Hat Media has been selected for HubSpot's 2025 Partner Advisory Council, on the AI track. We're honoured, and we're also aware of what the invitation actually is — a request to turn up with evidence rather than enthusiasm.

The PAC is one of HubSpot's most influential programs. It gathers a small group of expert partners from around the world to share insight, challenge assumptions, and shape where the ecosystem goes next. Each year HubSpot picks a cohort that has shown leadership in a particular area. This year that area is AI.

What the council actually does

The PAC isn't a forum in the conference sense. It's a working group — biannual live meetings plus continuous asynchronous collaboration in Slack, where two to four questions, topics or polls go up each month for the group to argue over. HubSpot's product and strategy leaders are in the room monthly, and the agenda runs from product development through to partner experience.

As part of the 2025 AI cohort, we'll be contributing on innovation, adoption, ethics and the real-world application of AI inside HubSpot and across the partner network.

Specifically, that means four things. Sharing what AI adoption actually looks like in practice rather than in a keynote — including the parts that don't work. Advocating for early-stage and scaling SaaS clients, who are frequently under-represented when a platform designs for its largest customers. Helping HubSpot read the changing expectations of B2B marketing teams as those expectations shift underneath everyone. And feeding into product development and partner enablement strategy while decisions are still open.

AI is not a buzzword here, it's the workflow

AI stopped being a topic for us some time ago. Over the last 18 months we've built it into most corners of our client services — smarter segmentation and predictive targeting, content ideation and personalisation, lead scoring and qualification, attribution accuracy in campaign reporting, and workflow efficiency inside HubSpot's CRM.

We're deliberate about where it goes, though. AI isn't here to replace marketers. It's here to buy back the hours that strategy, creativity and actual client relationships need, while automation handles the repetitive work underneath.

That sounds like a platitude until you apply it as a test. Every AI deployment we've kept passes it; several we tried didn't, and we dropped them. The ones that fail tend to be the ones that produce volume — more content, more variants, more outbound — without anyone asking whether volume was the constraint. It usually wasn't.

That distinction is why the council matters. Capability alone doesn't produce adoption — adoption needs context, confidence and collaboration, and it needs someone in the room saying what broke when they tried it.

Why this matters if you're a client

Sitting on the PAC gives us a direct line into HubSpot's roadmap, which means the needs of SaaS, tech and growth-stage businesses get represented where the decisions are made.

For clients, that translates into four practical things: early visibility of upcoming AI features before they reach general release, a clearer view of how to fold AI into existing marketing and sales workflows without breaking them, solutions built in collaboration with HubSpot's own teams, and genuine influence over the tools being designed for the next wave of B2B engagement.

The last one is the least visible and the most valuable. Roadmaps are shaped by whoever is in the room when the trade-offs get made, and small SaaS businesses are rarely in that room.

It's a responsibility we take seriously. Our brief has always been intelligent, strategic, human marketing, and this is a chance to argue for that at platform level.

Where HubSpot goes next

HubSpot is moving quickly from a marketing automation platform to a full customer platform, and AI is the engine of that shift. Content assistants, chatbots, predictive insight, smart automation — the surface area is large and growing.

The harder question is responsibility. By creating a dedicated space for partners to work through AI use cases, limitations and ethics, HubSpot is trying to make sure innovation arrives inclusively rather than just quickly. We're glad to be at that table, representing agile, growing SaaS businesses and the agencies backing them.

We'll report back through the year on what comes out of it — particularly the parts that change what we'd recommend you actually do.