HubSpot News
· 6 MIN READ
5 August HubSpot updates actually worth knowing
HubSpot ships a lot of product updates every month. Some are major releases, some solve very specific problems, and some quietly remove small annoyances that users have been working around for years.
Here are five August updates that caught my attention—not necessarily the biggest ones, but the ones I think can make a real difference in how HubSpot is used, governed and connected to the rest of the business.
AI connectors are starting to become real CRM interfaces
Required plan: All HubSpot plans
Additional requirements: ChatGPT needs an OpenAI account; Claude requires a paid plan. Gemini is in public beta and requires Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus or Enterprise with Gemini Alpha enabled. Connector setup and CRM access require appropriate permissions.
HubSpot’s external AI connectors are becoming much more than a way to ask questions about CRM data. In August, the HubSpot connectors for both ChatGPT and Claude expanded support for Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, Notes, Tasks and Meetings. Users can now query these objects and create CRM records directly from the AI interface. HubSpot also introduced a connector for Gemini, bringing another major AI platform into the same ecosystem.
This changes how I think about these integrations. Until recently, the interesting question was whether an AI assistant could understand CRM data well enough to answer useful questions about it. Now the question is increasingly whether the AI assistant can become another interface for actually working with the CRM.
Instead of opening HubSpot, navigating between objects and manually entering information, users can increasingly describe what they want to do in natural language and let the connector translate that into CRM actions. We are still early, but the direction is becoming clear: AI is moving from sitting next to the CRM to becoming one of the ways people interact with it.
I’ve already started doing this myself: simply typing instructions into ChatGPT instead of opening HubSpot and making the changes directly in the CRM.
More AI access also means more governance
Required plan: All HubSpot plans
Additional requirements: Super Admin permissions to approve apps and manage installation or data permissions.
Giving more external tools access to CRM data creates another problem: somebody needs to control which tools are allowed in the first place. HubSpot’s App Install Governance gives Super Admins centralized control over app installations. They can approve individual apps, decide who is allowed to install them, customize optional permissions and revoke approvals later. These controls also apply to AI connectors such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
This probably will not generate as many screenshots on LinkedIn as a new AI feature, but for larger HubSpot environments I think it may be one of the more important updates. Connected apps accumulate surprisingly quickly. An integration installed today can still be sitting in the portal years later, with access to data nobody remembers granting it. As AI connectors become capable of not only reading CRM data but also writing to it, app governance stops being an administrative detail.
A USEFUL RULE
The more systems can write to your CRM, the more important it becomes to control who can connect them and what they are allowed to touch.
Product Updates finally became easier to use
Required plan: All HubSpot plans
Additional requirements: Individual beta features have their own plan and access requirements. Enrolling the whole account requires a Super Admin.
HubSpot has also redesigned the Product Updates experience. The new Discover view is no longer just a long feed of everything HubSpot is shipping. It can surface updates based on what is trending across HubSpot accounts, feedback from your team, the tools your team uses most and what has recently become available. Users can also customize the order of these sections, search updates and join betas directly from the same area.
I like this change because HubSpot now ships features at a pace where discovering them has become a problem in itself. The old model effectively expected users to keep checking a release feed and decide which of dozens of updates might matter to them.
The new approach starts to answer a better question: Which updates are actually relevant to this portal? That sounds simple, but it makes Product Updates much more useful for people who do not spend their working day reading HubSpot release notes.
Column-level filtering removes another unnecessary step
Required plan: All HubSpot plans
Additional requirements: Availability depends on the CRM index-page experience; column filtering is marked as beta in the updated index-page documentation.
HubSpot has added filtering directly to CRM table column headers. Instead of opening the separate filtering interface every time, users can click a column and filter records from there. The update applies across CRM tables.
Again, this is not a dramatic change. But CRM users spend a huge amount of time navigating, filtering and checking data. Improving those basic interactions can matter more to day-to-day usability than adding another feature people use once a month. This is the kind of update that probably disappears into muscle memory after a few weeks—which is usually a sign that the UX improvement worked.
Webhook data sources make Data Studio much more interesting
Required plan: Data Hub Professional or Enterprise
Additional requirements: Data Studio beta access and relevant permissions. Activating datasets in workflows, segments, CRM syncs or exports may consume HubSpot Credits.
The most technical update on my list may also have the biggest long-term implications. HubSpot Data Studio can now receive JSON data directly from HTTP-capable external systems through webhook data sources. Each source receives an inbound URL and supports GET, POST and PUT requests. Incoming data can create new records or update existing records using a match key. Once ingested, the data can be used in datasets, segments, workflows and reports.
In practical terms, this lowers the barrier to bringing operational data into HubSpot. Product usage events, logistics information, ERP data, internal applications or other external systems no longer necessarily need a full custom connector just to make selected information available inside HubSpot.
There are still important limitations. Requests currently handle one record at a time, and the inbound URL itself acts as the authentication mechanism, so it needs to be treated as a secret. But conceptually, I find this update very interesting. HubSpot is becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that the data used by CRM automation does not have to originate inside the CRM.
What these updates have in common
On the surface, these five changes do very different things. One connects HubSpot to AI assistants. Another controls app access. One helps users discover features. Another improves basic CRM navigation. The last one brings external data into Data Studio.
But together, I think they show three directions HubSpot is moving in.
More interfaces.
HubSpot no longer expects every interaction with CRM data to happen inside the HubSpot UI.
More external data.
The boundary between CRM data and operational data from the rest of the business is becoming increasingly flexible.
More governance.
As the platform becomes more connected and capable, controlling access and data quality becomes increasingly important.
I like that combination. Making a CRM more powerful is relatively easy to demonstrate in a product keynote. Making it easier to understand, govern and use every day is less spectacular—but in mature CRM environments, it is often much more valuable.
Tomasz Miszkin
September 4, 2026
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