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Good morning. Travis Kelce scored the ultimate podcast guest last night in his girlfriend, Taylor Swift. During the nearly two-hour episode, the singer spoke about the Eras Tour, her Easter eggs, and her new album. More than 8 million people have already watched it — but if you’re not one of them, read BI’s seven big takeaways.
In today’s big story, employees are treating ChatGPT like their new office besties. But there are risks, and some of their human coworkers feel weird about it.
What’s on deck:
Markets: Corporate bankruptcies are blowing past pandemic-era highs.
Tech: One of AI’s hottest startups is seeking a fresh round of fundraising.
Business: Why your favorite celeb is suddenly hawking cellphones.
But first, the rally continues.
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The big story
Your new office bestie
Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
The model coworker: Always on. Stays focused. Learns fast. No ego. No attitude. No pulse?
You know AI chatbots can be great tools to optimize your work — but this goes deeper. People are swapping office besties for bots, and it could spell disaster for real human connections.
For Nicole Ramirez, it began with using ChatGPT to draft emails. Then came more complex tasks. Before long, ChatGPT felt like a trusted coworker, even listening to her vent about real clients and colleagues.
She’s named it Deborah, by the way.
More and more Americans are developing human-like relationships with AI, even romantically. For $69.99 a year — which BI’s Katie Notopoulos reasoned is cheaper than a few “real-life” dates — you could essentially purchase a romantic partner from Replika.
The appeal of building human connections with AI can be overwhelming. The potential dangers, too.
“Like junk food, it’s efficient when you need it, but too much over time can give you relational diabetes,” says Laura Greve, a clinical health psychologist in Boston. “You’re starved of the nutrients you need, the real human connection.”
BI previously spoke with four professionals — a sociologist, a psychologist, a digital etiquette coach, and a sex therapist — to explore how the rise of AI is changing how we see each other and ourselves and disrupting our manners and intimate lives. The findings? ChatGPT is making us weird.
MIT researchers found that overindulging in AI in the workplace can result in the weakening of critical-thinking skills. You may see yourself start procrastinating more, becoming lazy.
Then there’s how others may see you. Your colleagues might view you as dependent on the technology, less creative, and lacking growth potential, says David De Cremer, a behavioral scientist.
In a world where one-third of US workers would rather clean a toilet than ask a colleague for help — yes, it’s a real statistic — it’s no surprise that some are turning to chatbots instead. The risk arises when they start turning to them for everything else as well.
The workers who spoke with BI about using chatbots say they still interact with their human peers, just less often than they did before.
3 things in markets
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
1. US bankruptcies are surging past 2020 pandemic levels. Though the economy seems to be on solid footing, a peak in corporate bankruptcies signals pain beneath the surface. Beloved 1990s and 2000s brands like Forever 21 and Joann’s are among those that have filed.
2. Less BLS, more alternative data sources. Trump’s shake-up of the Bureau of Labor Statistics means macro investors may start leaning more heavily on non-governmental data sources. Those include the ADP jobs report, MIT’s Billion Prices Project, and more, macro traders told BI.
3. An easy way to make more money on your money. Many Americans are missing out on high-yield savings, according to a recent Vanguard survey. Here’s how to make sure you’re not missing out on any gains.
3 things in tech
Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images
1. Perplexity is raising another round of funding. This time, the AI search engine is seeking a $20 billion post-money valuation, according to an email sent to prospective investors seen by BI and a source with knowledge of the raise. Perplexity’s business has been surging lately, but that valuation still doesn’t come close to the surprise $34.5 billion bid it recently offered to buy Chrome.
2. Is Sam Altman a weak CEO? The OpenAI founder introduced GPT-5 and told everyone they’d have to get rid of the old versions of ChatGPT they’d been using. Then, after people complained, he reversed course. BI’s Peter Kafka argues that makes him a flexible CEO, not a weak one.
