Ten SmartAcres, One Growth Agenda: Why SmartAcre is going to UNBOUND 2026
Summarize this insights post with:
In a few weeks, ten SmartAcres will pack their bags for Boston. From September 16-18, we’ll be on the ground at UNBOUND 2026, HubSpot’s biggest event, freshly renamed after fifteen years as INBOUND, alongside thousands of marketing, sales, and revenue professionals.
We could tell you we’re excited. Everyone says that before a conference. What we’d rather tell you is the growth agenda we’re looking to leave with.
Our team isn’t walking into UNBOUND with a blank agenda and a stack of business cards. Each of us picked a session, a theme, and a question we’re determined to get an answer to. Not a recap written from memory two weeks later. A working list of what we’re watching for, and published live updates while there’s still time for it to be useful to you too.
The B2B marketing landscape isn’t waiting for anyone to catch up
AI is changing how buyers search. AEO is changing what it means to be visible. HubSpot is rapidly expanding what its platform can do, while marketers are being asked to turn all of those new capabilities into measurable growth.
The question isn’t simply “What’s new?” It’s “What actually matters?”
Across our team’s schedules, four themes kept coming up: AI agents, AEO, the evolution of HubSpot, and the fundamentals of demand generation. Underneath all four sits one bigger question: What does effective B2B marketing look like as the technology underneath it changes?
AI: From Automation to Agents
For the last few years, AI in marketing has mostly meant doing existing work faster: automating workflows, scoring leads, generating content, streamlining repetitive tasks. Now the conversation is shifting toward agents, AI that can make decisions, take action, and work across systems on its own.
Our CSO, Lisa Zwikl, is always tracking the latest AI tools and developments. At UNBOUND, she’s applying that to a specific question, which marketing fundamentals hold up regardless of the tooling? She’s most excited for sessions on the questions marketers rarely say out loud, and she wants to hear more about the timeless principles that matter even more as tech shifts. Ask her about AI adoption that’s safe and built to scale.
Anna Parrish, our VP, is looking at how those capabilities fit into an organization built to grow. She’s focused on what a strong data foundation requires and where tools like Agent Hub fit into it, which matters more now that AI is taking on autonomous work instead of just assisting marketers.
Those two angles point to the question we’re most interested in answering: where can agents genuinely improve a client’s marketing operation, and what has to be in place before they can? That’s what we want to bring home, not a list of which AI tools launched at UNBOUND, but where they actually belong in a B2B growth system.
AEO is no longer optional
The same shift is happening on the other side of the funnel. Buyers aren’t only searching Google and clicking through results anymore. They’re asking AI tools for answers directly, which changes the question from “how do we rank” to “how do we get included in the answer.”
That’s why AEO is a major focus for our team at UNBOUND. Melanie Cellini is heading into “What 10,000 Hours of AEO Taught Us” for practical answers on content strategy, citations, and measurement. Emily Babinchak is approaching the same shift from the content side, how marketers should write for answer engines and rethink email for the AI era.
Our team wants to understand what changes when the way buyers discover information changes, and what should change with it. We’ll be watching for the strategies, examples, and measurement approaches that make that shift actionable for our clients.
HubSpot as the Bigger Picture
UNBOUND is also a chance to step back from day-to-day work in HubSpot and look at where the platform is headed. Four of us are prioritizing HubSpot Spotlight sessions, each covering a different part of the ecosystem. Our HubSpot Engineer, Justin Johnson, is excited to focus on portal optimization alongside CEO, Dave Snyder, who is tracking what’s already improving and what Hubspot updates are still coming.
Dave’s focus is identifying the product updates and platform shifts that have real strategic value for clients, not just the features that make the biggest headlines. New capabilities only matter when they solve a real problem, improve an existing process, or create a better way of working. Natalie Kelly, our VP of Success, is on the AI and customer experience side, watching for what’s next on that front along with fresh thinking on teams. That’s what our team will be looking for as we bring HubSpot’s newest ideas back into client strategy, reporting, workflows, and go-to-market planning.
Demand Generation: New Tools, Same Goal
Not every useful takeaway from UNBOUND will be about AI. Our account managers, Brian Mather, Delaney Fenton, and Amanda Trevino, are prioritizing new tools, winning strategies, and growth ideas that can strengthen client demand generation programs, from AI-powered campaign planning and content to buyer awareness and systems that can be reused across clients.
Their focus gets at a bigger question: as the tools and tactics change, what still makes a demand generation strategy work? The answer probably isn’t another new platform. It’s creating the right demand, reaching the right buyers, building useful content, and giving teams systems they can actually run and improve over time.
Live From the UNBOUND Floor
Most companies write about a conference after it’s over, once every insight has passed through two weeks of hindsight and landed in a slide deck nobody reads. We wanted to try something different: covering it as it happens, along with what we’re already thinking about doing with it.
Our microsite, built in Lovable, will carry real-time reactions from the floor, an interactive map of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and coverage from our private dinner on September 16, where we’ll sit down with marketing and revenue leaders to turn the day’s ideas into something more concrete than notes. Bookmark it here.
For Our Clients
The real work starts when we get back.
If you work with SmartAcre, our UNBOUND takeaways won’t stop at a blog post. Our client hub will turn the broader conversations from the event into personalized recommendations, relevant sessions, ideas worth exploring, and actions connected to each client’s current priorities.
Because the goal isn’t to come home knowing more about UNBOUND. It’s to come home knowing more about what’s next for our clients. If you are reading this and you don’t have an access code yet, talk to your account team and they will get this to you.
Let’s Talk in Boston
If you’re a B2B marketing or revenue leader who’ll also be at UNBOUND and want to compare notes on where AI, AEO, HubSpot, and demand gen are actually headed, we’d like 30 minutes of your time.