HubSpot is a massive AI beneficiary because it lets customers spin up ad campaigns without a full-time employee or even an outside marketer. Yet its shares trade exactly opposite AI. x.comÂ
Oh Come On!
Investor, Venture Capital Background
HubSpot benefits from AI because it marries inferential and deterministic work: AI helps users write copy and ads, while classic code delivers emails, runs A/B tests and authorizes spend. Deterministic work is inherently immune to AI. @chamath notes that frontier models' gains on complex production systems have shrunk while costs kept doubling, making the last 5% of engineering work extremely hard and expensive to automate. x.comÂ
HubSpot and Intuit have a meaningful chance to be AI winners even as the market destroys SMB software, because selling to small businesses is life on hard mode, as @travisk put it, which makes it moaty. The math is so hard that competition is thin and survivors gain share in downturns; they have aggregated customers at scale; AI agents favor full-platform adoption and clean data; and AI may spur many new small businesses. They still add customers, but the window is closing; they must accelerate. … Show more
HubSpot is at its most attractive entry point since 2022, about 8.4x implied forward earnings, if agentic AI eventually shows up in revenue, which it likely will. Adjusted operating margin expanded to 18%, deals above $120k ARR surged 64% as it wins upmarket against Salesforce, and it gets 6% more per customer each year while adding 16% more customers. Revenue growth has slowed to 18%, and not significantly raising the 2026 guide suggests management itself doesn't know if AI will lift revenue. … Show more
HubSpot shows that disruptors get disrupted, as AI forces CRM vendors toward outcome-based pricing that bills for results rather than users. KCR made that call in December 2025, and it materialized on May 7, 2026, when HubSpot moved its AI agents to outcome-based pricing and cut prices; the stock fell about 19% the next day. x.comÂ
AI will not replace Fortune 500 CRM platforms, as the moat of Salesforce, ServiceNow and HubSpot goes beyond the software. It lies in the data model, integrations, workflows and customer records; agents may even raise the value of a trusted system of record. Thin workflow tools are vulnerable and seat pricing faces pressure. Platforms that make AI a native operating layer to expand usage and monetization should be pretty good investments; they look near the end of a multi-year correction. x.comÂ
HubSpot barely needs to grow to justify today's valuation, given its current cash inflows, terminal value aside. That shows once the customer acquisition costs and growth spending in the P&L are accounted for. Reading through from IBM is silly, since IBM serves a totally different market. x.comÂ
HubSpot only looks cheap, because its CRM is terrible and will be used less and less as AI takes over software. x.comÂ
HubSpot is a long with much better management than peers, while monday.com is AI roadkill; the two are the only real comparables. Its valuation case needs realism, though: @CeleritasRe sees 2x forward sales as absurdly cheap if it reaches 30% terminal margins on 20% growth, but those margins are unlikely at that growth, and HubSpot is growing 17%. x.com x.comÂ
HubSpot is mathematically on track to accelerate, not die, because it has grown net new ARR faster than total revenue for about six straight quarters. Its failure to capture agent spending is a real and existential threat, but that is priced in and the game is not over. Exposure to SaaS remains small, so this is reasoning rather than table-pounding. x.com x.comÂ
Horizontal SaaS tools such as HubSpot, Atlassian and Intuit will be disrupted as companies build their own replacements with AI. Per @CJ0pp3l, quoting one of Constellation Software's AI leads, HubSpot, Jira, Mailchimp and Zendesk have been replaced with AI-built systems and agents, and only vertical software with strong systems of record and deep workflow integration will grow with AI. The market also sold vertical names like Constellation and Topicus, which hold deep platform data. x.comÂ
HubSpot is the only apps company ripping the bandaid off by moving away from seat-based pricing, even if that means lower growth in the near term. Enterprise SaaS only starts to work after a total reset of pricing toward consumption-based models, which also resets near-term revenue growth and margins. x.comÂ