The Vision of Transformation: Three Essential Takeaways from GROW Europe 2025

I’ve just returned from an unforgettable few days at GROW Europe 2025, and I am utterly convinced of one thing: the current era of innovation is not about minor tweaks or incremental optimisation - it’s about fundamental transformation.

The gathering of a thousand existing customers, partners, prospects, and app partners created a community that was truly inspirational. It reaffirmed that HubSpot’s strategy is underpinned by a relentless focus on the customer. This focus is crucial, as it plays directly into the seismic shift currently being driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

For businesses looking to thrive, ignoring this shift is not an option. But how should we approach the adoption of these revolutionary tools? My key takeaways revolve less around the technology itself and more around the leadership, strategy, and data foundations required to make AI work for you.

1. AI Success is a Leadership and Change Management Challenge

AI is the primary force driving most of the change and opportunity right now. However, it is a mistake to treat AI like a generic mandate—a simple instruction that "we should use AI". As I heard reinforced in an interesting discussion, including one with Open AI, success depends entirely on strong leadership and effective change management.

The fundamental requirement for successful implementation is clarity:

• Understand the Specific Problem: You must first clarify exactly what specific problem you are trying to solve. AI must be treated as a targeted solution, not a general tool.
  
• Executive Sponsorship is Non-Negotiable: The identified problem and its solution must be important enough to the business that it receives leadership vision from the top. Leadership must set the vision: "This is what we want to use it for. This problem will be solved like this far out into the future". Without this executive vision, implementation projects invariably get lost in the details and fail to deliver strategic value.
  
• Iterate Quickly and Define Success: Agility is key. Set clear success metrics at the very beginning. The power of fast prototyping and additional data allows you to try it, see what happens, and iterate quickly, constantly checking if you delivered the desired outcome. You must have the vision and keep track of that vision as you move along.
  

If you are not going to use AI to drive some specific, measurable change, (whether increasing revenue, improving productivity, or enhancing service), what exactly are you using it for?

2. The Shift: From Optimisation to Communication at Scale

For me, the most exciting takeaway is that there is simply more to go at. HubSpot’s platform evolution demonstrates this perfectly. It started as a marketing tool, grew into a strong CRM, and has now extended its functionality with assistants and agents.

These new capabilities effectively provide teams with "digital co-workers". This helps people do better work by removing common organisational friction points, such as backlogs, process breaks, process gaps, and the need for batch processing.

With all data connected across the platform, we are entering a new area where we can genuinely help businesses communicate properly at scale. This level of communication impacts every operational area: marketing, sales, customer success, operational decisions, and management decisions. Ultimately, this capability empowers your teams and rapidly evolves the culture of a business to become demonstrably better at communicating with people. This focus on communication and user experience is vital, especially when considering that a lack of user adoption is the number one reason for CRM implementation failures.

3. The Data Challenge is Not What You Think

We frequently hear businesses delay AI implementation because they claim their foundational data is "terrible, bad, siloed, or trapped". This is a critical misconception that holds many organisations back.

The good news is that the mess buried in your old systems (the data in your 16-year-old spreadsheets, ERP systems, or accounts packages) is often not the data you need for every high-impact growth process.

If you are using AI to increase retention, improve productivity, or increase revenue, the foundational data you need is often generated live on the fly as the customer moves through their journey.

Think about the customer journey through HubSpot:

• The data needed for marketing and prospecting.
  
• Interactions with sales and managing the deal pipeline.
  
• The relationship data generated through onboarding.
  
• Setting the scene for renewal and retention.

All of these are processes, and all of that data is dynamic. It is the communication created by the process itself. By focusing on fixing the process and collecting this dynamic data, businesses can start delivering value immediately, rather than waiting years for a massive legacy system migration.

Ready for Transformation?
I am inspired by HubSpot's vision to not simply tweak and optimise, but to constantly challenge partners and customers to think differently about platform usage and engagement. This push for change management and foundational process design underpins true digital transformation.

Successful CRM adoption requires more than just technology; it requires a culture shift and systems that are intuitive and agile. BabelQuest, as an Elite HubSpot Partner, specialises in helping businesses drive adoption and ensure that technology implementation is intertwined with positive organisational culture change.

If these three pillars of AI leadership, communication at scale, and dynamic data strategy resonate, it’s time to move beyond fragmented systems and discuss a transformation that actually works. Book a Strategic Consultation to discuss your digital transformation roadmap with our specialists today.