Our Top 5 AI Tools for Marketing in 2026 (AI Marketing Essentials)

Okay, we are back, Kip. We've had a break. We are. We are here to talk to you about there are so many AI launches. AI launch after AI launch after AI launch. In 2025, it really felt like there was a launch every single day and probably a big launch every couple of weeks. So if you are a marketeer, a founder trying to grow your business, how do you even know what launches matter to you? Well, in this episode, we are going to give you a breakdown of the top. five AI launches that should have transformed the way you work. If you follow this episode, you will get the launches and skills you need to be successful and win in 2026. There's that old quote, you know, that there's some decades nothing happens and in some weeks decades happen. Felt like in 2025, decades worth of progress happened. And what we've done is sorted through the real important things that if you're doing marketing in 2026, These are like the five things that you have no excuse that you should be doing. Right, right. Exactly. So the first kind of category of work that has really transformed because of this launch is content remix and content repurposing. And this is all because of Gemini 3, which launched in November. Gemini 3 has an incredible native YouTube integration, which means it really deeply understands the videos you give it. For example, one of the fun things I did over the break, Kip, is I asked Gemini 3 to really extract all of the learnings from a product demo. So one of our competitors, they got on stage, they kind of did a product launch, and I asked them to really critique everything about that launch, the way they moved around the stage, the narrative they had, the way they presented the product, and told Gemini 3 to tell me, what is my counter plan to that? How can I show that we are a better product in all ways? What's the counter narrative? and it was exceptional but the use case we're talking about here is content re-mixing youtube is the best treasure trove of content for marketers now because you can just extract all of these incredible content ideas from youtube videos and this for us i think was one of the must-have skills as a marketer is like use gemini 3 to extract analysis competitive intelligence and content remixing ideas from YouTube. I think this is my most used feature of Gemini. If you're using Google Gemini and you aren't using it, I think there's a common thread between the five things we're talking about today. And one of those things is the features are more magical. They did it to a level of depth and quality that really worked. Like you can just literally put in a YouTube link. It's not like you have to download a video, upload a video, anything like that. You literally just... pasting in a video and it can give a full critique you can literally just give it a youtube url and it understands everything that's the point we want to make sure that you understand it understands the aesthetics it understands the design what's being used within the video the way the person is moving and also the dialogue but here's like an example i had shared in a previous video where i also built a little app using gemini 3's build vibe coding tool to kind of showcase how valuable this is so this is the video we did with logan kilpatrick and then it turns that into a bunch of talking points so if i want to take a long form piece of content from youtube and i want to turn that into like viral talking points it basically says there's 25 talking points that list these categories of content that i give it which is hey i want educational content spicy content and these kind of content built around incredible data points that someone has shared it lists these and then you see that here Just look how good this is. So it basically then starts to give me the talking point. So here's one here. Stop underestimating AI. Ask for more. Are you limiting your AI's potential by asking for too little? So it tells me like, what is that talking point? It gives me the actual quote. AI users have been trained to ask for two different models, but Gemini 3 Pro demands more ambition. That's what Logan was saying is like, ask it to do more. And it basically gives you the proof from the dialogue that me and Logan had, and then tells me the value for the audience. Gives me the exact source. You can see this was at minute 336 in the YouTube video. And it does that, and it just extracts all of these content ideas from that one single YouTube video. If you were out there doing manual research and manual content strategy in 2026, you're going to lose. You're dead. You're done. This is number one. This is why we're talking about it. There is some basic analysis, strategy, and reformatting of content that is going to let you hit a new level of scale that wasn't previously possible. And actually... For the listeners on our podcast, I had brought up a visual of the YouTube app and I was showcasing an app that I had built because we actually put a video of us and we asked it to critique us as presenters. And one of the things it told us to do was show the visuals for the podcast audience when we are talking through things. So we actually recognized that we weren't showing the visuals or telling people what was actually on the visuals if you weren't looking. Look, knowing which AI tools are essential in 2026 is one thing, but actually using them to ship something, that's different. We built a guide with the top seven AI tools you'll need this year and