HubSpot Inbound '25 - AI meets CPQ to improve CX, says Sarika Garg, GM of HubSpot’s Commerce Hub

Last year research firm Forrester reported that up to 86% of sales deals stalled because getting a quote can take so long. It found that B2B buyers abandon deals because they are often so time consuming. Another factor is that sales reps are still doing manual calculations and dealing with cumbersome spreadsheets and approval email chains, which also slows down the process, and risks losing the sale

At Inbound ‘25 HubSpot announced a beta version of AI-powered Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) in its Commerce Hub, with the aim of streamlining the closing process and creating better customer experiences.

Sarika Garg, now GM of HubSpot’s Commerce Hub, joined the company after the acquisition of Cacheflow last year. Traditional CPQs were built for manufacturing companies, and were slow, complex, and expensive, according to Garg. Cacheflow re-designed CPQs to put users first. She recalls::

Nine months ago, when we joined HubSpot, we brought all these learnings that we have had from Cacheflow, and started working with thousands of customers, to once more reimagine CPQ, putting AI at the center of it.

For example, the CPQ for Commerce Hub now has AI-powered quote creation, which automatically uses conversations and deal contexts. Sales reps can quickly customize and send quotes, and their buyers can review, accept, and pay from a single page.

First time matters

Garg believes that this first experience with a customer is very important for any ongoing relationship:

My personal story around CPQ started a few years back when I bought a Tesla, and in five minutes on a mobile phone, I was able to configure, buy, and pay, and it was a mind-blowing experience for me. If you can buy a $60k car in five minutes, why does it take us days and weeks and months of back and forth to buy some service or software? There had to be a better way.

She believes that CPQs matter for every single person in the Go-To-Market (GTO) team:

They matter for marketers, because that proposal that your seller sends to your buyer is basically a mini brochure. It's a mini website that talks about the value of your company, the products, the positioning of how you talk about them. As a marketer, you want that to be perfect. If you're in operations, RevOps or admin, you don't want to be spending your time approving every single quote. You want the system to do that for you. If you're a seller, you don't only want to send a quote. You actually want to track who is looking at the quote? How many times are they looking at it?

HubSpot research has also found that sales would often get stuck on the last part of the manual process, and this is increasing as more and more buyer stakeholders are added to the buying process.

AI-powered CPQs allow customers to have a seller who helps them close the deal and really understand a solution, says Garg:

You have a very transparent experience and with AI, this opportunity becomes even more interesting. The gap widens between legacy CPQs and AI CPQs. Legacy CPQs are dis-connected, which means that you don't get any insights, they do not help you to accelerate your revenue in any meaningful way. AI CPQs are very different. They actually enable and accelerate your closing.

Human intelligence

HubSpot believes in hybrid teams, where humans lead and AI accelerates and empowers, and this seems particularly true for CPQs for Commerce Hub. Garg explains:

AI members on your team help your reps to do their best work ever, because they can focus on the customer, and they give your buyers an amazing experience by creating a revenue engine that's always on, and that's helping you to close the deal.

There are three pillars for an AI CPQ: quote creation, negotiation, and closing. Garg expands:

Quote creation takes all the CRM data and creates quotes. The next pillar is negotiation, this back and forth that happens. You can show risks and actually move the deal forward much faster. And the third pillar of the AI CPQ is closing and is all about taking processes around signing, paying, renewing and connecting them in one flow.

HubSpot works closely with partners on AI strategy, and product development, and now has over 6000 Solutions and more than 1,700 App partners. The company believes this ecosystem is really important, and that partners are really key. According to Garg:

When we started building this product we wanted to put partners at the center of it, because there is no way we can build everything, and we shouldn't. For solution partners it's all about implementing. For example, they're going to go towards AI to customize that active RevOps. They're all incredibly smart and understand the customers’ business processes better than we do, because they're so into that particular industry segment. They're experts. The App partner ecosystem is also becoming stronger. Our customers wanted it to be integrated, and it's a perfect example of how we were independent, but we integrated to offer customers a pretty smooth experience.

Enterprise rise

Historically most of HubSpot’s customers have been SMBs, but a growing number of larger enterprise businesses are now becoming customers. This wide range of different sized and resourced customers brings its own issues for the company, one of which is the readiness of organizations to begin implementing hybrid AI teams. At Inbound ‘25 the vibe was very much, one of ‘No pressure but start investigating AI as soon as you feel ready to’. Garg comments:

I think HubSpot recognizes that if you're not ready to start the AI journey, let's not even talk about it. Let's do this at your own speed. If you have started using chat GPT every day or recording your calls, then let's actually talk about how we can leverage some of those capabilities. But there are also customers who are like, ‘This is what I'm doing every single weekend. I live for this. Tell me more’.

My take

Sarika Garg’s presentation at Inbound ‘25, ‘Time Kills Deals. AI CPQ is here’ was packed. After drilling down into the potential of HubSpot’s AI CPQ for Commerce I can see why. Losing prospective deals because of long winded and cumbersome CPQ systems must be incredibly frustrating for sales and marketing folk. The presentation also offered a really good argument for the hybrid teams that HubSpot has always championed. In the past HubSpot’s approach to AI has been gradual and fairly cautious. But this year its AI-centered announcements, and particularly its AI CPQ for Commerce Hub looks pretty compelling for most of its customers right now. Garg concludes:

We are leaning in and saying this is what we're doing, and here's a way to think about it. We realize this is a really big difference. The HubSpot customer base is very diverse, from really small companies, all the way to software companies who are quite sophisticated, and want to use every new tool. HubSpot has been pretty good at navigating things, and I think there's also a sense of responsibility of keeping it easy that HubSpot feels, and it differentiates us.