All this and more in this week’s edition of The Hypha Wire, from Hypha HubSpot Development.
Welcome back to The Hypha Wire, and happy May! By the way, it sure feels like the ‘It’s Gonna Be May’ meme finally died this year. RIP.
This week was HubSpot Academy’s annual World Certification Week. As I mentioned in its run-up last week, this event donates $5 to an education-focused charity (up to $25k) for every certification taken, so it’s the perfect time to brush up on a lapsed certification or get a new one. (There’s still time to take one today!)
I wanted to participate, so I re-upped my Email Marketing certification—I hadn’t taken it in a few years, and it’s been updated significantly since.
Even though I write an email newsletter weekly, there were still things I learned, and it also reminded me of old tips and tricks that I’ll apply to future Wires. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from the certification:
Break your email strategy into three phases: preparing, sending and optimization
Knowing your brand voice and your audience will help you craft better resonating content
Building automation on top of segmentation can help you reach the appropriate audience, with the right message at scale
Your analytics tell you a story if you listen to them
Even if you’re an expert in a topic, there is always more to learn or topics to refresh yourself on. So why not give a certification a shot before the end of the day, and do your part for charity!
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Spring Cleaning Is Out. Spring Refinement Is In.
By Dillon Friday, Director of Client Services, Hypha HubSpot Development
I like “Rugrats,” the ‘90s Nickelodeon cartoon that follows the escapades of Tommy Pickles and the gang. People know this about me. I wear socks featuring Reptar, the Godzilla of the “Rugrats” universe, quite often, to the point that friends and family have gifted me Reptar socks for my birthday, Christmas, and sometimes just because they saw a pair and knew I’d like them.
This is good. Please send me Reptar stuff. I will wear it.
Of course, this also poses problems. Recently, I was putting away clothes from the dryer and could barely close my sock drawer, because it was filled to the brim (Note: I have more socks than just Reptar socks; I’m not a child).
I needed some Spring closet refinement.
And that’s how I’d phrase it. ‘Spring cleaning’ emphasizes what you take away more than what you keep. Refinement implies that you’re working toward something better.
At Hypha, we’re working on some Spring refinement of our own. In April, we started creating an internal ‘wiki’ that will host the resources that help us operate on daily basis. This includes everything from our employee handbook, software guides, and recommended HubSpot certifications to report templates, helpful tools, and examples of our best work.
All of these assets are accessible in different places. Now we’re bringing them to one location while cleaning out old folders on disparate platforms.
HubSpot’s capabilities have made this process both possible and easy. We’re leveraging the following features:
A password-protected landing page that enables us to control the design of the resource and to link to external sources (the HubSpot community, for example)
A membership-only knowledge base that will be populated by internal FAQs, guides, and templates
The file manager for hosting PDFs, like the aforementioned handbook
We also plan to create a HubSpot-built AI agent to train on the collection of resources. That way, team members can explore the landing page to search for guidance or pose questions to the chat, such as ‘How many PTO days do we get a year?’ ‘Can you send me a quarterly report we’ve completed recently?’ ‘What does TLDR mean on Slack?’
The end result will be really helpful to us, especially when onboarding new employees. We plan to revise the landing page once a quarter to ensure it’s up-to-date. The process of creating the ‘wiki’ has its benefits as well. We’re making tough decisions about what to include, not just the assets themselves but also the information within the assets, in the hopes of delivering the most useful, efficient resource for employees. Refinement takes sacrifice…as my Reptar socks that now live in Goodwill will tell you.
Mark Zuckerberg envisions a future where Meta generates and optimizes all your ads automatically, potentially eliminating traditional creative agencies and threatening the entire advertising ecosystem as we know it. Got it.
“Zuckerberg: Yeah, or we just make it for them. I mean, obviously, it’ll always be the case that they can come with a suggestion or here’s the creative that they want, especially if they really want to dial it in. But in general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”
University of Zurich researchers conducted an unauthorized AI bot experiment on Reddit’s r/changemyview, sparking outrage from moderators and a legal response from the platform over the ethical breach of deploying bots that posed as users without consent.
“Moderators on the changemyview subreddit alerted the group’s 3.8 million users over the weekend of the ‘unauthorized experiment’ that had been unfolding over the past few months. The moderators said they had received notice from the researchers as ‘part of a disclosure step’ in the study in which the researchers said they had used multiple accounts to post on the subreddit without disclosing that AI was used to write comments.”
Hypha Highlights
The world of artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving beyond tools that simply create content. While generative AI has revolutionized how businesses produce text, images, and code, companies are increasingly recognizing the strategic value of agentic AI.
Unlike generative AI, which responds to prompts with content, agentic AI can independently perceive information, reason through problems, plan solutions, and take action with minimal human oversight.
For businesses using HubSpot, this represents a transformative opportunity to automate complex processes, enhance data quality, and drive better results across marketing, sales, and customer service functions.
Key Takeaways
• Agentic AI moves beyond content creation to deliver autonomous actions that solve complex business problems
• HubSpot’s platform includes powerful agentic capabilities through Breeze AI and its specialized agents
• Real-world applications include intelligent data matching, automated customer service, and cross-hub workflow optimization
• Companies that implement agentic AI solutions can gain significant efficiency advantages and improved data quality
• Successful implementation requires clear business objectives and technical expertise in both AI and HubSpot
“Web accessibility can feel pretty daunting at first. Between WCAG guidelines, compliance levels, and technical requirements, there’s a lot to wrap your head around. But don’t worry! I’ve broken everything down into bite-sized, actionable steps anyone can follow.
“So, whether you’re just starting out or looking to improve your site’s accessibility, this checklist will help you tackle the essentials.”
Here’s another AI news roundup from the big players in the space:
Anthropic has launched Integrations, allowing Claude to connect with apps and tools like Jira, Confluence, and Zapier, while enhancing its Research capabilities to conduct comprehensive searches across multiple sources for up to 45 minutes. As stated in the announcement, “When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work—understanding project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge—and can take actions across every surface.”
OpenAI is launching a shopping feature inside ChatGPT that will allow users to research products and purchase them through merchant websites, with product recommendations based on user preferences and web reviews rather than paid placements. As ChatGPT search product lead Adam Fry explains, “It’s trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are,” creating a more personalized and conversational shopping experience compared to keyword-focused alternatives.
Google is introducing an AI Mode tab in Search for a small percentage of US users in the coming weeks, offering AI-generated responses based on Google’s search index rather than traditional URL results. As part of this rollout, Google is removing the Labs waitlist requirement in the US and enhancing AI Mode with new features including search history saving and visual, clickable cards for products and places that display information like business hours, reviews, and real-time pricing.
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Industry Spotlight: Climate, Advocacy, Podcasting
Global Optimism is an organization on a mission to combat the climate crisis through fostering a culture of optimism, collaboration, and actionable change.
Global Optimism partnered with Hypha HubSpot Development, seeking to amplify its online presence and enhance audience engagement.
Hypha’s Solution
Core Site Content
SEO
Content Creation
Collateral & Graphic Design
Tech Stack
CMS Hub
Marketing Hub
Hypha HubSpot Development not only realized Global Optimism’s vision for a revamped online presence, but also equipped the organization with the digital tools necessary to foster greater engagement and autonomy. This partnership has strengthened Global Optimism’s ability to inspire action toward a sustainable future, leveraging technology to broaden its impact and reach.
