My biggest takeaway from HubSpot Unbound 2026 is that access to information no longer sets teams apart. Consistent practice does. Teams that schedule time to experiment, and share what they learn every week, build new skills faster than teams waiting for a slow week that never arrives.
I attended the first Unbound, HubSpot’s rebranded Inbound conference, with our Digital Polygon team in Boston on Sept. 16-18, 2026. HubSpot isn’t a platform I use every day. Part of my job that week was keeping our team coordinated, and I wanted to see how HubSpot supports a business beyond the marketing team. Between sessions, vendor conversations, hunting shards on the expo floor, and a team side quest to Mike’s Pastry, I ended up thinking a lot about how we make time to learn.
Two sessions in particular stayed with me.
Why consistency beats access to information
The first was Jay Schwedelson’s, The Next 5 Years Won’t Reward the Smartest People. His argument was that access to information is becoming less of an advantage. What matters is whether you consistently do something with it.
He asked what we were doing every week to hold ourselves accountable to learning something new. I wrote that down. It’s easy to feel like you’re learning because you’re busy, attending meetings, and solving problems. But you can do all of that while relying on the same things you already know.
His suggestion was simple enough to try: share one thing you learned with your team every week. Keep doing it after the initial enthusiasm wears off. Having someone expect that contribution gives you a reason to keep looking for something worth sharing.
How Chili Piper scaled AI agents without a dedicated AI team
The second session came from Alina Vandenberghe of Chili Piper, who talked about how the company scaled 1,000 AI agents without an AI team.
What caught my attention was who was doing the work. Rather than assigning it all to a specialized group, they gave people across the company room to experiment and learn.
Together, the two sessions point to one idea. If you want people to learn through experimentation, you have to make it something they can keep showing up for.
Why does learning get pushed to the end of the week?
In my role, I see how quickly a team’s week fills up. There’s client work to deliver, meetings to attend, and something unexpected that needs attention. People can be interested in trying something new and still get to Friday without having had a chance.
Learning is easy to postpone because there usually isn’t someone waiting on it. There’s almost always someone waiting on everything else. In Alina’s story, people had enough room to follow an idea and see whether it went anywhere.
How Digital Polygon makes room to experiment
At Digital Polygon, our monthly Lunch & Learns give us a place to share some of that experimenting. Someone volunteers to walk us through something they’re passionate about or something new they’ve been trying, including what they learned along the way.
One of my favorites came from a teammate who used AI in Drupal to reformat recipes and build a recipe repository for their family’s website. It was a personal project, with no client deadline or place on our roadmap. They had a collection they wanted to organize and decided to see how the tools could help.
The rest of us got to see an actual example, ask questions, and think about where we might use a similar approach. A family recipe website gave us something concrete to learn from.
Having that session on the calendar matters. It creates a regular reason to share what people are figuring out. We share those discoveries in our newsletter, too. But sharing the work is only part of it. People also need time to do the experimenting that gives them something to bring.
What I’m taking back to our teams
I spend a lot of my time helping teams get things done. I’m used to looking at priorities, commitments, and where the hours are going. These sessions gave me another question to bring to those conversations: where is there room to try something we don’t already know how to do?
That room is hard to protect in a busy week. Work has deadlines, and an experiment might lead nowhere. I understand why it gets pushed aside.
I came back from UNBOUND thinking about our Lunch & Learns and what happens between them. Sharing what we learn is the easy part to schedule. The harder part is protecting the time to learn it.
