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Chris Carolan
HubSpot's October Updates: Enhancements and New Features
On October 24th, HubSpot unveiled a series of updates that promise to streamline workflows, enhance data insights, and offer more customization options for users.
These updates cover a range of features including CRM Smart Summary, Buying Groups, Automation Overview, and more. This article provides a comprehensive overview of these updates, detailing each feature and its impact on HubSpot users.
Platform Updates Detailed
CRM Smart Summary
Breeze Assistant now appears directly on record pages with smart summaries and contextual question suggestions. Users can ask Breeze Assistant questions about their records, save prompts that run automatically, and add Assistant responses as new cards to the page for quick reference.
Why It Matters: Instead of reviewing multiple tabs and properties to understand a record, users can now ask Breeze Assistant to analyze data and surface insights immediately. Saved prompts mean getting the same intelligence on every record automatically, making it faster to spot opportunities, understand deal status, or identify next steps. The hosts emphasized the importance of changing ingrained habits—many users immediately collapse or scroll past these summaries, missing valuable insights the system is trying to provide.
For more details, visit: CRM Smart Summary
Introducing Buying Groups
HubSpot launched buying groups, the platform's new native version of org chart hub, which joined the HubSpot family in June. Buying groups brings powerful context directly into HubSpot, making it easier for teams to understand and influence every decision-maker involved in a sale. The buying group functionality allows sales teams to get a clear visual of key stakeholders they are prospecting and selling to, with the ability to input buying group cards onto companies, contacts, and deals.
Why It Matters: When selling to large businesses, teams aren't selling to just one person—they're selling to complex buying groups. This feature helps teams see the whole picture of who's in the group, who's calling the shots, and who's influencing from the sidelines. It enables teams to spot gaps, identify missing connections or weak relationships before they become roadblocks, and protect deals by keeping everyone engaged and aligned to reduce the risk of last-minute derailment. The heat map visualization shows engagement levels across different parts of the organization, tracking emails, calls, and interaction depth over time. This visibility extends beyond the sales process, providing value in understanding relationships with existing customers as well.
For more details, visit: Introducing Buying Groups
Automation Overview Updates
Automation Overview now includes powerful new features to help users take action and learn faster. The interface displays recently created workflows, AI-powered automation recommendations tailored to each portal, an improved issues card, and HubSpot Academy automation resources all in one place.
Why It Matters: This update helps users get more value out of automation faster by surfacing recent workflows, personalized recommendations, and learning resources in one centralized location. It's easier to spot what needs attention, take quick action, and continuously improve how automation is used. No setup is needed—it's already ready for users.
For more details, visit: Automation Overview Updates
Custom Domains for Checkout and Payment Links
Merchants using HubSpot Payments can now host checkout pages on their own custom domains instead of a HubSpot domain. This builds buyer trust and delivers a seamless payment experience by hosting payment links and checkouts on custom domains. Note that Apple Pay and Google Pay are not currently supported on checkout pages hosted on custom domains. This feature is scheduled for release October 29th.
Why It Matters: Having checkout pages on a HubSpot domain causes confusion for buyers, leading to lower conversion rates and poorer experience due to repeated cookie consent requirements. Custom domains keep the buyer journey consistent and trusted, addressing a major blocker for business builders and improving conversions and satisfaction. When the URL in the address bar suddenly doesn't have the company name in it, buyers go on high alert—making this a long-awaited quality-of-life improvement for Commerce Hub users.
For more details, visit: Custom Domains for Checkout and Payment Links
Help Desk Customizable Search Results Columns
Users can now customize the columns that appear in Help Desk search results tables. Teams can choose which properties to display, rearrange column order, and save a layout tailored to their support team's needs.
Why It Matters: When customers reach out for help, speed and context matter. Customizable columns make it easier for agents to find the right ticket by surfacing the information that matters most directly in the search results. This is a quality-of-life improvement that enhances the index page experience within Help Desk.
For more details, visit: Help Desk Customizable Search Results Columns
Smart CRM Cards
New Smart CRM Cards, powered by Breeze, provide intelligent summaries and insights on company records. These cards surface critical information, flag potential issues, and suggest actionable steps to help users quickly understand what's happening within each company.
Why It Matters: Teams spend valuable time digging through company records to understand status and next steps. Smart CRM Cards solve this by providing instant overviews of company health, recent interactions, missing data, and more. Users will see early warnings about potential issues and clear recommendations for what to do next, helping make quicker, better-informed decisions with greater efficiency. This is a limited public beta—only a subset of eligible Professional and Enterprise customers will be able to opt in initially.
