HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan on-stage at the company’s UNBOUND conference, saying that while 90% of companies are using AI, just 6% are seeing true transformation.
Almost every company is using AI. Almost none are getting much out of it. That’s according to Hubspot, which surveyed thousands of companies across multiple industries. In her keynote this morning at UNBOUND,, CEO Yamini Rangan said 90% of the companies Hubspot surveyed are using AI. But only 6% are seeing transformational results.
“That’s such a huge gap,” Rangan said.
That doesn’t mean the other 94% are getting nothing. But it does mean most companies are spending on AI without seeing much change in the numbers that matter: demand, deals and customers. Even worse, AI with poor data and minimal context does more harm than no AI at all, resulting in poorer business performance.
HubSpot has a product answer to that, of course. At the same event, the company launched what it calls its most significant release in years: a CRM that updates itself, a rebuilt Breeze AI assistant that takes action instead of just answering questions, a new hub for managing the business context AI runs on, a new on-demand AI agent builder for companies and the first CRM integration with ChatGPT Ads.
All of it is built on a single premise: AI is only as good as what it knows about your business. But the big question is: what do the businesses that generate value from AI do differently?
According to Rangan, the 6% of businesses that win with AI do three things.
1. They pick outcomes, not use cases
“First, transformational companies are solving for outcomes,” Rangan said.
That often means doing less. While there’s always a new foundation model, new AI-powered tool, new AI-influencer process, the best performers do less, not more. HubSpot tracked 50-some AI use cases across marketing, sales and customer service. The best performers run only four or five on average.
“Transformational companies are doing fewer use cases, not more,” Rangan said.
They also pick different ones. Hubspot plotted every use case by how popular it is against how much impact it drives. The things most people do with AI — producing content, sending emails, prepping for meetings — scored low on impact.
“We get this beautiful slope moving in the exact wrong direction, away from impact,” Rangan said.
That makes sense. Those use cases look like easy low-lying fruit: type a few prompts, get a blog post or an email. But it’s exactly what anyone can do with a few prompts of their own, and the bigger problem is that most tools lack context that will make those emails or blog posts rich and impactful: customer knowledge, product knowledge, industry knowledge.
The high-impact use cases, says Hubspot, all rely on deep per-company context: analyzing campaigns, prioritizing pipeline, analyzing customer feedback. None of them work without your own business data.
“It is your data,” Rangan said. “It is your context and, therefore, it is your advantage.”
2. They build a foundation of context first
Context is the buzzword of the moment in AI, and Rangan knows it: “It’s one of those overused terms in AI, right? Right up there with tokens and harnesses.”
Her definition is simple: in the business sense, context is dynamic knowledge about your company, your customers and your team. That means brand, voice, products and positioning. It means customer conversations, ideal customer profiles and buying signals. And it also means team roles, goals, processes and approvals.
When AI has good context, Hubspot says, core go-to-market metrics go up. Marketing-qualified leads generated rose more than 200%, Rangan said, with deals won and customer meetings booked also up. Hubspot says companies with high-quality context create nearly 2x more deals, win 3x more deals, and close over 2x more support tickets.
But the finding Rangan said “completely blew our minds” went the other way.
“AI with bad context is worse than no AI,” she said. “Bad context is actually worse than having no AI at all.”
AI with bad context is worse than not using AI at all, says Hubspot. It actually impairs business results.
Humans compensate for bad data, adjusting almost subconsciously. AI usually doesn’t. It might recommend a product that’s no longer in your catalog, run an analysis on the wrong process, or route an approval to a manager who changed roles last week.
Rangan’s term for that output: “sloppier than slop.”
“The magic is not within the models,” she said. “It is actually within the context of your business.”
3. They’re purposeful about people
“These companies are purposeful about their people,” Rangan said.
The internet freed information, she says, giving everyone the ability to research and publish. AI, she argued, is doing the same for building. Marketers, salespeople and service leaders can now ship an artifact, automate a workflow or create an agent without waiting in line for engineering.
That sounds amazing, but it’s not automatically good news.
“Just because anybody can build anything, does not mean that everybody should be building everything,” Rangan said. “The hard part is not building anymore. It is actually deciding what to build.”
That takes judgment, creativity and critical thinking: human skills. The 6% aren’t choosing between AI and people, according to Rangan. “They’re actually combining the strengths of both.”
Hubspot, of course, has a solution for this
Today Hubspot launched what the company calls “Growth Context.” It’s all your business, team and customer context in one place, with new tools to gather it from customer conversations, voice notes, and your CRM database.
“We hear from customers every day that they don’t want to think about which AI tools to use, they just want outcomes,” Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox said in a statement.
Within the updated suite, every call, email and meeting is now captured and synced automatically. “Instead of you updating the CRM, what if the CRM updated you?” Lennox in a keynote after Rangan..
Then the company added a new Breeze Assistant, which is kind of like ChatGPT that knows everything about your company. Tell it what you need, and it builds campaign plans, reports, proposals and custom tools. Users can type or talk to it, and a new agent builder lets non-technical users build a custom agent and then give it work: a digital coworker as part of the human team.
Deeper integration with ChatGPT
Hubspot is also deepening its partnership with OpenAI, on two fronts. That’s interesting, because competitor Salesforce is partnering with Anthropic and integrating Claude into its software, something that CEO Benioff reportedly called “the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen for Salesforce.”
Hubspot launched the first CRM connector for ChatGPT in 2025. The updated connector brings Hubspot data into ChatGPT and lets users run email campaigns, create landing pages for ads, analyze closed-won deals, optimize for AI search and more.
HubSpot also said it’s integrating with ChatGPT Ads, so marketers can build, budget, launch and measure ChatGPT ad campaigns in HubSpot alongside their other channels. OpenAI and Hubspot are also offering free credits, discounts, and a $750 match on ChatGPT Ads for new accounts.
“ChatGPT is where people are going to make decisions,” Lennox said onstage.
Will this put every company inside the 6% that generate value with AI?
I’ve seen the “this industry is confusing and busy” pitch before, and like this one, it usually includes a solution proposed by the company pitching.
That’s definitely happening here, but it doesn’t means it’s not true.
The core diagnosis is hard to argue with. There are far too many AI tools for businesses to try every single one. And generic AI without deep context will produce generic output. Tying data and tools and intelligence is a smart move, though it does require extreme trust from customers, something Lennox acknowledged.
In the end, no matter how much AI you add, it still comes down to human decisions.
Rangan’s advice for companies feeling behind is to stop adding tools and ask three questions instead: What outcomes do we want? Do we have the right foundation of context and data? Do we have people who can think and build with AI?
“In the age of artificial intelligence,” Rangan said, “human intelligence has never mattered more.”
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
