How HubSpot scaled AI adoption
product.hubspot.com
product.hubspot.com
I really don’t understand why AI usage is mandatory for roles. Nobody’s doing anything like that for other productivity tools even when they’re proven to be helpful. Hell, a lot of employers can’t be bothered to provide basics like nice keyboards and monitors that exceed 1080p.
The current era of tech has way too many corporate losers.
Isn't mandating IDE usage a perfectly reasonable and common thing?
It's a productivity tool after all.
I was usually most productive with a text editor as opposed to an IDE but I'd sometimes use an IDE as needed or when I wanted to try something new.
I also remember thinking “this guy kind of seems like a self-impressed jerk,” while reading it.
Not that HubSpot didn’t earn their portrayal as a hype-driven business run by clowns, but the author lost me when he described himself getting into a passive aggressive Facebook comments argument with coworkers as an indication of how stupid they were… when all I could think was “you’re all idiots, cut the FB drama and get back to work.”
It seemed like he was kind of looking for a fight the whole time. Like… if you’re shocked a marketing tech startup runs differently than a newsroom, that’s on you.
No mention of how this was measured.
I'm very skeptical on this because I know there is competing research suggesting AI use makes tasks take longer but feel less burdensome. Also, you'd need to account for regression rate over time. Also, you'd need to ensure your methodology is correct. It's not trivial and great claims require great responsibility.
Here is the original version of their book: https://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social...
HubSpot was very big on pushing companies to publish lots of content like blog posts and then having calls to action for people to submit their info in exchange for a whitepaper download or similar. Predictably if your main goal is to consistently publish blog posts and whitepapers to generate leads, and you don't have a strong culture of quality and good writing, it's going to lead to lots of slop (even before you could automate writing it with AI).
That being said, I'm not sure how much to blame HubSpot vs. this just generally having been a marketing approach/idea that was "in the air" while it sort of worked (for some definition of "worked"). I sort of remember a handful of companies at the time doing pretty good blog/content marketing by writing useful and thoughtful stuff, and then lots of companies going „got it, make blog and profit!“. But possible that the HubSpot push accelerated that a lot — I don‘t feel like I have a good intuition about that part.
Well, yeah, I agree and would probably pursue it like this if I was running a business. However I get the impression that is not what happened at many places that adopted the approach, including one I've previously worked for.
Then, measure time taken, AI usage, and sentiment of AI usage.
With this, we find out how quickly was the task done, how much AI was used, and whether the individual was frustrated at any point and if the process went smoothly etc.
My system already hooks into top AI providers and measures these outcomes for engineers. Working on measuring other use cases. Email in profile if anyone wants to chat.
Now of course we can't do a blind comparison with the exact same task, but this at least gives insights into usage, outcomes, and ease-of-use.
…unless they have something to show, specifically?
Demos? Code? Details?
Nothing?
They actually revelead an interesting tidbit where they are with AI adoption and how they are positioning it now to new hires, e.g. "we made AI fluency a baseline expectation for engineers by adding it to job descriptions and hiring expectations".
It seems inevitable now that engineering teams will demand AI fluency when hiring, cuious though what they are doing with their existing staff who refuse to adopt AI into their workflow. Curious also if they mandated it or relied solely on incentives to adopt.