For more details, visit: Smart CRM Cards
Prospecting Radar
Prospecting Radar surfaces unengaged accounts in a rep's territory that may be worth revisiting based on buying signals or past deal activity. This feature is currently in development, with a "forward-looking statement" designation.
Why It Matters: Reps often overlook high-potential accounts simply because they can't manage hundreds at once, creating pipeline gaps and missed revenue opportunities. Prospecting Radar helps sales teams close the gap between owned accounts and engaged accounts by ensuring visibility into the right accounts to reengage, turning overlooked companies into new opportunities, and helping reps focus their efforts where it counts, leading to more consistent pipeline generation and higher win rates. This is particularly powerful for accounts marked as closed/lost for reasons other than choosing a competitor—such as "not ready" or "no budget"—where timing may now be right for reengagement. Users can request early access to test this experience before the beta officially launches.
For more details, visit: Prospecting Radar
Speech-to-Text in Breeze Assistant Mobile App
Now available on both Android and iOS, speech-to-text lets users dictate messages directly into Breeze Assistant. Whether on a walk, in transit, or simply preferring speaking over typing, users can now interact with Breeze using just their voice. This feature turns spoken input into text in real time, enabling users to get answers, create notes, or kick off workflows without lifting a finger.
Why It Matters: Speech-to-text is designed for busy go-to-market professionals who don't always have the time or free hands to type. Users can save time, capture thoughts instantly, and stay productive hands-free. To use it, simply open the Breeze mobile app on Android or iOS, tap the microphone icon in the chat input, and start speaking—voice is converted to text as soon as you stop talking. The hosts launched a "2026 campaign to kill carpal tunnel" by encouraging everyone to embrace voice input rather than typing everything.
For more details, visit: Speech-to-Text in Breeze Assistant Mobile App
Projects Task Card
Projects now include a default tasks card that displays all tasks associated with the project, providing a consolidated view where users can quickly review and manage all tasks for specific projects.
Why It Matters: Tasks drive project completion, but it hasn't been easy to view all tasks for a specific project in one place. The new task card solves this problem. The hosts noted the remarkable speed at which HubSpot is developing the Projects object—from launch to task cards to API support in rapid succession. If task cards can exist on project records, similar functionality for other record types is likely coming soon.
For more details, visit: Projects Task Card
Customize Brand Voice and Identity Across Brands
Introducing brand voice and identity customization for brands. Users can now define a unique brand voice, identity, and kit for each brand in their portal. This update allows tailoring how content is created across HubSpot's AI tools to better reflect the personality, tone, and values of each individual brand. For every brand, users can customize details like tone and personality, words to include or avoid, inclusive language preferences, and brand mission, vision, industry, and more.
Why It Matters: These settings help generate content that feels consistent, authentic, and aligned with each brand's voice. Whether managing one brand or many, HubSpot will automatically pull brand identity details by crawling the domain associated with each brand in the portal as well as pulling data from the CRM. This feature requires the brands add-on.
For more details, visit: Customize Brand Voice and Identity Across Brands
Payments in the New Forms Editor
HubSpot is adding support for payments in forms, allowing integration of digital payments directly into forms built in the new editor. Users can collect payments at submission—visitors complete a form and make a payment in a single streamlined process. Both form responses and payment details are stored in HubSpot for easy tracking. The update includes flexible payment redirects: simple redirects direct all visitors to a single payment link, or conditional redirects send visitors to different payment links based on information provided in the form.
Why It Matters: Businesses often need to collect payments alongside form submissions for event registrations, donations, or product purchases. This update makes transactions easier while keeping all submissions and payment data in HubSpot. This is primarily about bringing payment functionality to the new forms editor—users who have been using legacy forms for payment experiences likely stayed on the old editor because of this limitation. While this simplifies payment collection for buyers, it may increase internal complexity when using conditional redirects, requiring careful journey mapping.
For more details, visit: Payments in the New Forms Editor
Pathfinder in Customer Journey Analytics
Users can now uncover the most common paths customers take with their brand automatically. With customer journey paths, HubSpot identifies the top flows in journeys based on a start or end point users define, without needing to manually map each stage. The feature offers two modes: "top paths before this stage" to see how leads or customers typically arrive at key outcomes, and "top paths after this stage" to discover what happens after key milestones. Users can control how many steps are included in the analysis and which events are required to appear in the path.
Why It Matters: Understanding how customers move through the funnel just got easier. Journey paths highlight the most frequent steps before and after a defined stage, helping quickly spot drop-offs, key milestones, or high-converting paths. The most common use case is understanding what someone did before requesting a demo—something that has been surprisingly hard to nail down. However, if all events aren't captured in the system, Pathfinder will find a path, but it might not be the actual path customers are taking. This emphasizes the importance of data capture "at all costs"—without the complete story, attribution and journey analysis remain incomplete.