exactly how they work together. Notion, Claude, Clay, the full stack to launch products, find customers, and raise money for your business. It includes over 25 prompts and video walkthroughs. Get it right now, scan the QR code, or click the link in the description. now let's get back to the show all right let's get into number two number two is really image and video creation right this was an early feature of ai it was out long before 2025 the ability to use ai to create images but boy it got really really good in 2025 with two launches nano banana pro which is part of the gemini 3 pro package that is google's state of the art image model what's so good about nano banana pro it has fixed the text to image model problems which means in the past you would ask for an image text in that image it was garbled nonsense now you ask for text in the image and it's perfect it's so good and not only that nano banana pro is connected to google search so it actually understands things about the real world and i'm going to show you an example of that and then the second one was gpt image 1.5 that was OpenAI's response to Nano Banana Pro, and they fixed the iteration problem. So if you remember, when you asked ChatGPT to make an edit to an image, it would basically regenerate the entire image. And so you would get one change and everything else would be different. It was kind of comical. And what they fixed was the ability to regenerate part of the image and not all of the image. So now as a marketeer, you can unleash your creative side and do really incredible images but not only that you can create many many many iterations of them and i think this is a huge skill set a modern day marker needs to master i think you need to have some basic style prompts that you reuse to create And build a basic, simple workflow around the images you know you're creating regularly, whether those are slide images, website images. You just need to get in the habit and say, hey, I'm going to use Nano Banana for every image I make for my email marketing campaigns, right? Like you have to build and really hold yourself accountable there. Well, on the Nano Banana Pro side, something that you were doing pretty, pretty early is you can actually upload all of the examples of visuals that have worked for your. company like your brand style and it basically mimics that brand style perfectly so that's the first thing is you would have a little file with lots of examples of what you want your brand visuals and aesthetics to be every time you create an image you upload that and you produce something that's in keeping with how you want all images to look it really helps you to think about well what wasn't possible before And now is possible. And one of the things I thought about is like infographics would be quite expensive and they would be a one-to-many type of content because of that. Now you can actually create an infographic per prospect. So this is an example of Nano Banana Pro creating a infographic of why HubSpot is a great fit for Disney. So over the break, my daughter is now two and I introduced her to Winnie the Pooh, which is a great cartoon for kids. I love Winnie the Pooh. It's fantastic. It's on Disney. And I want to make sure people understand. I had a single prompt. And I asked it, Nano Banana Pro, the actual image module, I asked it to do a ton of research about HubSpot's core USPs, potential Disney problems that they've had or they need to solve from the press in terms of their earnings calls and things like that, and produce like one single infographic that speaks to how HubSpot can solve those problems. So it went and actually did research, got all of the external information, and then inputted into this graphic from people who are listening. I'm showing an infographic for Disney as a sales enablement piece of content with perfect text. Like look at what the text is, right? It's perfect text. And so that is the unlock. It's huge. The point I guess I would make here is that it's not just about that these tools are cool and they can make you more productive. They unlock your time to either do more valuable marketing strategy or to talk to your customers more to better understand the problems you're trying to solve. Because you're not doing manual image creation, which can take up hours and hours if you're doing a ton of it. And the big thing is you can create like one-to-one graphics, like one graphic for a company. It really does revitalize account-based marketing. These kind of marketing campaigns with assets, content assets that are really for things you used to do for brand campaigns because brand campaigns are so expensive. Infographics are expensive. Video is expensive. But now because the costs have come way down, a marketer can be way more autonomous. You can unleash your creativity and create these campaigns per company. So that... ability to take text, put it in the model, and then the ability to iterate a lot using something like the ChatGPT image model. So you can create 20 versions of a graphic and change in small parts, I think are two real unlock for marketers and how they work in 2026. So what's number three, Kieran? So kind of following along the theme of image and visual creation, we have another creative tool set, which is video. And I think this has been the most fun that I've had in the past month. I would say we have a lot of content shows coming up. The head of Instagram came out with the tweet that I sent you, Kieran, around what's changing in a world where AI can generate