After a few years away, I was back at HubSpot’s annual conference (formerly INBOUND) now called UNBOUND. There were familiar faces, new connections, and plenty of ideas to bring home. Having attended a dozen INBOUND conferences over the years (am I really admitting that?), I was curious to see what had changed beyond the name after a couple of years away.
AI was everywhere, as you might expect. But the theme that kept coming through was surprisingly human: when everyone has access to the same tools, what makes your work worth noticing?
Across sessions on content, brand, search, and customer experience, one word kept coming up: taste. The judgment to recognize a good idea. The experience to know when something doesn’t ring true. The confidence to choose a direction because you believe in it, rather than because an AI tool suggested it.
For brands trying to stand out, that has some very practical implications. Here are the ideas that stayed with me.
1. Human judgment makes the difference
AI can produce a perfectly acceptable blog post, campaign concept, or sales pitch in seconds. The trouble is that perfectly acceptable can also be perfectly forgettable.
In Why Your AI Content Sounds Wrong (And How To Fix It), Lindsay Rosenthal, Katie Wrathall, and Luis D. Camejo put the problem plainly on a slide: “It gives you the average.”
That’s a useful way to think about what happens when we give AI a generic brief. It draws on familiar patterns and produces something that sounds like other things we’ve already read. Human creativity gives us the chance to make something exceptional by questioning those patterns, connecting unexpected ideas, and deciding which risks are worth taking.
HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan brought this back to the brand with the idea of a “Taste Profile”: a practical record of your perspective, your customers’ language, the stories you tell, and the things your brand would never say.
That last part matters. Knowing what doesn’t belong is part of knowing who you are.
For me, the test is simple. If you removed your logo from a piece of content, would anyone know it was yours? If a competitor could publish it tomorrow without changing a word, it probably needs more of you in it.
2. Better AI content starts before the prompt
Another idea expressed by several presenters was that “AI didn’t make content free, it instead made production free!!”
Production still takes time, oversight, and resources, of course. But the point is that making another version is becoming dramatically easier. Having something worthwhile to say still takes work.
The same presentation asked what was missing when different AI tools produced similar results. Its answer: “What the model knows about YOU.”
Your experience. Your opinions. The customer conversations that changed your thinking. The project that went wrong and what you learned from it. Those are the details that make a piece of content yours.
Before asking AI to write, give it useful material: a clear brand position, examples of your voice, approved customer stories, and an explanation of who you want to reach. Then add the context for this particular piece. What does the reader already know? What are they worried about? What do you want them to understand?
Jay Schwedelson offered a practical editing exercise in his presentation, asking for “one specific observation, one opinion someone could disagree with, one oddly precise detail.”
Those details need to be real. The point is to bring something you know into the writing, not ask AI to invent a personality for you.
His advice also included removing the familiar, inflated language that makes marketing copy sound machine-written. Often, the best edit is to replace a grand claim with a concrete example. Tell me what changed for a customer. Show me why it matters.
3. Do less and learn faster
One of the simplest messages I noted from HubSpot’s CEO was “Do less.”
That sounds almost surprising at a conference full of tools that help us produce more. But I took it as a call to focus: choose the audiences, messages, and channels that matter, and give them enough attention to work.
It also fits with HubSpot’s Loop Marketing approach, which connects four stages: Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve.
The traditional funnel gave us a fairly orderly picture of someone discovering a business, visiting its website, becoming a lead, and eventually buying. The conference sessions described a much less orderly reality. People form opinions through AI answers, social posts, videos, reviews, and conversations before they ever reach your website.
Loop Marketing gives teams a way to keep learning through that process. Express what makes the brand distinctive. Tailor the message to a particular audience. Amplify it in places that audience uses. Evolve based on what happens, then feed that learning into the next round.
For a client campaign, that could mean choosing one important customer problem, testing a few ways of explaining it, and developing the strongest response into a more substantial article, video, or guide.
Rapid iteration has a purpose when each version teaches you something. Filling more channels with the same unremarkable content doesn’t get you very far.
4. Make your expertise easier to find and trust
Search was another recurring theme. With buyers getting some answers directly from AI, the familiar relationship between search visibility, website traffic, and new business is changing.
That makes answer engine optimization, or AEO, relevant to the work we do with clients. It also makes clear brand messaging and useful website content more important. People and the systems helping them research need to understand what you do, who you help, and why you are a credible choice.
My practical takeaway is to start with the questions customers actually ask. Use sales conversations, interviews, and support enquiries to identify them. AI can help suggest possibilities, but your customers should help confirm which ones matter.
Then answer those questions clearly. Explain the trade-offs. Include examples from your own work. Make your expertise visible through named contributors, evidence, and accurate information. A well-designed page should make those answers easy to find and understand.
Tony Eades’ session on the experience advantage connected this to a broader point: your competitors can use the same AI tools, but they haven’t had your experience. And the experience you deliver to customers still determines whether they trust you.
For UP, that connects brand strategy, website design, content, and customer experience. A distinctive promise needs to be understandable when someone discovers you and believable when they work with you.
5. Poke holes in your assumptions
One of my favorite experiences at UNBOUND involved putting the technology away.
I was lucky enough to attend a new session format HubSpot tried this year: a small-group creativity workshop with Nancy Harhut and Neal Boornazian. We sat on bean-bag-style seats on a carpet in a room that felt a little like kindergarten. There were colored pencils. No electronics allowed. Just us and our own thinking.
Apparently, that still works.
One line I wrote down was: “Everything you think about how you think is wrong.”
The exercises challenged us to notice how quickly we accept our own assumptions. Two ideas particularly stuck with me:
- Confront your bias. Think about when a truth isn’t true. Look for the exception to the rule you’ve been treating as a fact.
- Borrow someone else’s brain. Consider the problem from another person’s perspective. What would they notice that you have missed?
It reminded me of “Think differently,” a line from Dowell//Stubbs in the days before UP. It’s still good advice, although saying it is easier than doing it.
Perhaps that was the most useful challenge of the conference. Question what you assume about your audience. Question the format you always use. Question whether the polished answer in front of you actually says anything.
When I wrote about INBOUND in 2022, connection was the theme that stood out. This year, I left thinking about the human experience behind that connection: understanding people well enough to create something they care about.
AI gives us more ways to make things. We still have to decide what deserves to be made, what our brands stand for, and what we want to say.
I’m taking that question back to the next brief. Colored pencils optional.
Make your brand stand out
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