For more details, visit: Pathfinder in Customer Journey Analytics
Projects API
The Projects API is now available in support of HubSpot's new project object, which launched publicly last month. With this new API, customers and partners can programmatically create, read, update, and associate projects to related records.
Why It Matters: The Projects API allows users to create and manage project records as well as sync project data between HubSpot and other systems. Users can create new projects, retrieve existing ones, update project details, and delete projects as needed. The API gives partners, customers, and internal teams flexibility to automate project creation and updates based on triggers from other systems, sync project data across tools to ensure teams work from a single source of truth, build custom workflows and reporting on projects tailored to specific business needs, and enable integrations with external project management tools. This opens up possibilities like Fathom taking call recordings, extracting action items, and pushing them into HubSpot projects—functionality that previously wasn't available. The remarkable speed of development on the Projects object suggests HubSpot is prioritizing this heavily.
For more details, visit: Projects API
SurveyMonkey App: Sync Data to HubSpot Surveys
The SurveyMonkey app now allows automatic syncing of data as native feedback survey and survey response objects in HubSpot. This update enables using survey data from SurveyMonkey in tools such as Breeze, Workflows, Reporting, and Segmentation.
Why It Matters: With this update, SurveyMonkey survey responses become more integrated HubSpot assets, breaking down barriers between survey tools and customer insights. Previously, survey data was trapped in activity timelines, limiting what teams could do with it within HubSpot. Now users can analyze survey data synced from SurveyMonkey with Breeze, use SurveyMonkey survey responses as triggers in HubSpot Workflows, and build HubSpot reports using SurveyMonkey survey data. The hosts noted that while native HubSpot feedback surveys work well for many use cases, teams without Service Hub might rely on SurveyMonkey—though they encouraged considering Service Hub given its value beyond just surveys.
For more details, visit: SurveyMonkey App: Sync Data to HubSpot Surveys
Multi-Account Workflows
Introducing multi-account workflows, a powerful update that enables automatically creating and editing CRM contact records and their properties across connected HubSpot accounts. Users can now build workflows in one account that seamlessly create or update contact records in other connected HubSpot accounts.
Why It Matters: Multi-account workflows enable customers with complex organizational needs that benefit from separate HubSpot accounts to maintain the separation they need while automating data orchestration between connected accounts. The two most common use cases are routing form submissions from one brand or region to another brand or region, and running cross-sell campaigns across brands after a purchase.
For more details, visit: Multi-Account Workflows
Updated CRM Association Cards
Association cards now support sorting, searching, more display properties, and inline scrolling for easier navigation. These upgrades improve productivity by allowing users to find records faster, organize by labels, and see key details at a glance.
Why It Matters: Users now have more control, visibility, and flexibility when navigating CRM records and relationships. These upgrades streamline workflows while keeping record context easily accessible. The searchability improvement is particularly valuable—previously, users had to open new tabs to search, which caused them to lose their place. The hosts emphasized that if there's anything sales teams should be doing manually in the CRM, it's ensuring the relationships between records are correct, because sales has the most context. Teams need to stop over-automating associations, as getting them right activates the rest of HubSpot's capabilities.
For more details, visit: Updated CRM Association Cards
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
- Major Release Day: October 24th delivered sixteen substantial updates after a brief mid-week pause, demonstrating HubSpot's continued rapid evolution.
- AI Intelligence Expansion: Multiple updates leverage Breeze AI, including CRM Smart Summary, Smart CRM Cards, brand voice customization, and speech-to-text capabilities.
- Sales Enablement Focus: Buying Groups and Prospecting Radar provide powerful new ways to visualize relationships and identify opportunities.
- Journey Understanding: Pathfinder in Customer Journey Analytics makes it easier to understand actual customer paths, though data completeness remains critical.
- Projects Momentum: Rapid development of Projects object with task cards and API support signals HubSpot's commitment to project management capabilities.
- Cross-Account Capabilities: Multi-account workflows and brand customization reflect growing sophistication for enterprise and multi-brand organizations.
- Commerce Improvements: Custom domains for checkout and payment support in new forms editor reduce friction in payment collection.
- Integration Depth: SurveyMonkey sync and Projects API demonstrate continued emphasis on bringing external data into HubSpot context.
- Association Management: Updated CRM association cards improve a critical but often-overlooked area that "activates the rest of HubSpot."
- Habit Change Required: Several updates (CRM Smart Summary, speech-to-text) challenge users to change ingrained behaviors to realize value.
