On January 20, 2026, HubSpot released eight platform updates spanning customer success workspace improvements, AI agent notifications, assistant building enhancements, and expanded customer agent channel capabilities. The updates demonstrate continued investment in workspace customization, agent automation infrastructure, and omnichannel customer service capabilities.
The batch includes significant quality-of-life improvements for customer success professionals alongside foundational changes to agent management and AI connector security requirements. Updates range from public beta features to general availability releases across Service Hub, Operations Hub, and platform-wide capabilities.
The customer success workspace now features a persistent, customizable sidebar that displays comprehensive customer context and actions without requiring users to navigate away from their current view. Available in public beta, this feature addresses a long-standing workflow disruption where customer success professionals needed to switch between the workspace and record pages to access critical information. The extended sidebar appears when users click an object name in the customer services or revenue tables within the CS workspace. Admins can configure multiple tabs containing cards for health scores, activities, deals, tickets, and other relevant data. Crucially, customizations only affect the CS workspace's extended sidebar and do not impact sidebar configurations elsewhere in the portal—a limitation that previously prevented teams from optimizing this interface.
Why It Matters: Customer success teams lose efficiency through constant context switching. This feature centralizes critical customer information in a single, persistent view while enabling admins to tailor the interface to their specific workflows without unintended consequences across other HubSpot tools.
For more details, visit: Customizable Extended Sidebar for Customer Success Workspace
HubSpot introduced automated notifications that alert team members when agents complete runs, encounter failures, or require tool approvals. This system eliminates the need for manual status checking and ensures timely responses to agent activity across automated workflows. The notification system supports flexible team structures, allowing both individual owners and entire teams to receive updates based on their roles. Users maintain control through account-level notification preferences to prevent alert overload while staying informed about critical agent activity.
Why It Matters: As organizations scale their use of AI agents, monitoring multiple automated processes becomes increasingly complex. This notification infrastructure accelerates response times when agents require human intervention and provides visibility into automation performance without requiring dashboard monitoring.
For more details, visit: Agent Run Notification System
The custom assistant builder now includes an AI-powered enhancement tool that converts plain language descriptions into structured, comprehensive prompts. Instead of facing a blank prompt field, users describe their goals naturally, and the system generates instructions following HubSpot's best practices for clarity, tone, and behavior. The builder automatically populates the assistant template with instructions, inputs, and recommended tools based on the enhanced prompt. HubSpot emphasizes that users should review these generated configurations to ensure alignment with their intended assistant behavior rather than treating the output as a final configuration.
Why It Matters: Writing effective AI prompts requires specific expertise that many users lack. This feature lowers the barrier to assistant creation while introducing users to HubSpot's prompting conventions, potentially improving assistant quality across the platform as teams learn from the generated examples.
For more details, visit: Prompt-Based Assistant Builder
The reports and dashboards list pages now support custom views with personalized filters and pinned tabs, extending the CRM index page experience to reporting interfaces. Users can organize growing report libraries using tailored views that persist across sessions. This update follows last week's implementation of similar functionality on the users list page, continuing HubSpot's rollout of the enhanced index page interface across platform management areas.
Why It Matters: As organizations build more reports and dashboards, finding specific assets becomes increasingly time-consuming. Custom views enable teams to create role-specific or project-specific report collections, reducing search time and improving reporting adoption through easier access to relevant analytics.
Join beta: Custom Views on Reports List and Dashboards List
HubSpot will remove test mode for payment links effective March 3, 2026, due to changes in payment processing integration. Users can still preview checkout experiences using the payment links editor but will no longer be able to test actual transactions in test mode.
Why It Matters: Organizations using payment links for transaction testing will need alternative validation methods before the sunset date. While the update announcement does not detail replacement testing capabilities, teams should plan for workflow adjustments ahead of the March deadline.
For more details, visit: Sunset of Test Mode for Payment Links
Single sign-on configurations now automatically sync between production accounts and associated sandbox or developer test accounts. When admins configure SSO on production or create new non-production accounts, security settings propagate without additional manual setup.
Why It Matters: This update reduces administrative overhead while elevating security standards across all account environments. Teams no longer need to duplicate SSO configurations manually, ensuring consistent authentication requirements and reducing security gaps in testing environments.
For more details, visit: Sync Single Sign-On Settings to Sandbox and Developer Accounts
Organizations can now assign customer agents to third-party channels including SMS, Slack, Instagram, Telegram, Line, and WhatsApp through workflow and chatflow configurations. Teams can build custom channel integrations using the custom channels API or use marketplace apps that provide out-of-box support for these platforms. This expansion significantly broadens customer agent deployment beyond HubSpot's native channels of live chat, email, and WhatsApp. The update emphasizes truly omnichannel customer service by enabling AI-powered support across platforms where customers already communicate.
Why It Matters: Omnichannel service has historically required extensive human resources to manage multiple platforms simultaneously. Customer agent deployment across diverse channels enables organizations to maintain consistent, AI-powered presence on niche platforms without proportional increases in support headcount. Combined with recent improvements to customer agent expressions and tone controls, organizations can now deliver brand-consistent automated support across the complete customer journey rather than limiting AI assistance to specific touchpoints.
Join beta: Deploy Customer Agent Through Workflows and Chatflows
HubSpot now requires all new AI connectors on the marketplace to support user-level permissions through the developer platform. AI connectors are defined as applications that primarily connect HubSpot to general-purpose generative AI assistants or agents. This requirement mirrors the security architecture HubSpot implemented in its own connectors, such as the ChatGPT connector, which enforces strict user-level access controls from the beginning. Any actions taken by AI assistants on a user's behalf will be limited to that user's existing HubSpot permissions, preventing unauthorized data access.
Why It Matters: As AI integrations proliferate, maintaining consistent security standards across the marketplace becomes critical for data protection and compliance. This requirement ensures third-party AI connectors implement the same access controls as HubSpot's native integrations, protecting organizations from potential data exposure through poorly secured AI tools.
For more details, visit: New User-Level Permissions Requirement for AI Connectors on HubSpot Marketplace
Workspace Customization Momentum: The customizable CS workspace sidebar represents continued evolution of workspace-specific interfaces. Organizations should monitor whether similar customization capabilities expand to other workspaces or the CRM index page, as Chris Carolan and George B. Thomas speculated during their discussion of this update.
Customer Agent Infrastructure Maturation: Today's updates—particularly omnichannel deployment capabilities, notification systems, and prompt-building assistance—demonstrate HubSpot's investment in making AI agents more accessible and manageable. Organizations exploring customer agent implementations should prioritize clearly defined qualification criteria, brand voice documentation, and handoff protocols before configuration begins, as the technology capabilities are advancing faster than many teams' readiness to deploy them effectively.
Security-First AI Integration Standards: The marketplace permissions requirement signals HubSpot's commitment to maintaining security parity across native and third-party AI tools. Organizations evaluating AI integrations should verify that existing connectors comply with these standards, particularly if they were installed before this requirement took effect.