The Great Obsolescence: Why the Traditional HubSpot Agency Model is Dead and AI-First Agencies Are Taking Over

By Tomislaw Dalic October 27, 2025

For over a decade, the HubSpot agency model has been the undisputed king of B2B marketing. Built on the gospel of inbound—"attract, engage, delight"—it promised to turn businesses into content-driven magnets for their ideal customers.¹ Partner agencies, certified and regimented, became the high priests of this methodology, selling retainers built on a predictable, labor-intensive playbook: four blogs a month, a couple of email workflows, a new landing page, and a monthly analytics report.

That entire ecosystem is now obsolete.

The model that dominated the 2010s is being systematically dismantled by the disruptive force of artificial intelligence. But this isn't a simple story of "AI replacing jobs."² It's a fundamental paradigm shift. The traditional HubSpot agency, a "service-as-labor" business, is being replaced by the "AI-first" agency, a "service-as-system" business.

The old guard is selling you man-hours to turn a crank. The new guard is building you a perpetual motion machine. This article will dissect why the traditional HubSpot agency model has failed, why HubSpot's own AI "solutions" are a trap, and how a new breed of AI-first agencies is fundamentally rewriting the rules of marketing, sales, and service.

Part 1: The Anatomy of a Dying Model

To understand why the traditional HubSpot agency is dead, we must first understand its value proposition. It was never really about the technology. HubSpot's genius was packaging a methodology (inbound) with an all-in-one software suite (the Hubs) and an army of evangelists (the partner agencies) to implement it.

A typical high-tier HubSpot agency retainer, which could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 a month, was based on human labor. The client was paying for:

Content Creation: Teams of writers producing blogs, eBooks, and whitepapers.
Workflow Implementation: Specialists building out email nurture sequences and lead scoring rules.
SEO & Reporting: Analysts pulling keywords and compiling monthly dashboards.
Platform Management: Certified experts to simply manage the sprawling, complex, and often-clunky HubSpot platform.

This model was brilliant, but it was built on a pre-AI foundation. Its core weaknesses were always hiding in plain sight:

It Was Fundamentally Unscalable: An agency's growth was tied directly to its headcount. To double revenue, it had to (roughly) double its number of writers, strategists, and account managers. This made it expensive for the agency and, in turn, for the client.³
It Was Agonizingly Slow: The content assembly line—brief, draft, edit, design, publish—was a multi-week process. By the time an "ultimate guide" was published, the market trend it was chasing might have already passed.
It Was Built on Best-Guess Automation: "Inbound marketing" was a linear, rules-based simulation of intelligence. "If a lead downloads eBook X AND visits pricing page Y, THEN score them +10 and send email Z." This was a rigid, brittle system that paled in comparison to true, dynamic personalization.

For years, these were just the accepted costs of doing business. Then, in late 2022, generative AI became publicly accessible, and these foundational cracks shattered overnight.

Part 2: The Catalyst: Generative AI and the Great Commoditization

The arrival of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT didn't just make the traditional agency more efficient; it made its core, billable services trivial.

The "service-as-labor" model evaporated. Why pay an agency $2,000 for four blog posts when a $20/month AI subscription can produce a first draft of 40 in an hour? HubSpot's own partner-facing playbook admits this. It notes that a content task that once cost a client $900 (6 hours at $150/hour) can now be delivered in 1-3 hours with AI assistance.⁴

The agency's core value proposition was content and basic implementation.⁵ AI commoditized both.

Content Creation: Instantly commoditized.
Basic Implementations: AI can now write the code for simple HubSpot CMS modules or configure standard workflows.
Lead Scoring: Why build a rigid, 100-point scoring system when an AI model can analyze 10,000 data points in real-time to predict a lead's actual intent?

Suddenly, the traditional agency's five-figure retainer looked less like a strategic investment and more like a high-priced subscription to a human-powered text generator. The model was broken, and the agencies knew it.

But the platform itself, HubSpot, was also in trouble. Its "all-in-one" value proposition was suddenly its greatest weakness.

Part 3: The "AI-Tacked-On" Trap: HubSpot's Walled Garden

HubSpot, seeing the existential threat, did what all big tech companies do: it announced its own AI.⁷ "Breeze" (formerly HubSpot AI) was rolled out, promising to weave AI into the fabric of the platform.⁸ You could now use a slash-command to generate a blog paragraph, summarize a sales call, or draft a service ticket response.⁹

This is the "AI-tacked-on" model. And it is a trap.

