with two people deliver content on five channels which they were never able to do before. And he was like, this is a game changer for me because we, I'm manager, I have like one person working on the team and we were only focused on text and email. Now I just between the two of us, we are able to have a full on YouTube channel, a full on social media strategy, a full on video, short form video. And so that is force multiplier. Now I can give the same example in terms of support and service where, you know, tier one tickets are handled and you're able to actually get into more proactive levels of service. I can give an example in sales where you can get all of the account research done and help you have better conversations with humans on the other end. And so to me it is helping do your job better and higher quality with higher conversions. And that is why it'll continue to be like a force multiplier.
- [07:33]
Sarah McDevitt
What do you think? You talked Teresa. You know, that's a great example. You speak to customers all the time. You know what's been one of the surprising outcomes where you've seen a human smile because they're really excited and delighted by what HubSpot is doing with AI to make their lives easier.
- [07:49]
Yamini Rangan
If you step back and think about HubSpot, what we like to do is make things easy and fast. Those are the two things that we have honed on, we have been consistently working on. And when we see something like AI, it's like, oh, it can actually make things easier and faster. I'll tell you this story of our customer, Brad Poole. He is the chief revenue officer at Reseller Ratings and on a Saturday morning about like, you know, a month ago, he wrote me a very long email. Now, I love our customers. I talk to our customers all the time. But someone taking probably five minutes to kind of like write it was not AI written because he was so excited and had like a humanness to it. And he was like, yamini, I just had this magical moment. I have been like thinking about agents and I've been talking about, you know, all of this to people, with people. And I last week I just experimented with your customer agent and it took me like 30 minutes to give like, knowledge base and all of the support tickets. And now it's solving. It's actually solving. I put it, I put it on our channel and solving and it was magical. He was genuinely excited. He just had a breakthrough and he couldn't wait to communicate that he was genuinely excited about this potential of AI. And then he's, you know, since then I've had multiple conversations with, with him. He's using customer agent to resolve support tickets. He's using prospecting agent. And I asked him, brad, what makes you so excited about this? He said, look, we're a small company, we've always been a small company. We can now do big things. I don't have to worry about adding one more person because our support queue is too long or contracting one more person because I need to increase the support levels. I can do more with what I have. And that is genuinely exciting in conversations. This is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a couple of things. One is AI going from novel to necessary or neat to necessary. You know, last couple of years we've all had these magical moments you use for the first time, like, it's great and then you never go back. You know, that's not what we care about. We genuinely care about the things that people use becoming necessary in their everyday workflow. That's like number one. I think the second thing is the magical moments. You know, the content marketeer who only had one channel and is now able to have content distributed in five channels, the support leader who had two people could never bring their CSAT up, but is now able to bring the customer experience to be much higher. These are magical things that were very, very constrained, especially for scaling companies. And when you hear of these magical moments, then you're like, okay, now we can identify it and we can replicate it for others and then scale it. And that's what gets me genuinely excited.
- [11:02]
Sarah McDevitt
That's what it's all about. Yamini. That's what the pride of working for HubSpot is, is creating those magical moments for customers. So the enthusiasm lives through you, through those conversations with customers. It's wonderful. Don't tell anyone, but I'm obviously a bit biased when it comes to partners and teeny bit, teeny bit. And I really like every day want to help our partners make sure that they understand the potential and the future as part of HubSpot. And something I'm thinking about really deeply is a term that, that I call relational intelligence. And how our partners have it and what I see that is, you know, AI has all of these intelligence that are around, like math and all of the things around efficiency and scale, whereas relational intelligence is that kind of cluster of human emotions together in a business context. So we've been able to read the room, it's been able to bridge the gap with trust, for example, for some humans when it comes to AI. And that's where I think our partners are really going to succeed. When you think about our partners and the way HubSpot is going in terms of evolving its product, would you have a similar point of view that humans just not just partners, but even HubSpot, humans bring that element of being able to read the room and the context and emotional intelligence and all these things.
- [12:23]
Yamini Rangan
I love the term relational intelligence. I do think that you're hitting on something that is very, very important, because the moment that we are all in is one where we're trying to figure out where do we fit in. And, you know, is my job going to exist the way it is and how is it going to look like three years from now? What do I ask my kids to study? You know, so we're trying to figure out where humans contribute and add value and where technology contributes and add value, adds value. And I think it's very. I call it like a profoundly human moment because it is a moment where we're thinking about our relationship to a technology and the level of value that we add to technology. And there is absolutely a role. I believe this. You know, I've seen it and all of the early examples, and I don't quite yet see a world where, you know, we're just like sitting and gardening and everything is taken care of by agents. It's just not there. So then the question becomes, where do we add value and where does AI add value? So if you think about where the complementary set is, AI can do manual tasks, mundane tasks, repetitive tasks, you know, a lot of things that even, even creating content and being able to like, get the content out there, you can do a lot of those things. And then what does that mean in terms of humans ability to contribute? We can point and prompt AI to do the right kinds of things. We can apply what AI is providing and make it personal to the specific person that we are targeting, whether it's a prospect or customer. We can then activate conversations where it feels much more contextual, much more relational. You can actually do that. And then we can evolve it. We can actually look at the output of it, and we can evolve it. And so if you think about it in a repetitive task, tasks that can be learned, tasks that, that can be determined and mundane tasks you have, like AI do it, that opens us for creative, strategic and tasteful contextualization. And that is, you know, that's actually great because now I think about my role, you know, especially when I'm interacting with ChatGPT and like some of these is like, how can I ask the right prompt and how can I express what I'm trying to create in the most clearest and compelling manner possible? If I can express what I want and my expression is really, really clear, then the output from AI is much better. And so that's broadly how I think about this. Now, if you apply to hubspotters, if you apply to partners, look, we are on a journey, of course it's very human to have fear and uncertainty what this role is, but there's also curiosity and growth mindset around what this can genuinely help us do. And if you are a partner. The wonderful thing about our partner ecosystem, and I'm biased, I do love our ecosystem, is that we've really done this transformation before. We were, you know, start, we started as like marketing agencies and then we've kind of really transformed into CRM implementation and people thought that was not possible. The number of times I've, I've gotten questions of like, how are you going to get your partners to go from agencies to, you know, CRM implementers to upmarket implementers, how are you going to do that? We did it, the ecosystem did it. Like we've, we've really come along that journey together. Now it's a, how are we going to get the most, you know, highest value use of partners within the ecosystem? It's not by doing the mundane migration tasks or the mundane, you know, repetitive tasks like going and like documenting everything while we can actually figure things out pretty quickly. If you can record a certain set of actions and document, but then how do you implement it? Who is your champion? What are they trying to accomplish? How do we know the highest cost that they're working towards and how do we actually make that happen? That is the role. And so, you know, just be open, be curious, ask a lot of questions and figure out where you can bring, you know, your taste and your strategic thinking and your creativity and that's how we go through this transition.
