Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
HubSpot shipped a whole new hub this week, and the most interesting piece of it is not the piece that builds anything.
On July 23, HubSpot launched Agent Hub and Agent Builder in public beta for every Professional and Enterprise customer. Agent Builder is the half getting the attention. It is a no-code canvas where you describe what you want in plain language through Breeze Assistant, and it assembles a custom agent using the customer data already sitting in your CRM, including deal history, contact records, and call transcripts, with no separate setup or field mapping.
Agent Hub is the other half, and it is a console. It shows live status for every agent running in your account, what each one has produced recently, and which ones have gone dormant so you can switch them back on in a click. HubSpot organised the view around outcomes rather than tools: build demand, win deals, delight customers, and scale growth.
The problem it is built for has a name
Duncan Lennox, HubSpot's Chief Product and Technology Officer, was direct about the reasoning in the announcement. He said the problem is not managing a single agent on its own, it is that once you have several of them they end up fragmented, each working from a different picture of the customer, or from no picture at all. CMSWire reported the example HubSpot used to make the point: a sales prospecting agent contacting a customer in the same week a service agent is working an open complaint from that same account, with neither one aware of the other.
CX Today called this agent sprawl, which is the right name for it. I see the same pattern in much smaller accounts every month, and it does not take a sophisticated stack to create. A Zap that tags incoming leads, an AI note taker, a scheduling tool running its own follow-up rules, and a CRM automation somebody built in 2024 and forgot about. Four things acting on the same contact, none of them aware of each other, and no single place to see what they all did yesterday.
The customer number HubSpot is promoting is a good one. PPC Land reported that Ignite Reading, a virtual literacy tutoring program operating across more than 25 states, built an agent to parse school district calendars and cut that job from 15 to 20 minutes per district down to seconds, with roughly 350 hours a year expected back. That is a real result. It is also what happens when somebody sits down, knows exactly which task is eating the hours, and builds for that one thing.
A console tells you what happened, not whether it was right
Nobody at HubSpot is going to open your Agent Hub on a Tuesday morning and notice that a prospecting agent has spent two weeks emailing a client who cancelled in March. The dashboard will show you the activity. Reading it and deciding the activity was wrong is a separate job, and it belongs to a person.
Worth watching the billing too. Custom agents built in Agent Builder run on HubSpot Credits when they take configured actions, with credits included at the Professional and Enterprise tiers and the option to buy more. PPC Land noted that no separate pricing tier was announced at launch, so that line is one to check as usage climbs.
This checking work is most of what I actually do inside a CRM. Setting the automation up is the short part, and keeping it honest as the business changes is the long part. It is the centre of my CRM and automation work, and the reason I take accounts on as a CRM and automation specialist rather than as a one-time build.
What to do with this news
If you are on HubSpot Pro or Enterprise, turn the beta on and go look at the list. Even if you build nothing, seeing every agent in one place will tell you something useful about what is already running in your account without anyone watching it. Then decide who owns that list. My monthly retainers give businesses and startups with teams a dedicated person who runs the CRM, adds automation where it earns its place, and reviews the output on a regular cadence so a quiet failure does not sit unnoticed for three weeks. Book a consultation and I will go through your setup with you.
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