Rise Of The Agentic Customer Platform

I've been working in the CRM industry for 30+ years now (time flies!).

Throughout that time, I've seen exactly one major transformation in that time: Salesforce launching Cloud CRM 25 years ago. That shift took years to play out, but eventually every successful CRM became a cloud CRM.

This week, we announced the next one at HubSpot.

Everyone's talking about being "AI-first." Building AI features. Adding AI assistants. Integrating with the latest models.

But that's not the game. The game is being CONTEXT FIRST (which, if you read this newsletter regularly, you know I’ve been preaching for a while).

So today, I want to break down:

• Why context matters more than the AI model you use

• Where context actually lives in most companies

• What HubSpot has been building toward for 20 years

—@dharmesh

IQ vs CQ: The Context Quotient

Modern AI models are incredibly capable. GPT-5, Claude Opus, Gemini 3.0 -- these models have capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction just a couple of years ago.

But here's the thing: success isn't just about high IQ. It's about having high CQ -- Context Quotient.

I wrote about this recently in my post on The Three Quotients of Agent Success, where I broke down why agent success = IQ × EQ × CQ. Not additive, but multiplicative. If any of those goes to zero, so does the result.

You could hire the most brilliant consultant in the world -- a bonafide genius with a 200 IQ. But if they don't know your business, your customers, your current initiatives, or your team dynamics, that intelligence doesn't translate into useful action.

Now imagine hiring someone with a 150 IQ who knows your business cold. You pick the second person, every single time.

Why? Because raw intelligence without relevant context is just confident guessing.

Same with AI.

An AI that knows your Q2 pipeline is full, your best rep is on parental leave, and your biggest account just hired a new decision-maker responds very differently than one that doesn't.

One gives you generic advice. The other gives you advice that actually fits your situation.

That difference is context.

The Context Problem

The reality for most companies is that context is scattered and fragmented.

It lives in:

• Your CRM database

• Slack threads and meeting notes

• Google Docs and shared drives

• Email conversations

• People's heads

When a human employee needs context, they piece it together. They check the CRM, skim recent Slack messages, remember a conversation from last week, and synthesize all of that into understanding.

AI can't do that -- not without help.

Without shared, structured context, AI is sort of like a very smart intern on their first day of work: it can answer questions impressively and write eloquently. But it doesn't know what's actually happening in your business.

This is why most AI deployments underwhelm.

The missing piece isn't a smarter model. It's context.

The Agentic Customer Platform

This brings me to what HubSpot has been working toward. It's been 20 years in the making: The Agentic Customer Platform.

A customer platform built for both humans and AI agents. One that is context-first from the foundation.

The vision is simple: combine the world's smartest AI models with the deepest business context to deliver the most effective agents to drive growth.

Context-first means the platform is designed to:

• Capture the right context at decision time -- not just what happened, but why

• Maintain context over time so agents learn and improve

• Connect context across systems -- CRM, support, analytics, all synthesized

• Make context queryable so agents can ask "what precedent exists?" and get useful answers

As I ranted earlier, we’re not just bolting AI features onto the existing platform. We’re enabling AI agents to be first-class actors -- able to take actions, make decisions, and operate autonomously when appropriate, all with full context about your business.

Yamini Rangan, HubSpot's CEO, wrote a detailed post about our vision. You can read it here:

What This Means

Without a doubt, AI Agents are the future of software. I’m pretty sure you believe it, too, if you’re here reading this newsletter.

But here's my prediction: every successful GTM agent will need to integrate with an agentic customer platform.

Just like every successful sales tool eventually had to integrate with a CRM, every AI agent that helps with customer acquisition, retention, or growth will need access to a context-rich customer platform.

And eventually, every successful customer platform will be an agentic customer platform.

I know I'm biased -- I've been building HubSpot for 20 years. But the pattern from the Cloud CRM transformation applies here: the companies that get this right early will have a significant advantage.

Whether you're building agents or evaluating them for your business, don't just ask "how capable is the underlying model?"

Always ask: How much context does it have access to? How does it learn about my specific business? Can it remember decisions and improve over time?

Context isn't a feature. It's the WHOLE GAME.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be digging into the details of what this means from a product and technology perspective. For now, I love it when the dots start to connect.

If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear them.

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)