HubSpot's CMO on how AI will mess with marketing metrics - and why that's exciting

HubSpot's Marketing Chief Kipp Bodnar tells me why creativity matters more than management in the AI era

"I'd wager that the most successful companies of the next decade were founded and run by missionaries who earned high rewards through hard work and learning."

Kipp Bodnar is talking about the AI talent wars, where companies are throwing $250 million pay packages at researchers, and his take is heretical: it won't work. Not in any way that matters. The HubSpot CMO thinks the mercenary approach might deliver numerical wins, but "it will not create this new 10x, better than anything outcome."

When I caught up with Bodnar recently ahead of HubSpot’s annual ‘Inbound’ conference and the launch of the company’s new Loop Marketing playbook, he was deep into experimenting with Perplexity's new Comet browser, dictating thoughts through Willow Voice, and building custom GPTs that his marketing team apparently would "die on a hill for." But what struck me wasn't his tooling obsession. It was his contrarian take on what actually matters as AI reshapes marketing.

"Benchmarks don't matter in real life," he told me, cutting through the industry's obsession with model performance metrics. "They don't correlate well to real life."

The Taste Problem

While everyone else is talking about prompt engineering and management skills for the AI age, Bodnar is focused on something decidedly more analog: taste.

"Taste is that unique point of view and unique understanding of your audience, what they need, the experiences that they're not getting," he explained. During the pandemic, bored and looking for something to do, he decided to learn about contemporary art by spending 20 minutes a day on Artsy, just looking at piece after piece. "Now I actually kind of understand. And if I was in New York City and I was talking to somebody running an art gallery, and I knew what they were focused on, I could have a good conversation with them."

This isn't just philosophical meandering. Bodnar believes the last era of marketing let people get away without taste because everything was "so metrics driven,” and focused on adjusting “knobs and dials." But that world is ending. The SEO apocalypse that marketers are lamenting on Reddit? It's real, but it's not the end of the story.

The Volume-to-Value Inversion

"Visits and revenue are going to get decoupled for the first time," Bodnar said, describing what might be the most important shift marketers need to understand. Traditional conversion rates used to be static; you just needed more traffic. Now it's flipped. "AI can really help your conversion rates improve and change dramatically. But it's much harder to move that visits number because you have established channels like Google going away."

The data backs this up. HubSpot is seeing customers who arrive via LLM-based search queries converting into customers twice as fast and at "12x the rate, not like 1 or 2x like over an order of magnitude more." The problem? There are far fewer of them.

This creates a paradox that's breaking marketers' brains. The old playbook (more traffic equals more revenue) is dead. The new reality requires something different: extreme personalization at scale.

"I don't know that we're that far away from me having like a dedicated part of any website just for you with custom content and everything," Bodnar mused. "Because I could programmatically do it and make it good."

Why Your CEO Shouldn't Hire That $10M AI Researcher

When I asked about the talent wars and those eye-watering compensation packages for AI researchers, Bodnar had a surprisingly measured take. Yes, he understands why companies are doing it: "the opportunity cost of not being great at artificial intelligence over the next 24 to 36 months is probably the highest opportunity cost, at least of this century."

But here's the kicker: "I'd wager that the most successful companies of the next decade were founded and run by missionaries who earned high rewards through hard work and learning." The mercenary approach of being top bidder for a particular researcher might work numerically, he argued, but "it will not create this new 10x better than anything outcome."

This extends to his philosophy on skills development. While others are preaching management skills for overseeing AI agents, Bodnar is skeptical. "Management has long been kind of overrated even in human culture. Professional managers will always get beat out by skilled craftspeople most of the time."

Instead, he champions curiosity, creativity, and ambition. "If you're willing to think about things from a slightly or very different perspective and from first principles and you're willing to have some ambition... it's 100x easier to make that vision come true now than it was five years ago."

The Browser Wars Nobody Saw Coming

Perhaps the most unexpected part of our conversation was Bodnar's enthusiasm for what's happening with browsers. Using Perplexity's Comet browser has him convinced that "the browser wars are kind of everything."

"I use Perplexity way more now because of Comet," he said, demonstrating how the browser can fill out forms, draft emails, and analyze YouTube videos in real-time with contextual understanding. It's not just a Chrome extension – it's full computer use that's actually fast.

This matters because it reveals something crucial about AI adoption: integration beats innovation. The best AI isn't the one with the highest benchmark scores; it's the one that slides seamlessly into your workflow.

The Diminishing Returns Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here's what the AI optimists won't tell you: "AI can't do everything." Bodnar was blunt about the reality of implementation. "If you use AI to solve customer support, you can resolve a lot of your customer support. But it's not like you're going to get 100% solved. You're going to get 50, 60, 70, 80, and then it might cost more money to solve the rest with AI than not."

This pragmatism extends to his advice for marketers navigating the chaos. When I asked about generative engine optimization (GEO, AEO, or whatever acronym wins), he was clear: pay attention, but understand the tradeoffs. "You get way less visits. And the attribution is way harder." But those visits? They're gold. HubSpot literally has recordings of customers saying, "I talked with ChatGPT for an hour about my business and they said that you were the best choice for me and I would like to buy your product."

What Apple Should Do (But Won't)

As our conversation wound down, I asked what he was most excited about. New OpenAI model releases, sure. Better video generation, definitely. But what really has him fascinated is watching Apple navigate this moment.

"Just give your whole market cap to Sam and have him run the company," he joked. "Do something crazy."

The company that once attracted mission-driven talent at a discount now finds itself desperately behind. It's a cautionary tale for any organization that thinks its current advantages are permanent.

The Real Transformation

Bodnar has seen this movie before. He watched the second generation of the internet create fortunes for early adopters. He's telling his team the same thing now: "My expectations around AI skills and AI adoption will likely be higher than anywhere else. And that's going to be great for you because... whenever you decide to take the next step of your career, you're going to go out to the market and you are going to have this premium skill set."

But unlike the social media revolution, this one requires something different. Not just early adoption, but taste. Not just management skills, but creativity. Not just more traffic, but better conversion.

"Creativity and ambition are now the limiting factors of successful people, successful companies," he said.

In other words, the robots aren't taking over. They're just raising the bar for what humans need to bring to the table.