- [17:08]
Sarah McDevitt
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, what I say, Amini, is AI gives you intelligence and scale, AURI gives you influence and together you can scale with soul. And that's, and that's the way I think we need to look at it. You talk to obviously lots of leaders every day, both customers. What kind of mindset do you think is the most essential thing these leaders can focus on when it comes to implementing this, you know, kind of human and AI approach?
- [17:38]
Yamini Rangan
Yeah, I mean we've talked a lot about this. You just can't start with fear. That's like number one. And then it's also interesting if you look at like the AI adoption within our customer base, you know, is it a small companies, the mid market companies, the in a software company, what vertical are they in? Actually it comes down to this. There's someone there who is curious about AI and is kind of like going top down on AI. It really comes down to that. It's not, you know, and I call it like, you know, intelligent constraints. Right. Someone at the top is saying, I'm going to put some intelligent constraints and I want to see you use this new technology to be able to solve it. And that is the commonality. And if you look at like, who is able to do that, you know, is do they have some experience with innovation, do they have some experience with something else? No, they are curious. They have a growth mindset. They look at like everything that is thrown at them and say, oh, you know what, I'm going to try and apply this to my team or my function or my company. And it just comes like top down. And so I do think that the first stage, and we are still in the very early stages of like AI adoption is happening because someone is curious and someone is growth oriented and they're like looking at this and saying, I'm just going to have my team do this. I think then we're going to get a few use cases that are just going to prove value over and over. I call it like the product market fit stage of an adoption where you know, support has found product market adoption, developer tools have found product market fit and content generation and distribution has found product market fit. So there are at least three to four places where we've found product market fit. Now everybody else has to like follow and say, you know what? Every those early adopters are getting clear value. So now I am also going to do it. And so it all starts with someone just having a very open, curious growth mindset that's like, yeah, go make it happen.
- [19:46]
Sarah McDevitt
So is that, you know, not to repeat the question again, Yamity, but it's a slightly different question I have for you. When you're looking at you, you're observing loads of companies globally. Okay. And you Just kind of talked about the. The pattern you're seeing for companies who succeed is leading with that curiosity and wanting to experiment. What's the pattern for those that you might think or predict might in the long term fail because they're not displaying those characteristics now?
- [20:14]
Yamini Rangan
I mean, look, I think it's pretty simple. There'll be fomo. It's just, you know, you see people who are early adopters, who are innovators, who are getting the value, and then you're like, oh, my God, I'm so behind. And that's going to, that is going to like, actually get the next set of people to use it and then they're going to get value. And look, this is how we went from on premise to cloud. This is literally what happened. People were like, my data needs to be in my data center. I need to make sure that I can secure it. No, no, no. What do you mean? I don't even know which cloud is going to have my data. That is not possible. And then everybody got it and people, people saw that it helped with their tco and then everybody was like, okay, if they're getting the value out of TCO and we're not, we're becoming less competitive. It all comes down to this. How can you leverage technology to be much more competitive and win in whatever you're trying to accomplish? That has been the role of technology, and it's the same thing here. You're going to get product market, fit in a set of use cases, people are going to use it, and then the next set of people are going to be like, I'm behind this year, 2025. If you're not using AI for your support tickets, you are behind because this is a place where the technology has proven itself. You can actually genuinely have history of support and knowledge base and be able to solve it. And then you can take that person that you had and move them up to more proactive support and use cases. And by the way, they're happier with that. Like, you know, who wants to reset the password and get you activated every single time for 10 times a day? That's not what we want to do now. You can have something else do it. And so I think there will be certain use cases like that where it's done.
- [22:09]
Sarah McDevitt
Yeah, Mani, as AI becomes more prevalent in our lives, what part of humanity do you think will get stronger? And in terms of our partners, you know, where can they get stronger?
- [22:21]
Yamini Rangan
Yeah, the first part of the question is easy. It is taste. Humans still are the best at figuring out what great looks like. And I think this is where our partner ecosystem has a huge, huge role to play. Your ability to understand the context of a particular customer and apply your creativity and taste to get them to the best possible outcomes, that is what partners can do. So start with your own AI fluency, start with genuine curiosity and interest with AI, and then help customers get the best possible outcome. And that is why I believe that there is a huge opportunity for partners within our ecosystem.
- [23:09]
Sarah McDevitt
Well, thank you so much, Amini, for joining me today on Owning the Outcome. And if you've enjoyed the content that you're hearing today, we're why don't you give us a subscribe so you don't miss the next episode?
- [23:19]
Yamini Rangan
Yes, I wouldn't want to miss any episode with Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for what you do for our partner ecosystem.