so much content. We're going to have a whole content strategy, content creation show. If there's certain questions you have, drop those in the comments below, and we'll make sure we get those answered in the next show. And the head of Instagram... Funnily enough, you and I were on stage in London two months ago, and I called out the fact that my friends were telling me Instagram is a mess. And he called that out because of AI-generated clips. So video generation, what happened? So video has been underwhelming, I would say, prior to these two launches. It has been very disappointing so far, right? And it took a huge step up in 2025. Google VO 3.1, which was... really production-worthy content text to video from Google. You can do up to 60 seconds. It's connected to Google Workspace, has native audio generation, which means you can create. Audio integrated into the video and then the other one which incredibly I still do not have access to was open AI Sora 2 and the big thing about Sora 2 was really their cameo feature the ability to splice in real videos of people into all these different settings and the iOS app which I again do not have access to so really you had VO3.1 and you now have the ability to create text production worthy video for up to 60 seconds and then you have open ai sort of too and i think the cool thing about that was you were able to do things like take a video of your ceo and then have the ceo do 50 different types of product demos for again individual companies or scale your ceo's presence by creating many different videos with that ceo in them and they were i think two must-have skills if i'm being honest i think vo3.1 is a far better product and is the thing I would learn if I was a marketeer, but there are two new skills I think marketers can master and be way more successful in 2026. What's your take on where we are with video and video as a marketing skillset? Well, so I was hoping we'd have a little debate for just a second, Karen. What made the biggest leap in 2025? The video models, the image models, or the coding models? Coding models. I think it's coding, image, and then videos last. Do you agree with that ranking? Yeah, I will tell you, I created a video with VO3.1. Now it's about one minute, 20 seconds. If I was an influencer, I would say I one shot at it. Wow. I put it on LinkedIn. I would say, look what I one shot at. And I get all of the engagement. I would say I'm up to like 10 hours. I believe it. But I think this is really important. We're telling you the five things that really matter going into 2026. I would also say the number one thing Kieran and I are spending our time learning in 2026 is using coding. agents and learning cloud code really well. We're going to do some shows on cloud code. So if you have questions on that, drop them in, obviously. But Kieran, for me, I think if you are a video professional, a video specialist, those AI models have gotten very good. And you can generate the clips and stuff you need to use in your Adobe suite and really crank it along. If you're a mere mortal like me or you, it's still not quite there in the way the image models are. where you can really make some great looking images as a non-image designer, graphic designer. And so I think it's very important that you understand these video models, but in my priority order, I would spend more time on the image and content repurposing stuff first. Well, I will say if you are a listener subscriber, I think that's true of VO3.1 that it's still tricky to use, but there are some... things that I have learned in the 20 hours of messing about with it in December that I'm going to share in that single episode that make it much, much easier, where I have a specific flow that goes from how you create a script, images, flow board, and then the video. So I've actually learned a flow that should actually simplify it for any marketeer. And my problem was very unique. I had a dialogue between a human and an object. And so VO3 could not understand that the object could... Talk like a human in the same screen they were in the same shot I always thought the human should say the dialogue it always no matter how many times I told it I was like VO3 I'm literally gonna have to burn down my house with me inside it unless you could understand that this object can also have dialogue and speak to the human and so I've actually edited it in a way where they're usually not in the same shot and it worked perfectly fine so that was like pretty unique but I was blown away by how good the actual model is and so I do think for me If you are a marketeer, creativity is a must-have skill and video is a must-have content format. And so VO3.1 is definitely a tool to learn. I totally agree. All right, what's number four? You need to listen to this section because if you do not internalize what we tell you in four and five in a marketer, you are going to get run over and you are going to become obsolete and you likely are not going to be very successful. and i'm going to be really harsh i think you might lose your job you're forced out of marketing if you don't know these two things i think that's being harsh i think that we are just trying to get everybody the knowledge ahead of time right i think these are critical skills because they allow a single marketeer to go to a team of marketeers by themselves they allow them to expand their craft scale their craft so the first one is automation and workflows What I would say is these are agentic workflows. You stream together a bunch of