HubSpot intros AI tools to make content creation easier
The new AI tools are aimed at marketing, sales and customer service teams that create websites and blogs. They also provide customers with a natural language chat-based experience.
CRM and marketing technology vendor HubSpot added more AI tools to enable its customers to work more efficiently.
The vendor, based in Cambridge, Mass., and specializing in CRM, CX and customer service software mainly for small and medium-sized businesses, on March 6 introduced two new AI-powered tools: Content Assistant and ChatSpot.
Content Assistant helps marketing and sales teams create content such as blog posts, landing pages, websites and emails, as well as streamline content marketing workflows in one place.
Meanwhile, ChatSpot gives HubSpot customers a natural language chat-based user experience. With ChatSpot, customers can use a ChatGPT-like capability to add contacts and companies to the HubSpot CRM platform, create reports and draft emails.
The marketplace
HubSpot's Content Assistant and ChatSpot come as many vendors add generative AI-powered capabilities to their CRM, CX, search and ERP systems.
Microsoft recently added similar capabilities with Copilot using ChatGPT. Salesforce also launched similar Einstein GPT capabilities on Tuesday.
The similarity of AI and large language model-based tools across the market shows that most vendors are still trying to grasp the technology, said Predrag Jakovljevic, an analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers.
It's hard to debate the usefulness of these AI tools as they can definitely augment humans' capabilities.
Predrag JakovljevicAnalyst, Technology Evaluation Centers
"For anyone to stand up in the future, it is all about painstakingly curating the data sets the AI tool uses to properly clean data to make recommendations better," he said.
Moreover, the long-term effectiveness of such tools is still unknown.
"It's hard to debate the usefulness of these AI tools as they can definitely augment humans' capabilities," Jakovljevic said. "It will be important to still provide interactivity for the humans to review and approve the suggested content or conversations."
Human vs. machine
Having humans review and approve the content will help enterprises avoid the known proclivity of some AI bots to spew racist or sexist and insulting language or inaccuracies, Jakovljevic added.
Tools such as these that help with content creation have also come under criticism when consumers are unaware that an AI bot or algorithm is the originator of the content. In January, the media website CNET made corrections to several articles after acknowledging that it had been using an AI tool to write dozens of stories.
But while some maintain that distributors of content written by AI technology should explicitly state that, others think it makes no difference.
"When you go to any website, or you read some blog, does it really come to your mind at all who wrote that -- a person or ChatGPT?" Jakovljevic asked. "At this stage, it doesn't bother me as long as the content is compelling and valid."
HubSpot's Content Assistant is now available in private beta, while ChatSpot is available in public alpha.
Esther Ajao is a news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
