A briefing for CEOs and marketing leaders on why AI only works as well as the data behind it, and how HubSpot’s Data Hub turns fragmented CRM data into something you can actually build on. Drawing on insight from Tim Butler, CEO of Innovation Visual, and Maxime Lauricella, Partner Manager at HubSpot.]
Watch the Data Hub webinar in full, featuring Tim Butler and Maxime Lauricella
You’ve probably already started to include AI in your strategy. However, can you say your data is ready for it?
Watch the Data Hub webinar in full, featuring Tim Butler and Maxime Lauricella
It's hard to spot, and usually the AI itself gets blamed rather than the underlying data when a project doesn’t get the expected results. Often, it's the small operational habits that pile on top of each other:
Your marketing team can’t personalise outreach or segment your audience with any confidence
Your leadership stops trusting the dashboards your own team built
Your sales and marketing people waste hours moving data between systems by hand
The AI tools you’ve bought produce inconsistent, unreliable results
You can live with that for a while. But it catches up with you the moment you try to build something on top of it.
Your AI agents are only ever as good as the information and tools you give them.
In our recent webinar, Maxime Lauricella, HubSpot’s UK partner manager, explained that the average business now runs around 15 different tools across its customer journey. This means most companies end up making decisions using only around 20% of the data they hold. The rest of the data ends up disconnected, duplicated across systems, or never used.
This creates contacts you can’t segment properly, and a dashboard that nobody trusts. Therefore, you’re left with AI tools you cannot rely on, because you only ever fed them a fraction of the picture.
“If you want tools to deliver great results, you’ve got to think about the information you’re delivering to them.” Tim Butler, CEO at Innovation Visual
Tim Butler, CEO of Innovation Visual, calls this the hybrid workforce. This is not people splitting time between home and the office. But instead, people working alongside AI agents as members of the team. These agents only know what you show them, and if you want them doing marketing, sales or customer service work, the data behind them has to be trustworthy.
HubSpot renamed Operations Hub to Data Hub earlier this year, and this reflects a change in what the product does. Data Hub is HubSpot’s toolkit for understanding, connecting, cleaning and activating the data that you already have, inside and outside, your CRM. Rather than treating data quality as a one-off clean-up job, it’s built to keep your data in an efficient format automatically, so everything else you build on HubSpot, your campaigns, your reporting, your AI features, has something solid to work from.
One of the main reasons for having messy data is that nobody knows how the data is structured. The Data Model tool simplifies this for you. It gives you a visual map of every CRM object, contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and shows you how they connect, which properties are connected, and how those properties get used across your workflows and reports.
HubSpot now offers over 100 native, two-way integrations you can switch on in a few clicks. For everything outside that list, and most established businesses have at least one system that falls outside it, an accredited partner can build a custom integration instead. HubSpot has also introduced Smart Transfer, a tool for migrating your data wholesale from platforms like Salesforce or Zendesk, without losing the context you’ve built up over years.
“The fact that you’re not losing any context around records, and it’s a really deep data transfer, which often wasn’t possible... it’s been pretty magic when we’ve been using it of late.” - Tim Butler, CEO at Innovation Visual
Once you can see your data and connect your systems, the next job is making sure what is in there is worth using.
The Data Quality tool finds and merges duplicate contacts and companies, the classic problem where one sales rep owns five versions of the same account, and fixes formatting issues automatically: swapped first and last names, incorrect capitalisation, placeholder text left in a field, missing or wrong location data. It also flags properties and workflows that are outdated, so your CRM doesn’t just get clean once, it stays that way.
Data Studio allows you to connect data that isn’t in HubSpot, a spreadsheet from an event, a Shopify report, a Stripe export, and blend it with your CRM data without injecting anything messy into your live system. You can also prompt it to generate new columns, or ask it to research a list of companies and flag which are B2B or B2C, and it does the work, so you only sync the records that matter into HubSpot.
How Data Studio unifies external sources with your CRM
It’s the question that most leaders ask when starting new projects. Your data is a mess, and you want to implement AI to improve your current processes, so do you wait?
On our webinar, Tim Butler summed it up in one line:
“Data is never going to be perfect, you’ve got to move forward... better 95% today than 100% tomorrow.” - Tim Butler, CEO at Innovation Visual
His point is straightforward: perfect data doesn't exist, and waiting for it only delays results your business could be getting right now.
It is important to start by weighing impact against effort. Low-impact, high-effort projects are what Innovation Visual call AI killers . They eat up time and goodwill, and when the payoff turns out to be small, they put the whole business off trying again. Therefore, aim for high impact and low effort instead. Several Data Hub tools, enrichment, formatting fixes and deduplication among them, are easy high-impact tasks. A data audit is always the sensible first step. It tells you what is broken before you spend money on fixing everything.
Data Hub provides the tools for your organisation. Turning that into a working AI strategy that improves how your team operates takes expertise, not just access to the software.
As a HubSpot Platinum Partner with over 12 years of accreditation, we run data audits and CRM migrations that preserve context and fix the worst of the mess before AI gets layered on top.
Beyond Data Hub, our HubSpot services cover onboarding and custom integrations. A website connected to clean CRM data can personalise content and convert far more effectively too, which is why we build sites on the same foundations through HubSpot website development.
Clean, connected data isn’t a back-office chore. It’s the direct input to better targeting, better campaigns and a hybrid team.
Data Hub is HubSpot’s data management product, previously called Operations Hub. It brings together tools for mapping your data model, syncing and migrating data from other systems, cleaning and enriching records, and blending external data through Data Studio, all built to keep your CRM accurate and AI-ready without needing a dedicated data team.
You should run a data audit first, but don't let it hold you back from starting. Use it to find and remove the obviously duplicated or unused data, then keep improving from there while you get on with using AI. Tim Butler's advice from our webinar stands: data is never going to be perfect and waiting for it to be perfect means never starting. Better 95% today than 100% tomorrow.
No. Data Hub gives you the tools to migrate and clean data yourself, but a proper migration still benefits from a partner who’s done it before, especially when you’re consolidating multiple systems or moving years of historical records. That’s exactly what our CRM data migration accreditation exists for.