A look to the future – speed, convenience and the rise of AI in today’s sales and marketing with HubSpot’s James Gilbert.
James Gilbert is HubSpot’s Marketing Director in APAC. He leads the inbound movement in Australia, New Zealand and Asia, with a mission of helping businesses grow better by transforming the way they market and sell to match the way modern humans want to buy.
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He says speed, convenience and the rise of artificial intelligence is driving innovation, “we know what convenience is now but it continues to be redefined in ways that we can’t even imagine,” he says.
Speaking at the inaugural State of Social conference at Optus Stadium on Tuesday the 26th of June 2018, Mr Gilbert says messaging apps are the platform to watch, with Hubspot rolling out a new Facebook Messenger app on the 7th of August.
“Mobile phones have opened up access to a bunch of services that take convenience to a whole other level,” he says.
“There’s a focus especially on live chat, where you could be chatting to a travel agent and then have to jump in your Uber, so you transfer from the chat on your laptop to the mobile app and continue the conversation.”
Mr Gilbert says he also expects to see a sharp rise in the use of voice to text with 20% of internet searches currently coming from voice; “in two years, we could be up to 40% voice search,” he says.
He also warns companies need to be constrained with the rollout of new technology and the early adoption of artificial intelligence, as it can be alienating for customers. He suggests to allocate a percentage of a marketing budget to trialling new tech on customers before its release, “say 80% of the people in this audience have Facebook Messenger, that means 20% of you may really hate it,” he says.