3. xAI is losing one of its cofounders. In a farewell post on X, Igor Babuschkin, who co-founded xAI with Elon Musk in 2023, said he’s leaving to start Babuschkin Ventures. In the post, Babuschkin recounted helping Musk build xAI from scratch — and said he learned two major lessons from him.
3 things in business
Michael Steele/Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
1. Why cellphones became the hot, new celebrity side hustle. Telecom is the new tequila, and everyone from Ryan Reynolds to Jason Bateman and Donald Trump is cashing in. The hope is that they can leverage the clout they have with existing fanbases to get people to switch mobile networks. (Whether that bet will pay off, however, is a different story.)
2. Not everyone loves Cracker Barrel’s modern makeover. Some of the chain’s locations are losing the decor that lent it a nostalgic feel, a change that diners are divided over. However, some said Cracker Barrel needs to focus on what they’re putting on the table, not the walls.
3. The protein bros have won. After four and a half years of being vegan, Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park announced it’s reintroducing meat to its menu. The restaurant’s chef said the vegan menu “unintentionally excluded some people” and caused financial difficulties. The decision also aligns with the country’s current protein obsession.
In other news
What’s happening today
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Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO in court on sex trafficking charges.
Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York (on parental leave).
Business
Business Matters: OpenAI and Meta say they’re fixing AI chatbots to better respond to teens in distress
Artificial intelligence chatbot makers OpenAI and Meta say they are adjusting how their chatbots respond to teenagers and other users asking questions about suicide or showing signs of mental and emotional distress. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, said Tuesday it is preparing to roll out new controls enabling parents to link their accounts to their teen’s account. Anne Gaviola has this story and more in Business Matters for Wednesday September 3, 2025
Business
HubSpot unveils blueprint to building hybrid human-AI teams with 200+ product updates at INBOUND 2025
While many businesses are experimenting with AI, most are still treating it like a side-project. At HubSpot, we believe the future belongs to businesses that build hybrid human-AI teams where smart people plus smart systems create exponential growth.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250903907062/en/
HubSpot announced their Fall 2025 Spotlight with over 200 product updates.
“We’re at a pivotal moment,” said Karen Ng, EVP of Product at HubSpot. “AI transformation is happening whether we’re ready or not. The question isn’t if AI will change your business—it’s whether you’ll lead that change or be left behind. The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most AI tools; they’ll have the smartest hybrid teams where AI doesn’t replace people, but multiplies their impact.”
At their Fall 2025 Spotlight , HubSpot unveiled exactly how to build those hybrid teams. The blueprint is simple:
1. Connect your data
○ Bringing together structured, unstructured, and external data is critical because hybrid teams are only as good as the data that powers them.
2. Enable your people
○ Embedded AI across HubSpot’s customer platform reduces busywork and allows humans to focus on strategy, creativity, and vision.
3. Build your AI team
○ A combination of assistants and agents will become digital teammates that work alongside humans to accelerate growth.
The products launched at the Fall 2025 Spotlight give GTM teams the tools they need to make their hybrid team a reality.
Connect your data
Most businesses are making 100% of their decisions with only 20% of the data.* The rest is scattered across systems, trapped in conversations, or just plain bad. The new Data Hub and powerful updates to HubSpot’s Smart CRM bring business data together—structured, unstructured, and external—to give GTM teams, and their AI, unified, clean, and complete context.
- Data Hub is a new hub** that brings together data from external sources and includes AI tools to connect, clean, and action data.
○ Data Studio uses AI to turn scattered context into unified data just by adding a column, powering smarter segmentation, automation, and reporting across HubSpot.
○ Data Quality is a new set of AI tools that automatically finds and fixes problems in customer data. No more manual clean-up.
- Updates to the Smart CRM, the context layer that provides the most complete view and understanding of the customer.
○ Flexible CRM Views allows for new data visualizations—boards, calendars, maps, or tables—so teams can view data however works for them.