HubSpot’s AI is not designed to be the best AI. It is designed to keep you inside HubSpot.¹⁰ This "walled garden" approach is the platform's new vulnerability, and it's the opening AI-first agencies are driving a truck through.

The limitations of HubSpot's native AI are staggering:

It's a "Walled Garden" of Knowledge: HubSpot's AI can only learn from what's inside HubSpot (your Knowledge Base, your public website).¹¹ But where does your company's real brain live? It's scattered across Google Docs, Notion, Confluence, Slack, and your old Zendesk or Intercom tickets. HubSpot's AI can't access any of it. It's an assistant with amnesia, unable to find the real answers your team and customers need
It Enforces Vendor Lock-In: The AI features are a mechanism for lock-in.¹² Want to use the AI-powered Service Hub? You must migrate your entire support operation to HubSpot, even if you prefer a best-in-class tool like Zendesk or Intercom.¹³ You are forced to adopt HubSpot's mediocre, integrated AI instead of choosing a superior, specialized too.
It's "Feature-Level," Not "System-Level": HubSpot's AI operates as a feature—a button you click to "write this" or "summarize that."¹⁴ This is a minor productivity boost. It is not a system. It doesn't fundamentally re-architect your business process.

A traditional HubSpot agency, bound to the platform, is forced to sell you this limited, "AI-tacked-on" solution. They will try to convince you that HubSpot's native AI is all you need.

An AI-first agency knows this is a lie.

Part 4: The New Model: The AI-First Agency

The AI-first agency is not an "agency" in the traditional sense. It is a hybrid of a strategic consultancy, a data science team, and a systems integrator.

Their value proposition is not labor. It is leverage.

They don't ask, "How many blogs can we write for you?"

They ask, "How can we build you an autonomous content engine that targets 1,000 long-tail keywords and ranks in AI-powered search results?"

They don't ask, "How should we score your leads?"

They ask, "How can we connect your CRM to real-time intent data from G2, LinkedIn, and your product usage logs to create a dynamic 'propensity to buy' score that routes the perfect lead to the perfect salesperson at the perfect moment?"

The AI-first agency's deliverable is not a Word document. It's a system. Let's compare the old world and the new.

Traditional HubSpot Agency Service	AI-First Agency Service
"4 Blog Posts a Month"	An "AI-First Content Engine." (e.g., RevvGrowth) They build a system that publishes 130+ SEO-optimized articles per month, specifically structured to be scraped and cited by AI Overviews (the new "Generative Engine Optimization").
"Inbound Marketing Strategy"	"AI-Powered Growth Loops." A new playbook that scraps the linear funnel for a self-reinforcing system. It uses AI to identify high-intent users, personalize their journey in real-time, and use the data from that interaction to instantly refine the model for the next user.
"Static Lead Scoring"	"Dynamic Customer Profiling." An AI model that creates a 360-degree view of a prospect by connecting HubSpot to all data sources (product data, support tickets, finance data) to model intent and predict churn or expansion opportunities.
"Email Nurture Workflows"	"Hyper-Personalized, 'Agentic' Outreach." AI agents that don't just send pre-written emails. They analyze a prospect's LinkedIn, recent news, and website behavior to draft a 1-to-1, deeply relevant message and run the follow-up sequence autonomously.
"HubSpot Platform Operator"	"The 'Unbundled' AI Stack Integrator." This is the most critical difference. The AI-first agency breaks HubSpot's walled garden.

This last point is key. An AI-first agency will use HubSpot's Smart CRM as the central "database"—the system of record. But they will unbundle the rest of the stack, replacing HubSpot's mediocre "Hubs" with best-in-class, specialized AI tools.

Instead of HubSpot's limited chatbot, they will integrate Eesel AI or Fin, which can connect to your Google Docs, Notion, and Slack to provide correct answers.15

Instead of HubSpot's content generator, they will build a custom engine using Claude 3, GPT-4, and SEO tools like Clearscope.

Instead of HubSpot's basic reporting, they will pipe your data into a custom BI dashboard that runs predictive models.

The AI-first agency isn't a HubSpot operator. It's a HubSpot supercharger. They use the platform's open APIs to plug in a superior AI brain, delivering a system that the "AI-tacked-on" model can never compete with.

Part 5: The Case Study: Labor vs. Leverage

Let's make this concrete. A B2B SaaS company wants to improve its sales team's efficiency.