agents and they do a ton of work for you. I think what the three biggest players are OpenAI, Claude and Entropic. There's a reason that two of those companies are betting on agentic workflows, which is OpenAI launched something called Agent SDK Swarm, which was really a framework for building agentic workflows. So you build agents and you orchestrate them to complete work. And Google Workplace Studio was a no-code platform for building agentic workflows. And I think the reason that they are betting on that is because in the future, a single person will always have a team of agents that they've built to do work. The winners in AI are the people who have real skills. I think that is the part that is the optimistic part. If you have real skills, if you have real craft, if you are a domain expert. You will win as long as you can build a team of agents to help scale your craft. So if you take two marketeers in 2026, one understands how to build agentic workflows and has built an army of agents to do a ton of work. So they show up as an actual team, a marketing team, or a traditional marketer that's trying to compete with them with no one, right? Who wins that? The AI-enabled marketer. And I think it's a must-have skill to learn. Agentic workflows, how you scale yourself. The way that you have been working before, that level of scale, even if you're really awesome, it's just you can't compete if somebody's operating at not like 10% more scale, but like 10 times more scale. And that's the delta that is going to start happening. And I might reframe what you said a little bit. I think you have to build. buy and use agents. Like literally if I were doing this and maybe we will do this Kieran is we just will do screen recordings of the work we do and then just put those into the frontier models and say, how can I build or what product should I buy to help me scale this work? with AI agents, right? Like, right. We have great out of the box agents at HubSpot. There's lots of cool agent companies out there. Like some of those you're going to buy. Some of that work is going to be really niche and specific to you. And you're going to need to build that with like an AI workflow tool or a custom GPT or Gemini gym, something like that. Right. And like understanding what that work is, when to build versus buy, and then how to like. actually use on an ongoing basis is going to, I think, be the biggest marketing opportunity of 2026. And I think people are probably asking, well, what do you mean by this? Well, I talked to a marketer before the break and they are like a really AI in the weeds person. And they have an agent that basically goes and whenever there's a new competitor launch, the agent gets notified. It goes and actually pulls all the material from that launch. It analyzes what has actually been launched. It analyzes any kind of positional changes. It cross-references all of that with the product roadmap that that person has or that company has. And then it automatically generates, well, what are any actions that we need to take and what is any marketing that I need to do to counteract this product launch? And then the other one that they have is they have an agent that doesn't just do typical scoring. What it does is when a company comes in, a prospect, it goes off and it researches that company. It looks for any recent... funding announcements. It looks for any leadership changes, job postings. It looks for any kind of indicating growth areas. They can be plugged into a tool like SimilarWeb so it can actually look to see what's trending. And then it comes back and builds a kind of prioritization for their sales team, which they should go after. And talking points, key talking points for every single sales call. Now, if you are a traditional marketer trying to compete with that person, you are toast. Like how do you compete with someone who has that automated? You're doing all of that by hand. It just will not scale. And so these marketeers are... are starting to have these agents show up as incredible team members. I think that's a perfect example. And I think you also just set up what the stakes really are. A lot of times it just gets masked in like, oh, you're going to do 10 times more. No, in this specific example, you're going to be able to cover more competitors at a much greater detail, which means your team's going to beat the other team. Yeah, you do. Yeah, exactly. That's what's going to happen. You can spend more time on the details. You can spend so much time on the... craft and spend more time on the details and spend more time on the customers like prospects. That's the thing is all of the manual marketing work has gotten marketers further from the customers and the closer you are to your customer, more time you spend with them, the better your marketing full stop. Right. Okay. And the fifth is similar and is what we talked about where we are spending our time. And obviously as an ex-software engineer, this is a fun space for me right now, which is VibeCoden, but VibeCoden has taken an inordinate amount of leaps. over the past year and three of the biggest have been Replit Agent. It basically is an autonomous coding agent that can build complete applications from scratch within itself. You have Entropic, Claude's Opus 4.5. Before that it was Sonnet 4.5. Opus 4.5 was the most recent launch. It is unbelievable. It is jaw dropping. It is insane. It is like all the things that the YouTube influencers will show up and say. And then Claude Code. Claude Code is number one