○ Conversational and Intent Enrichment automatically enriches records with HubSpot’s proprietary data, unstructured data like calls, emails and support tickets, and intent signals like website visits.
○ Smart Insights surfaces the most important patterns and trends, delivering actionable recommendations without digging through reports.
Enable your people
Embedded AI features across HubSpot’s customer platform help humans focus on strategy, creativity, and closing deals. This is AI that’s built into the workflows teams already use. No context switching and no data gaps. Marketing, sales, and service teams get intelligence where they need it to help them grow.
○ Segments + Personalization unlock dynamic, AI-driven segmentation that grows with your business, with new powerful features for audience targeting that is truly personal.
○ In Marketing Studio, marketers can work with AI to generate a full set of campaign assets and optimize their campaign, all from a collaborative canvas.
○ AI-Powered Email uses your CRM data to create deeply personal messages for individual contacts for higher conversion.
○ AI Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy helps optimize how your brand appears in LLM answers.
- CPQ (Configure-Price-Quote) in Commerce Hub
○ AI-powered Quote Creation drafts quotes automatically based on conversations and deal context, saving reps time and accelerating the deal closing process.
○ The new Closing Agent is available 24/7 to answer buyers’ product and pricing questions.
○ Quote Engagement notifies reps when a prospect views or shares a quote.
○ Flexible Approvals route quotes to the right people based on custom criteria.
○ The new Product Builder makes it easy to create everything from simple fixed-price items to complex, tiered structures and bundles.
Build your AI team
New Breeze Agents, Marketplace, and Studio give GTM teams everything they need to build, customize, and deploy AI teammates—all powered by unified data for complete business context that point solutions can’t offer.
- Over 15 Breeze Agents across marketing, sales, and service:
○ Data Agent is a new AI agent from HubSpot that researches and answers custom questions about customers like which prospects are using competitive products.
○ Customer Agent is your AI front office concierge that instantly answers questions, resolves issues, and turns conversations into opportunities.
○ Prospecting Agent is a 24/7 BDR that understands your business, monitors prospects for buying signals, researches target accounts, personalizes outreach, and engages at the perfect moment.
- Breeze Assistant is an AI companion that works alongside GTM teams. Now with web search, memory, file upload, and connections to your teams’ favorite apps like Google Workspace and Slack, Breeze Assistant gives employees an expert that knows their business.
○ Custom Assistants take that a step further by allowing you to create specialized experts for specific business needs.
- In the Breeze Marketplace, you can discover, browse, and install Agents and Custom Assistants.
○ Breeze Studio is where you manage and customize Agents and Custom Assistants to work for your specific business needs.
Today, HubSpot also announced a new HubSpot connector for Gemini.**** Now customers can bring their HubSpot context to Gemini to surface insights, and generate content to be actioned back in HubSpot.
- Marketers can ask: “Show me a list of contacts in the ‘lead’ lifecycle stage, and draft follow up notes that I can send in HubSpot.”
- Sales reps can ask: “Show me a list of deals, and draft follow up emails that I can send in HubSpot.”
- Support teams can ask: “Show me a list of companies, and recommend a follow up note that I can send in HubSpot.”
Visit the Fall 2025 Spotlight to learn more .
* Data Bricks, Get more value from unstructured data
**Data Hub replaces Operations Hub.
***HubSpot proprietary data
****Available in closed alpha now and available to all joint customers soon
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250903907062/en/
Marketing software maker HubSpot at its annual Inbound customer conference on Wednesday will launch new artificial intelligence tools and agents. As with many software companies, the revenue impact from generative AI remains to be seen for HubSpot as its platform strategy evolves. Meanwhile, HubSpot stock has been struggling.
Adding customer data management capabilities to its platform has been a focus of HubSpot. At Inbound, the company will unveil a new data hub and more goal-oriented AI agents directed at marketing, sales and customer service.
