Salesforce moved the screen. HubSpot painted it grey.

DATA DIVERS DIALOGS · ANALYSIS

In the same week, one CRM vendor shipped its product into someone else's window and another made a new colour scheme mandatory. Only one of them was thinking about the button that will matter most once the agents arrive.

By Christian Schappeit · Data Divers Dialogs · September 2026 · approx. 9 min read

On 31 August, every HubSpot portal in the world woke up grey.

The new theme had been optional since the end of June. On the last day of August it stopped being optional. The announcement was friendly and brief: "It's the same HubSpot, just cleaner and faster to work from." And, for the anxious: "The navigation and structure you already know aren't changing, so there's nothing to relearn."

Five days earlier, in a press release about something else entirely, Marc Benioff had written a sentence that makes the whole exercise look slightly odd.

"Here, the UI is the AI."

31 AUGUST

A new coat of paint for a room people are leaving

HubSpot's community thread for the redesign is titled "HubSpot's new design brings your work into focus". The replies do not agree.

"Bring back the orange," wrote one user in early July. "HubSpot = orange." Another found the interface "soulless" without its orange buttons. A third called it "harder to read than the old theme, and an unwelcome change". One described showing the new look to colleagues: "Every single one was shocked… Buttons/links don't stand out." In mid-August someone reported that the high-contrast styling "causes significant eye strain and fatigue". Another simply implored HubSpot to let people opt out.

They could not. HubSpot's moderator in the thread replied, several times, with an offer to connect people with the product team.

There is a small historical detail here worth keeping. When HubSpot first previewed the design direction in September 2025, it was a beta you could switch on from the account menu, and customers could "switch back anytime you need to". The same post contained a sentence I have now read several times: "The real power of great software isn't in features; it's in how little you have to think about it to get your work done."

A year later the switch-back option is gone, and a good number of people are thinking about the software quite a lot.

HEURISTIC NUMBER EIGHT

They took out the colour and left the clutter

I spend a large part of my working week inside HubSpot portals, mostly other people's. So this is an observation from someone who uses the tool, not a report.

What grey does to a CRM is not a question of taste. Colour in an interface like this was never decoration. It was hierarchy. Orange meant this is the thing you do next. The primary action looked different from the secondary one, the active tab looked different from the inactive one, and a new user could find the right button without having to remember where it lived.

Usability people call that recognition rather than recall. It is one of Jakob Nielsen's ten heuristics, which have been around since the 1990s and are about as controversial in design circles as the multiplication table.

The redesign is sold as minimalism, and that is where it gets interesting. Nielsen Norman Group's own explanation of the minimalism heuristic is blunt about this. It says interfaces "should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed", and then adds that minimalist visual design, flat design, "does not always satisfy this heuristic by default (and is often guilty of removing necessary elements)."

"Minimalism is about removing what you don't need. HubSpot removed what told you where to look."

Nothing was taken out of the work itself. The same properties, the same record tabs, the same association cards, the same settings nested inside settings. What was taken out was the contrast that helped you get through all of it. One user put their finger on the rest: the side panels now make "fitting essential details… virtually impossible". In the portals I see, the first thing to lose screen width is the data table, which is the part of a CRM people actually came for.

That is not minimalism. It is the same room with the light switched off.

26 AUGUST

Salesforce ships its product into someone else's window

Now back to Benioff.

The press release announced what Salesforce calls Claudeforce. Part of it is a plugin, Salesforce in Claude, with 37 prebuilt sales skills. A seller works inside Anthropic's interface and asks for what they want. The plugin reads live pipeline data, updates the records and takes what the release calls "governed action". An administrator connects it once: "no per-user setup, no new permissions model to build, no re-auditing account by account." It is in pilot now, and open beta is expected this month.

Take a step back and this is a strange thing for Salesforce to announce. For twenty-five years it has sold the screen. The list views, the page layouts, the Lightning components, a whole certification industry built around where the fields go. And now the market's largest CRM vendor is telling its customers that the screen will increasingly belong to somebody else.

What Salesforce keeps is everything behind the screen. The data, the permissions, what the release calls the Trust Boundary. The system of record stays at home. The system of engagement moves out.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

The growth is where the screen isn't

You could dismiss this as a press release, if the quarterly numbers were not pointing the same way.

On 10 September Oracle reported its first quarter. Cloud infrastructure revenue was $7.4bn, up 121%. Cloud applications, the software people actually log into, came to $4.2bn, up 10%. The same company, the same quarter, and a gap of more than a hundred percentage points between the layer that runs the models and the layer that has a user interface.

Workday's quarter, reported on 27 August, is the more telling one. The CEO said AI now drives "more than 25% of our new ACV". Subscription revenue grew 13.9%. The full-year guidance is 13%. Total subscription backlog grew 8%.

If AI were simply extra revenue on top of the seats, those numbers would be heading up. They aren't. They look much more like AI taking a larger share of a pie that is not growing much faster. The agents are selling well. They just seem to be doing work that used to justify another licence.

I would not call this proven. A quarter or two of results is a trend line drawn with a ruler someone else is holding. But the direction is consistent: the money is flowing towards compute and consumption, and away from the layer where you pay per person looking at a screen.