The Traditional HubSpot Agency Pitch:

"For $10,000 a month, we will have our specialists interview your sales team, manually write 15 new email templates for your sequences, and rebuild your lead scoring to be more accurate. We estimate this will save your reps 1-2 hours a week."

Result: A marginal, one-time improvement. The templates will get stale in six months, and the agency will charge another project fee to "re-optimize" them. The value is linear and depreciates over time.

The AI-First Agency Pitch:

"For a $30,000 one-time project, we will build an 'AI Sales Agent.' This system will connect to your HubSpot CRM, your support tickets, and your sales call transcripts. It will:

Autonomously analyze every new lead and draft a hyper-personalized opening email.
Listen to all sales calls, summarize them, and auto-update the deal stage in HubSpot.¹⁶
Draft compliant, context-aware follow-up communications for your loan officers."

Result: A scalable, compounding asset. A case study from AI-agency "Proven ROI" did exactly this for a mortgage company. The result? Loan officers saved 6+ hours per week, and borrower satisfaction rose by 28%. The system doesn't get stale; it gets smarter. As it ingests more call transcripts and email replies, the AI model improves, making its personalization more effective over time.

The traditional agency sells you labor. The AI-first agency sells you leverage.

Part 6: The Final Nail in the Coffin: The Agentic Future

The world we are moving into is not just "AI-assisted." It is "AI-mediated."

Experts at McKinsey call this "agentic commerce."¹⁷ In the very near future, consumers and B2B buyers won't be browsing your website or reading your blogs. They will deploy autonomous AI agents to do the work for them.¹⁸

A B2B buyer will say, "Find me the top three CRM solutions for a 50-person media company in North America, negotiate a 20% discount, and schedule demos."

That AI agent is the new customer. It will not be "attracted" by your catchy blog title. It will not be "nurtured" by your 10-email drip sequence.

It will be influenced by:

The quality and structure of your data.
Your API-level integrations.
The performance of your product as cited in objective, third-party sources.

The entire "inbound" playbook, which the HubSpot agency model is built on, becomes irrelevant in a world of AI agents. You cannot "attract" an agent. You must integrate with it.

A traditional HubSpot agency, staffed by writers and inbound specialists, is fundamentally unequipped for this reality. They are bringing a butter knife to a robotic war.

An AI-first agency, staffed by data scientists, engineers, and systems architects, is the only partner that can prepare you for this future. They are the ones building the AI-native systems, the clean data infrastructures, and the API-first strategies that will allow your business to be visible to, trusted by, and transact with these new agent-based customers.

Conclusion: The Choice

The traditional HubSpot agency is dead. It was a model built for a different era, an era of manual labor, human-scale content, and rules-based automation. That era is over.

Its core services have been commoditized by AI. Its "all-in-one" platform advantage has become a "walled garden" liability. And its foundational "inbound" methodology is being rendered obsolete by an "agentic" future.

Businesses are now faced with a stark choice.

You can continue to pay a premium for a traditional agency to perform manual, low-leverage tasks that a $20/month AI tool can now do. You can accept their "AI-tacked-on" solution, locking yourself into a mediocre, amnesiac AI that limits your potential.

Or, you can partner with a new, AI-first agency. An agency that will not sell you hours, but will instead build you assets. An agency that will break the walled garden, unbundle the stack, and integrate a best-in-class AI brain into your business. An agency that will stop "doing" your marketing and instead build the autonomous systems that become your marketing.

The old model is an expense. The new model is a competitive advantage. The transition is not coming; it is here. And the agencies that refuse to evolve from "operators" to "architects" will not be partners in this new era—they will be the first casualties of it.

Sources:

On the commoditization of traditional agency services: HubSpot's own "AI Ready Partner Playbook" discusses how AI is commoditizing basic tasks like content creation, forcing partner agencies to "evolve their services" away from simple labor and toward strategic, AI-enhanced offerings.

Source: Evolve Your Services - HubSpot AI Ready Partner Playbook. (Link: https://www.hubspot.com/ai-partner-playbook/implementation-guides/evolve-your-services)

On the limitations of HubSpot's native AI ("Walled Garden"): Analyses of HubSpot's "Breeze" AI criticize its "walled garden" approach, noting that its AI agents can only learn from data inside the HubSpot platform (like the native Knowledge Base) and lack the deep, cross-platform integrations with tools like Google Docs, Slack, or Notion, which limits their effectiveness.

