This week, the Hexus team partnered with Apollo to bring together Go-to-Market leaders, executives, and founders in San Francisco during HubSpot INBOUND week for Not Another AI Happy Hour — a standing-room-only panel discussion on how AI is reshaping pipeline generation and customer engagement.

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With GTM teams under constant pressure to move faster and operate leaner, our panel of founders and leaders from Sendoso, Sequel, and Apollo shared how they’re using AI-powered tools to streamline workflows, improve content, and set up their teams for success.

The room was buzzing with energy, and the consensus was clear: AI is here to stay, but adoption and impact look very different depending on company size, use case, and organizational culture.

A big thank you to our incredible panelists for bringing their perspectives to the table:

• ‍Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO at Sendoso
• ‍Oana Manolache, CEO at Sequel.io‍
• Mack McConnell, Co-Founder at Geostar‍
• Xi-Er Dang, Product Marketing Lead at Apollo, who moderated the discussion

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Key Takeaways from the Panel Discussion

1. Adoption Is Uneven, But Rising Fast

AI adoption is accelerating, but the pace looks very different depending on the size and maturity of the business. Startups and mid-market companies are eager to test new tools, while larger enterprises remain more conservative, often requiring approvals and extensive data governance in place before AI-powered features go live.

Startups & mid-market teams are experimenting aggressively, using AI to shorten gift research, prospecting, and business case creation from hours to minutes. — Kris

• Enterprises often request to “turn off” AI features until security, compliance, and data ownership questions are addressed. This slows initial adoption but can lead to more structured rollouts once trust is built.
  
  

Inbound traffic shifts are undeniable: companies like Vercel saw signups from ChatGPT grow from 1% to 9% in a single year, while Google AI Overviews already drive even more hidden traffic. — Mack

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2. Productivity Gains Are the First Wins

When it comes to pipeline generation, the most immediate impact of AI isn’t in bold, futuristic use cases; it’s in reducing the grind of repetitive GTM tasks and creating opportunities to both iterate and scale faster

Research and personalization: AI cuts down the 15 minutes once needed for gift research or drafting a note into seconds. — Kris

Business case creation: Sales teams that once spent nearly an hour crafting business cases per demo now generate them in minutes, freeing up bandwidth for more conversations. — Oana

• Scaling without hiring: AI agents for account management and SDR tasks are helping companies cover the “long tail” customer segments without adding headcount, saving hundreds of thousands annually, we can invest in other areas of the business.
  
  

3. Human + AI > AI Alone

The panel repeatedly emphasized that AI’s role is not replacement, it’s augmentation. AI can draft, suggest, and automate, but the “last mile” of customer engagement still depends on humans to make the interaction authentic and valuable.

90/10 balance: AI does the heavy lifting for content and data, however, humans are a critical part of the loop to refine messaging, adjust tone, and add the context and nuance machines can’t replicate. — Mack

High-value moments stay human: Bottom-of-funnel conversations, where trust, nuance, and relationship-building matter most, remain firmly in the hands of people. — Mack

• Choice matters: Some customers prefer a dedicated human CSM, while others are open to AI-driven account management when it comes at a fraction of the cost (10s of thousands of dollars)
  
  
  

4. Build vs. Buy: A Balancing Act

Another lively part of the discussion centered on whether companies should build AI tools in-house or buy off-the-shelf solutions. Each panelist acknowledged that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, it truly depends on the problem being solved, resources available, and long-term strategy. Engineering lead organizations and builders in technical roles may lean into building for their love of solving challenging problems using Cursor and Claude code to iterate faster.

Buy for stability and scale: Panelists noted that building something like global logistics or live video infrastructure isn’t feasible for most companies. Buying solutions brings immediate stability, scalability, ongoing innovation, and support. — Oana

Build for speed and morale: Many teams bias toward building, especially when the problem feels urgent and the engineering team is motivated. Building can also be a morale booster, letting teams experiment and learn hands-on. — Mack

• Maintenance risk: A recurring concern was what happens when the engineer who built an internal tool leaves. Purchased tools provide continuity, while custom-built ones risk breaking without dedicated ownership.
  
  
• Customer objections: On the GTM side, sellers are already encountering the same question from prospects—why buy when we could build? The most effective objection handling emphasized long-term value, innovation cadence, and reduced maintenance risk.

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5. The Road Ahead: Data Clean-up, UI-less Interfaces, Sales Coaching 

While today’s wins come from productivity boosts, GTM leaders are already looking to the next wave of applications.

• Sales analytics & real-time coaching: Panelists highlighted this as the missing piece — AI tools that can guide reps mid-call or in real time could transform performance.
  
  
• Data Clean-up: Marketing and RevOps teams still wrestle with manual cleanup across HubSpot, Apollo, and Claude. Seamless AI-driven integration remains a major opportunity.
  
  
• UI-less workflows: Envisioning CRMs as command centers, where reps can trigger dozens of tasks to engage prospects and customers across systems via natural language or MCP connections — moving from point-and-click to conversational interfaces.
  
  

Final Thoughts

AI is no longer a side project in GTM, it’s a core lever for scaling productivity and pipeline. The challenge is balancing speed with trust, automation with authenticity. The companies that master this balance will define how pipeline is driven in 2025 and beyond.

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Quick take from Hexus

At Hexus, we see this shift firsthand. GTM teams don’t just need more content, they need content that’s faster to create, easier to personalize, and proven to drive engagement. That’s why we’re building an AI-powered platform that helps Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams turn product knowledge into interactive demos, guides, and enablement materials in minutes.

Just as the panelists emphasized, the winning formula is AI doing the heavy lifting while humans bring the insight and authenticity. Hexus is designed to make that balance possible so teams can focus less on production and more on connection. 

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