TWO BETS

The AI comes to the screen, or the data goes to the AI

To be fair to HubSpot, the grey is only stage one. The same announcement promises "a deeper reimagining" over six months, with the Breeze assistant that "understands where you are in the product" and builds reports and "shareable artifacts" on request.

So both companies see the same thing. Their answers point in opposite directions.

HubSpot's bet is that the AI moves into HubSpot's screen. Salesforce's bet is that Salesforce's data moves into the AI's screen. One is defending the window. The other has quietly accepted that the window may not be where the work happens.

Either bet can be right. What looks awkward is spending the months between them on a paint job that makes the existing window harder to use, and making it mandatory. HubSpot has also renamed its annual conference. INBOUND is now UNBOUND, because, in the organisers' words, "INBOUND laid the foundation. UNBOUND reflects how growth works today." The conference got a new name. The portal got less orange.

THE REGULATED VERSION

The agent writes the report. Somebody still signs it.

Where I work, in pharma and medical devices, this argument has already stopped being theoretical.

In its results on 26 August, Veeva reported that "a top 20 biopharma deployed Vault CRM and the Agentic Call Report across its full U.S. field team in the quarter." So the agent writes the visit report. The rep checks it and submits it.

Look at what that does to the interface. The rep no longer fills in forty fields. They read a draft and press a button. The screen does not disappear. It shrinks to the one moment where a human confirms that what the machine wrote is true.

In a regulated company, that moment is the whole point. A call report can contain a side effect a physician mentioned over coffee, and that is no longer a sales note but a safety obligation. The signature is where responsibility attaches to a person.

The European rulebook is still some way from this. On the Commission's GMP page, Annex 11 on computerised systems is still listed as "revision January 2011". The draft Annex 22 on artificial intelligence went out for consultation in July 2025 and is still not final. Its draft scope says generative AI and large language models "should not be used in critical GMP applications". A commercial call report is not a GMP application, so there is no breach here. But it tells you roughly how far the regulator's picture is from what is already running across a US field force.

"When most of the work happens elsewhere, what is left on the screen is the signature. That is the one thing you cannot afford to make hard to see."

This is where the two stories meet. In the agent era, the interface does not become unimportant. It becomes smaller and more critical at the same time. What's left is review, approval and exceptions: the few places where a person has to see clearly what they are agreeing to.

Visual hierarchy exists to make that unmistakable. It is exactly what went grey.

Two dates for the diary

16–18 September — HubSpot UNBOUND, Boston. The first stage since the theme became mandatory. Watch whether the "deeper reimagining" is shown as a better window or as a way out of it, meaning an MCP server, agents working outside the portal, or HubSpot data inside someone else's assistant.

September — Salesforce in Claude, open beta. Salesforce has not published a price. The number that matters is the unit: whether a seller working entirely inside Claude still counts as a Salesforce seat, and whose log holds the record of what was said.

WHAT'S LEFT

HubSpot = orange

That early-July comment has stayed with me because it is shorter and more accurate than most design reviews. The user was not asking for nostalgia. They were pointing out that the colour told them something.

Over the next few years a lot of CRM work will leave the CRM. It will happen in chat windows, in agents that run at night, in plugins inside assistants that belong to other companies. The screen that remains will have fewer buttons, and each of them will carry more weight.

Somewhere near the bottom of it there will be one that says Approve.

It would help to be able to find it.

Figures and sources. HubSpot: new theme available as a public beta from 30 June 2026 and applied to all customers on 31 August 2026, per HubSpot's announcement thread in the HubSpot Community. Quotations from users are taken from pages 1 and 3 of that thread (July–August 2026). HubSpot's September 2025 design post described the new theme as an opt-in beta with the option to "switch back anytime you need to". UNBOUND 2026: 16–18 September, Boston.

Salesforce and Anthropic, "Claudeforce", 26 August 2026: Salesforce in Claude plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, in pilot now, open beta expected September 2026, pricing not disclosed. Oracle Q1 FY27 (10 September 2026): cloud infrastructure $7.4bn (+121%), cloud applications $4.2bn (+10%). Workday Q2 FY27 (27 August 2026): subscription revenue $2.471bn (+13.9%), full-year subscription guidance +13%, total subscription backlog $27.403bn (+8.0%). Veeva Q2 FY27 (26 August 2026): revenue $928.0m (+18%). EU GMP: Annex 11 listed as "revision January 2011" on 11 September 2026. Draft Annex 22 consultation ran from 7 July to 7 October 2025.

A note on confidence. The HubSpot usability critique is the author's own observation from client work, supported by public user feedback. The thread shows a sample of vocal users, not a survey. That seat-priced applications are growing more slowly because agents are replacing seats, rather than adding revenue on top of them, is emerging, not established. A quarter or two of results from a handful of vendors do not prove it. The consolidation of the remaining interface into review and approval is an argument, not a measurement. Disclosure: Anthropic, a party to the Salesforce announcement, makes the model used to research this piece.

Primary sources: HubSpot Community announcement · thread, page 3 · HubSpot Product Blog, Sept 2025 · UNBOUND 2026 · Nielsen Norman Group, heuristic #8 · Salesforce IR · Oracle IR · Workday IR · Veeva Q2 FY27 release · EudraLex Volume 4 · Draft Annex 22.

HubSpot Claudeforce Usability CRM Economics Veeva Annex 22 System of Record

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