HubSpot’s AI strategy focuses in part on “context,” helping customers use proprietary business data in a controlled way to build AI agent apps. At Inbound, HubSpot also will highlight hybrid AI workforces. According to the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm, a hybrid human-AI team is only as good as the data that powers it.
Meanwhile, HubSpot’s AI pricing strategy has been evolving. Like many software makers, HubSpot includes AI tools and agents for free in per-seat licenses. In June, though, HubSpot began charging users of Customer Agent consumption-based fees based on credit usage.
Also, HubSpot recently released a “deep research” connector for OpenAI’s ChatGPT — a natural language tool that lets ChatGPT analyze customer data.
In an interview, Head of Product Karen Ng talked about the software maker’s strategy.
HubSpot Stock: Inbound AI News
IBD: What’s HubSpot’s AI message to customers at Inbound this year?
Ng: What we want to do is help our customers through the AI era and we believe in hybrid teams — humans and (AI) agents. And so we think of our product strategy that way: To create the best hybrid team requires (data) context. That’s why we’re investing so much in creating context. It requires giving people tools to help them unlock creativity and personal reach and it requires giving them a set of tools that help humans be supercharged with AI and agents.
IBD: On Wall Street there seems to be concern about per-seat business models if productivity gains lead to fewer employees.
Ng: Our philosophy stays really the same as it always has been, which is we’ll focus first on value before monetizing. So we focus on value in our agents before we move to monetizing it. Customer Agent is one of our flagship agents. It resolves over 50% of support tickets today. In June, we moved to monetizing that through (consumption) credits and work that is done. The more you use (Customer Agent), the more it helps resolve support tickets, the more value it adds.
So you can think of our pricing model right now as hybrid. We still have a seats model and those seats have different tiers, and then we have a credit consumption model on top of each of the seats.
IBD: Do you expect HubSpot to stick with a hybrid model or at some point lean more consumption-based?
Ng: We recognize that from a seats model perspective, you may change the number of seats you have as AI causes more productivity with teams. Our monetization is tied directly to the value we deliver, and so there’s really no ceiling there. One other thing I’ll add is that especially in the world of AI, the concept of user permissions and what an agent is allowed to see is incredibly important. Trust is kind of at the heart of our AI strategy.
We believe in a hybrid approach. There is something we call personal AI, and that is the ability to supercharge human work. It is an assistant that kind of helps and supercharges humans today. That Breeze assistant is included in every one of our seats. That assistant can do a lot of different kinds of work. So, for example, being able to create a workflow in a natural language. We are still exploring how we translate that as value when AI augments humans.
Connecting To ChatGPT
IBD: HubSpot recently announced “connectors” into ChatGPT as well as Claude. What does that accomplish?
Ng: ChatGPT itself has over 700 million users. That is nearly 10% of global humanity, and now HubSpot is kind of a default connector in ChatGPT for everyone available to use. However, it requires a seat, because we want to respect user permissions (to access data). As long as you have permissions to access (data), which is done through a seat (license), you can use the connectors. We’ve seen over 20,000 users connect to ChatGPT.
IBD: On Wall Street there also seems to be a feeling that OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies are going to emerge as competitors in the enterprise market against software incumbents. Do you see that happening?
Ng: I do not see them as direct competitors. I believe that as in every tech disruption, it’s possible that they will come into different spaces, and we see that even with the verticals that they do. But it is a platform and operating system shift more so than a direct competitor.
HubSpot Stock Analysis
Meanwhile, HubSpot stock has retreated 32% in 2025.
HubSpot’s IBD Composite Rating is 53 out of a best-possible 99, according to IBD Stock Checkup. The best stocks tend to have a Composite Rating of 90 or better.
In addition, HubSpot stock has an Accumulation/Distribution Rating of E. The rating analyzes price and volume changes in a stock over the past 13 weeks of trading. On an A+ to E scale, the rating measures institutional buying and selling in a stock. E means heavy selling.
Follow Reinhardt Krause on X, formerly Twitter, @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
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