At the July 9 Orange County HubSpot User Group, held online, Eli Portnoy, founder and CEO of BackEngine.ai, tackled a question most teams are living with: why does AI turn into a superpower at some companies and into chaos at most others? Eli has spent about 15 years in data science and AI, and he walked through how AI tools like Claude actually use your data, then shared three workflows you can build with the data you already have.
Part of the Orange County HubSpot User Group series. See the recording and recap from every session.
Missed the meeting, or want to rewatch the workflows? Here's the full recording from July 9 (about 50 minutes).
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Eli has watched dozens of AI deployments, and he says they go one of two ways. In a few companies, AI becomes a force multiplier: productivity, quality and sales go up, and cost goes down. In most, usage is high but the output is inconsistent, and the team ends up producing more mediocre work, faster.
His explanation: large language models are trained on nearly all the data in the world except yours. They know nothing about your customers, deals or processes. He compared it to hiring 500 brilliant graduates and never onboarding them. They'd be eager to help and would mostly create chaos. Ask Claude "Which committed deals this quarter are going sideways?" without your data, and the best it can offer is generic advice on evaluating deals. With your data, it can do the work for you.
You can build a graph yourself (for example, code that pulls from your tools daily and exposes an MCP connection) or buy one, which is what BackEngine does. Eli also argued for keeping your data separate from your AI tools, because the leading platform today may not lead in three months, and a separate data layer lets you switch without starting over.
Ask Claude to build a live artifact that becomes your Monday morning command center: every active account as a row, with tier, ARR, signal count and a letter grade Claude assigns from everything it can see. Because it's live, the data refreshes each time you open it, and you can click into any account for the detail behind the grade.
Set up a scheduled task that runs every Friday at 4 PM, reviews your email, calendar, Slack, Notion and Drive, and sends a 50-word summary of what you moved forward plus what you checked off. Save the reports to Notion and you can later ask Claude what you focused on over the last three months.
Have Claude track each person's progress against their goals, pulling from email, call transcripts and notes. When both people walk in already knowing where things stand, the meeting can focus on blockers and strategy.
BackEngine shares these prompts and about 100 more in its free prompt library, including HubSpot-specific ones.
What's the difference between a prompt and a workflow? A prompt is the instruction you give the AI. A workflow chains steps together and runs on a schedule, like an 8 AM email with a prep guide for each of today's meetings.
Do you need a knowledge graph for these workflows? No. They work with direct connections to HubSpot and your other tools. In Eli's experience, the answers are just less accurate and cost more to produce.
Why are my results with Breeze mediocre? Eli's view was that it's usually the tool, not your prompting, and that the best way to learn Claude or ChatGPT is to experiment and ask the AI itself when you get stuck. John added where Breeze does shine: configuration. He uses it to add properties and adjust pipelines, and logs each change as a task on a HubSpot project record, which gives him a running history of every change to the portal.
A tip for Starter editions: if you can't build custom reports in HubSpot Starter, try building them in Claude.
The Orange County HubSpot User Group meets monthly, alternating virtual sessions with in-person meetings in Irvine, with guest speakers from HubSpot and its partners. The August meeting covered where to start with HubSpot AI, credits, AEO and Loop Marketing; read the August recap. Join the group on HubSpot User Groups to get an invite to every meeting, browse all past sessions, or get in touch with John Hulina to suggest a topic.