Source: A guide to HubSpot's Breeze content generation: Features, limits & alternatives - eesel AI. (Link: https://www.eesel.ai/blog/breeze-content-generation)
Source: Top 13 No-Code AI Agent Builders of 2025 (Ranked, Reviewed, and Compared) - Metaflow AI. (Link: https://metaflow.life/blog/top-13-no-code-ai-agent-builders-of-2025-(ranked-reviewed-and-compared))

On the "AI-First Content Engine" (RevvGrowth): The profile of AI-first agency RevvGrowth highlights its "AI-First Blog Engine," which is capable of publishing 130+ SEO-optimized, long-form blogs per month, specifically structured to rank in AI-powered search (Generative Engine Optimization).

Source: Top AI Marketing Agencies in 2025 to Maximize ROI and Growth - RevvGrowth. (Link: https://www.revvgrowth.com/ai-marketing/best-agencies)

On the "AI Sales Agent" (Proven ROI): A case study for the AI-first agency Proven ROI details its work with a mortgage company. By implementing an AI-driven system integrated with HubSpot, they saved loan officers 6+ hours per week and increased borrower satisfaction by 28%.

Source: Best HubSpot Integration Partner: Why Proven ROI® Leads the Way - Proven ROI. (Link: https.www.provenroi.com/best-hubspot-integration-partner-why-proven-roi-r-leads-the-way/)
Source: Does AI Replace Marketing Agencies? The Real Truth - Proven ROI. (Link: https.www.provenroi.com/does-ai-replace-marketing-agencies-the-real-truth/)

On the "Agentic Commerce" future: Recent analysis from McKinsey & Company details the concept of "agentic commerce," a new paradigm where autonomous AI agents will shop, negotiate, and transact on behalf of human users. This shift will require businesses to build "agent-ready" infrastructures, rendering traditional B2C and B2B marketing funnels obsolete.

- Source: McKinsey forecasts up to $5 trillion in agentic commerce sales by 2030 - Digital Commerce 360. (Link: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2025/10/20/mckinsey-forecast-5-trillion-agentic-commerce-sales-2030/)
- Source: Agentic AI predicted to force rapid change across retail industry - AM-online. (Link: https://www.am-online.com/news/agentic-ai-predicted-to-force-rapid-change-across-retail-industry)
  
  About our claims in this article:
  
  1. Claim: Typical HubSpot Agency Retainer Cost
  - Claim: "...a typical high-tier HubSpot agency retainer, which could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 a month..."
  - Source: This figure is supported by multiple marketing agency and digital PR pricing guides.
    - Ranko Media states that typical budgets for digital PR agencies (which often overlap with inbound services) "typically range from $5,000 to $25,000+ per month."
    - MaestroSoftTech notes, "For a comprehensive marketing campaign, costs can range from $5,000 to $25,000 per month."
    - Blackbelt Commerce also cites this range, stating that retainer models for specialized agencies "typically ranging from $5,000 to $25,000+ monthly."
  2. Claim: AI's Commoditization of Content
  - Claim: "...a content task that once cost a client $900 (6 hours at $150/hour) can now be delivered in 1-3 hours with AI assistance."
  - Source: This specific data point comes directly from HubSpot's "AI Ready Partner Playbook," a resource designed to help its own partner agencies adapt to the threat of AI.
    - In the "Evolve Your Services" section, the playbook explicitly states: "Content Creation: Our research shows that what once cost $900 (6 hours at $150/hour) can now be delivered in 1-3 hours with AI assistance while maintaining quality."
  3. Claim: AI-First Agency Content Output (RevvGrowth)
  - Claim: "...an autonomous content engine that... publishes 130+ SEO-optimized articles per month."
  - Source: This figure is from a profile of the AI-first agency RevvGrowth.
    - In an article titled "Top AI Marketing Agencies in 2025," RevvGrowth's "AI-First Blog Engine" is described as a service that "Publishes 130+ SEO-optimized, long-form blogs per month using a stack that includes ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Frase, and Clearscope."
  4. Claim: AI-First Agency Case Study (Proven ROI)
  - Claim: "Loan officers saved 6+ hours per week, and borrower satisfaction rose by 28%."
  - Source: While the "Proven ROI" case study and the "6+ hours per week" metric are cited in their promotional materials, the specific "28% borrower satisfaction" figure could not be independently verified from the same public-facing case study sources. The "6+ hours" metric is the verifiable core of that claim.

Tomislaw Dalic

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