Boots on the Ground at Unbound 2026: Lessons from HubSpot's Flagship Event

For years, HubSpot's signature conference went by a different name: Inbound. This year, it rebranded to Unbound, a small shift in language with a bigger point behind it. The event wasn't just about inbound methodology anymore. This year, it was about unbinding from whatever past box a marketer thought they were working in.

HexaGroup Account Executive Morgan Phillips went to Unbound to dig into HubSpot's evolving platform, connect with other agencies and professionals, and bring back a fresh perspective for our own clients. Below is Morgan's on-the-ground recap.

HexaGroup: This is your first time at Unbound. What was the experience like?

Morgan: This is my first time going to Unbound. They previously marketed it as Inbound, but this year they wanted to convey that you're unbounded from everything.

The people I talked to who had gone before were really in the flow of everything, but there were a lot of first-timers there along with me. You could really see the light in their eyes. It's a lot to take in when you get there. It really did feel like they made a conference for my specific interests, which made it super intriguing to me. It was a lot of fun. I could talk shop with people and really activate all sectors of my experiences as a marketer. The good, the bad, the unbound!

HexaGroup: Did the people you spoke with who had been there in the past notice anything different this year?

Morgan: I think there's a big focus on AI functionality, and I'd say some people were viewing it with mixed messages. HubSpot itself is very pro-AI, while other smaller companies or speakers were more focused on controlling where that AI usage comes from. It's a very intriguing time for the marketing industry as we figure out how to incorporate this. It's a conversation we have at every level of our organization: How do we intelligently put AI into things? How do we make sure we're leveraging the technology? Because if we're not doing it, someone else is.

But at the same time, you have to be so mindful and careful about how you're handling data or creating workflows that would just make things a nightmare in the future, especially in the infancy of AI.

HexaGroup: Would you say that was the biggest theme at the conference?

Morgan: I would say that's the biggest theme. Now, every platform has an AI integration built into it, so it did seem like a buzzword a little bit, like "synergy," "AI-powered." In some parts of the conference, it was clear where AI came in, and in other parts, it really just seemed like a way to rephrase data science and aggregation. Something that traditionally would just be data cleaning and organizing turns into “AI-powered decision-making.”

HexaGroup: As somebody who's never been before, what were you most impressed by at the event and how HubSpot put this on?

Morgan: I've seen some big events; World of Concrete was a similar, super large Las Vegas conference. But this one was so well put together, especially aesthetically. It didn't feel like just a bunch of booths; it felt like a real environment well curated for conversations. I'd say that's what they really leaned into.

There were a ton of areas where you could schedule meetings with like-minded individuals — people in the same agency world as you, or an independent marketer inside a large company — and really see where the differences come in, especially when they might work in healthcare or telecommunications versus energy sector stuff. There were B2C and B2B differences as well.

HexaGroup: Other than AI, what were some of the biggest topics on people's minds?

Morgan: If we're talking about what is the opposite of AI, it's making sure that there are human touchpoints. At a very basic level, marketing is communicating a message effectively to another person, not a general message to a general audience. We're seeing people really leaning into the human aspects even though AI is evolving rapidly.

You might have a workflow that is AI-powered, but you should make sure there's a human component to it. So rather than sending an automated email, you could have a salesperson record a script that maybe was generated by AI, but it's directed toward a specific person with specific personalizations. That reads as more human than something entirely text-based that feels separate from how humans think and make decisions.

Another topic was leaning into new channels for go-to-market and ABM strategies. In the past, launching video advertising for live sports or streaming television was a little complicated. But now more streamlined service offerings help with that.

Fifteen years ago, you would have thought you could never put your ad on TV in front of thousands of people from a general television audience, and now you're advertising to a specific group of people. That’s very interesting to me. They're also leveraging advertising through AI chats — ChatGPT, TikTok — and promoting content to social-oriented channels rather than email, LinkedIn, or phone calls. It’s something a little different than what we’ve seen in the past.

I think HubSpot was really pushing that too, at least in the separate sections of the conference where they were promoting parts of their use-case applications. It was all wrapped around a human, tactile element: learning new skills, neuroplasticity, and playing with slime, which was great for my son because I brought so much slime back home. But it does make you think differently about how attached we are to computers, and how nice it is to have something with a physical touch component.

HexaGroup: Anybody you'd like to give a shout-out to for their creativity, or people you had an interesting conversation with?

Morgan: I really liked two presentations. The first was Sumner Vanderhoof, from Propensity, the ABM platform. His talk on go-to-market strategy and ABM was really interesting. Even when there were parts I already knew from a workflow standpoint, he offered new ways to think about how you're leveraging different technologies to support a more rapidly changing go-to-market “hypothesis.”

The CEO of Capsule also talked through the evolution of the business and their video marketing playbook. He covered how to create a leverageable brand kit for motion graphics that can be used to make short-form content videos at a higher pace, especially as AEO leans into video-generated content. LLMs love video content. It's also easy for humans to get drawn in, especially when someone's talking to you about something genuinely intriguing.

I especially loved the keynotes from Cynthia Erivo and Sonya Williams, people who are outside of marketing entirely. Sonya Williams talked about being an astronaut, and Cynthia Erivo, even though she's a producer and owns a company, still brings a real artistic element.

It got me thinking about how people engage in pseudo-marketing activities, and how human communication matters not just for how you market outside your organization, but for how you connect with people inside it and lead effectively.

Mel Robbins gave a great talk on internal leadership. How we view it, how we're facilitating an environment for people to thrive, and how to be better leaders than they were the day before.

And of course, there are always new product highlights from HubSpot and seeing where you can apply those for a client. At this type of conference, it's so easy to get into a “servicing” mindset, which I find really, really energizing. You're not just thinking about yourself and how you can change. You're also thinking about how you can develop new processes to help your clients, which is the best feeling in the world for marketers.

HexaGroup: Were there any HubSpot announcements from this conference you could share?

Morgan: Leading up to Unbound, they were really making a lot of changes to the UI of HubSpot. They recently did a full site redesign that lets you recategorize things and customize the experience, plus they reworked reporting dashboards and how you can brand them. Before that update, all the charts had the same orange HubSpot color scheme, which could look pretty monotonous.

On the AI side, there's an AI campaign agent that was really interesting to see, along with some specific new flows you can now run within HubSpot campaigns, both through the marketing hub and the service hub. The customer support AI agent is incredibly interesting. It can even connect to phone lines to answer calls, help gather information, and create tickets.

There are also some newer updates coming — nurture agents and content agents — that are going to shake up the traditional HubSpot process a bit. These might also shape marketing activities in the future.

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