INDUSTRY EVENTS | 30th APRIL 2026
From Output to Outcomes: My key takeaways from HubSpot GROW 2026
Last week, I attended the HubSpot Grow Conference in Sydney to learn about how they see marketing technology developing and what it means for marketers. While the hype around AI doesn’t appear to be slowing, the conversation does seem to be shifting. AI Leaders are moving from individual LLM experiments and are focusing on how they can use AI to drive Institutional Growth.
The goal for 2026 isn’t just to increase “output” – it’s to drive outcomes. AI can help us break down some of the barriers to improved relevance and personalisation, but we need to be clear about where we want to apply our human focus and how we can enable AI to help with the rest.
As CEO of Marketing Cube, I wanted to share the highlights that resonated most closely with how we are helping our clients build their marketing strategies this year.
Last updated: 28th May 2026
(L-R) Adrian Jones – CEO, Thomas Walsh – Marketing Technology & Automation Engineer and Arnon Miniano – Partner Specialist – Hubspot (ANZ)
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My top key takeaways from GROW 2026 this year?
1. Unifying Marketing, Sales and Service
AI is dissolving traditional silos, blurring the lines between Marketing and Sales and Marketing and Customer Success.
We’ve been talking about inter-departmental alignment for a long time, but AI has the potential to help teams provide a seamless omnichannel customer experience powered by shared data and automated intelligence. The right hand can know what the left hand is doing.
2. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
The most insightful session of the conference was Aja Frost’s session on AEO. AI models look for snippets that best answer questions, rather than focusing on page authority, and they place much more emphasis on recency. This session focused on the evolving landscape of how your business is found, and how providing structured content, unique statistics, and frequent updates helps ensure AI models trust and prioritise your website to drive citations and mentions.
How to win at AEO?
- Think about the questions people ask and how you provide context-rich content to help answer them
- Use more easily recognisable headings as questions and consider including robust FAQ sections.
- AI values recently updated content more than ever – so refresh your key pages frequently.
- Support your AI authority across multiple channels as well as your site – for example, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.
HubSpot provides tools and analytics to help you do this, but as it’s a concept that every marketer needs to be across.
3. Turn your Data Architecture into a Growth Engine
In the Data & Governance session, a great analogy was made between AI and Formula 1 racing and space rockets. Everyone sees the car flying around the track, or a rocket launch into space, but few people consider all the teamwork and hard work behind the scenes to make it happen.
Your data is the fuel – and to turn your AI into a growth engine, we must focus on 2 clear areas
- A clean taxonomy and data strategy to identify and classify your key data sets; and
- Set clear rules and permissions for how AI accesses and uses your data.
4. Agentic Workflows
The Hubspot team went through a number of Agents in action, and how they help specific parts of the funnel:
- Demand & Inbound Agents that help qualify and progressively profile leads
- Prospecting Agents that operate in the “Engage” phase to coordinate multi-channel outreach
- Customer Agents that provide support at scale to help manage more basic enquiries
In closing
The research is clear: 3 in 5 marketers are already being assisted by AI, but only 1 in 5 say it has fundamentally changed their role. HubSpot is helping its customers to fundamentally change this in 2026.
If you’re wondering how you should be moving from individual AI tool experiments to incorporating AI into your growth strategy and driving outcomes, let’s talk.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does shifting from “output to outcomes” mean? Historically, artificial intelligence focused on boosting productivity and output, such as generating more emails or articles in less time. Shifting to outcomes means moving beyond sheer volume. The goal is now focused on institutional growth: using integrated automated intelligence to solve complex business barriers, drastically enhance personalisation, and drive measurable revenue results.
2. How does modern automated technology unify internal silos? Advanced automated systems are beginning to dissolve traditional boundaries between marketing, sales, and customer service teams. By operating on a single, shared database, every department gains immediate visibility into customer interactions. This unified view ensures the entire organisation works from the exact same insights, enabling a seamless, consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.
3. What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)? Traditional SEO focuses heavily on building website domain authority to rank on search engine results pages. Conversely, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring your digital content so that conversational AI models and large language models can easily find, trust, and quote your website when directly answering user queries.
4. How can businesses optimise their content strategy for AEO? To align with conversational search engines, copywriters should phrase headings as direct questions that buyers frequently ask, followed by context-rich, concise answers. Furthermore, because AI algorithms place immense value on recency and credibility, businesses must frequently refresh key web pages and publish unique, empirical data and statistics across their digital channels.
5. Why is a business’s data architecture critical to AI success? An AI strategy is only as powerful as the data feeding it. Without a strong architectural foundation, advanced automation cannot function effectively. To turn data into a growth engine, organisations must establish a clean corporate taxonomy to classify key information assets correctly, whilst setting explicit data permissions to govern how automated systems interact with that data.
6. What are agentic workflows in automated marketing? Agentic workflows use specialised digital agents to execute complex, multi-step tasks autonomously. At the top of the funnel, inbound agents qualify and profile prospects. In the middle, prospecting agents coordinate targeted outreach across multiple channels. At the bottom, customer agents handle foundational enquiries at scale, ensuring buyers receive immediate support throughout their entire lifecycle.
7. Why are many marketing teams struggling to transform their roles with AI? While a significant majority of marketers use artificial intelligence to assist with basic, daily tasks, far fewer have successfully changed the nature of their operational role. To bridge this gap, organisations must move away from isolated, individual tool experimentation and instead embed automated workflows directly into their overarching business strategies, allowing technology to manage administrative tasks while humans focus on creative strategy.
