This year’s INBOUND conference featured tons of great HubSpot product updates (CPQ is finally here!) and interesting breakout sessions. But the speaker who’s been stuck in my head for the past two weeks wasn’t talking about HubSpot at all.
Zack Kass, futurist and former Head of GTM at OpenAI, closed out Partner Day with a candid presentation on the future of AI—warts and all.
It got me thinking: beyond the hype, what does all this actually mean for the way we work? And more specifically, what does it mean for the teams we help at accelant, who are using HubSpot to unify their operations and customer journey?
I’ll admit it — I tend to be a realist (I originally wrote “pessimist”, but my marketing team said it wasn’t great for branding).
So naturally I have to address the risks of our AI-centered workforce.
Kass reintroduced the concept of Idiocracy—a nice throwback to Mike Judge’s 2005 film—and tied it to how AI might change the way we think (or don’t). Critical thinking feels optional when smarter tech is always ready to spoon-feed us answers.
That’s where his “K-Curve” comes in. On one side, you’ve got the people who dive into AI, use it to learn, and sharpen their skills. They shoot up-and-to-the-right. On the other, you’ve got people who lean back, let the machines do the thinking, and end up sliding down the curve.
From my perspective, that checks out.
AI is not a replacement—it’s an enabler. The people and teams who treat it like a partner, who use it to get more efficient while still pushing themselves to think and improve, are the ones who win.
Kass also shared some mind-blowing examples of how AI is pushing science forward. We’re talking new antibiotics, better plastics, and research cycles that once took years now being compressed into months. Basically, AI is doing the heavy lifting on the data side so scientists can spend more time in the lab. (Whatever it is scientists actually do in labs—don’t ask me.)
And that’s the connection I keep coming back to: the same thing applies in business.
AI can crank out first-draft content, process mountains of customer data, and take care of repetitive tasks. But that’s just the beginning. What it really does is free up time for humans to do the stuff that matters—like tailoring customer experiences, making smart strategic calls, and actually building relationships.
At accelant, that’s our POV: mass AI output is table stakes, and if you’re not careful, runs the risk of categorizing your brand as inauthentic. The real differentiator is how you use the efficiency gains AI has powered on for your teams to create a personalized, human-centered customer experience.
The cool part is that HubSpot is already weaving AI into the platform—agents, Breeze Assistant, predictive insights, automation. It’s powerful, no doubt.
But here’s the thing: AI by itself doesn’t guarantee a great customer experience.
Where the magic happens is when teams infuse AI into their operations and connect it across the full customer journey in HubSpot. That’s how you get the one-two punch: AI driving efficiency, and HubSpot keeping everything unified, so the customer experience feels consistent and intentional.
That’s also how you make sure your people have more time for the good stuff—like actually talking to customers instead of just wrestling with spreadsheets.
Kass’s K-Curve isn’t just about individuals—it applies to businesses too. The teams that lean in, experiment, and use AI as a partner? They’ll move up the curve. The ones that treat it like a shortcut and hope it does the work for them? They’ll slide backward.
And if history has taught us anything, it’s that it only takes a couple of bad actors for the rest of us to feel it. That’s how we end up in the pods of The Matrix—powering the same tools we once asked for help with in Excel.
At accelant, we believe the future belongs to the teams that marry AI-driven efficiency with HubSpot’s end-to-end system—while keeping human creativity and strategy front and center.
AI is here, for better or worse. The question is: are you using it to move up the curve?
Don’t wait to see where the curve takes you. Talk with our team today about building an AI-enabled system you can trust.