on my list. It's number one, I think, on your list. It is number one on my list. It is the tool that I will obsess over mastering because it allows you to do incredible things as a marketer. So what is the Vibe Code and category of work? If you were a marketeer, the way I would break this down is if you think about that YouTube app that I had that allowed me to take a single video and turn it into talking points. As a marketeer, I can actually have a suite of personal apps customized for how I do work if I know how to vibe code them. And that's the thing that people are missing. It's actually the personal software that is the unlock for marketeers. Yeah, you can build free lead magnets to attract prospects. You can build lead score models. One of the things I'm building internally to master the cloud code is an interactive dashboard that I showcased in another video. But the personal suite of software. to accelerate and improve how you do work is the incredible part I think about these vibe coding tools. I don't know how to properly communicate this at this moment but like part of the messed up aspects of my psyche are that I wake up with like existential dread most days of like things I need to learn and this is the top of the list. Like I worry every day that I'm behind. Right. I worry every day that I do not know enough. And I see the opportunity. And I'm just telling you, like, people I think might look at you and I and be like, oh, they've accomplished a lot in their lives. Like, they're fine. They're just chilling. And it's like, first of all, no. Second of all, like, the opportunity is to accomplish, like, 10 times more than we have. And we think the coding agents are, I think, in 2026, the number one way to get there. There was a tweet by an engineer who's pretty well known on X that you're in the AI space. And he said for the first time ever in December, 100% of all of the code he created, this is an engineer, has been at most of the big tech companies, has always built code, said 100% of the code that he shipped in December was Claude Code. And he said he's actually stopped even reading it. Like he used to obsess over reading what is the eye producing, making sure that it's doing correct things. He's like, I just shipped it. It works. That is scary. Well, I think what you're hearing in the world of software engineering. And I'm going to bring this back to apply to everybody here is that it's taking somebody who's a really good engineer and making them like a hundred X better because they know the context. They know how to train it. They know how to prompt and look for errors correctly because they know what to do. They just need the help of like doing the manual work faster. Right. And that's what cloud codes are doing. And I think Kieran, what you and I are here saying is that cloud code is going to do the same thing for marketing. And I'm using cloud code as a generic term for coding agents, but. If you are a good marketer, these coding agents are going to make you a 10x marketer. I talked to the head of growth at Claude. He only uses Claude code. And he's a marketer in charge of growth, has had an amazing growth career. And a lot of why he uses it is for... file access and context and like less actual coding stuff, but more the ability to do more holistic marketing work. And that was the aha moment for me of like, oh gosh, I'm, I'm really pined. Yeah. There's so much you can do that. Yeah. We have a great, incredible leader on the team called Rich and he is in the weeds and all things. He's really great at cloud code. And anytime I'm like this thing or that thing, he's like, oh, I just like built that in cloud code. I think cloud skills is a incredibly valuable thing that was launched last year. I could have easily made this list, but I just don't think enough people know about it right now. But Claude code can easily build Claude skills. And I want to do an episode on that. I'll wrap with one thing, a line that you have that you kind of talked about the narrative, but just want to give you your credit for this line. If you think about us two, like we have six accounts. I have like one of each for Claude, OpenAI, Google, a personal account. and a work account one of my accounts which is my personal chat to pt account which has not been used that much in the past four months they did their chat to pt wrapped and it basically put me in the 0.1 of users in 2025 and i was like oh damn that's kind of scary actually because that's probably like 25 of my usage and i was telling chat to pt like how high is this and it was like frighteningly high and so if you're listening to this you're like hey you two are in the weeds you're too far ahead and You feel you're behind. And I think one of the lines you have, which is the way I feel is we are ahead of the average, but behind on the opportunity. It's actually the opportunity has got so large that that's what I feel behind on. I don't even think about the competition. I think about how behind I am of what I could be achieving for myself. Exactly. That's it. And that is a very weird way to think about it. But that I hope for everybody watching this is. the stakes whatever you think the stakes are they're 10 to 100x bigger bigger the opportunity is so much bigger the what what you could be doing is so much higher and that's what i get motivated by and that's why i feel behind that's the recap if you want to make sure you know what are the right things to learn right things to use what should i even be paying attention to 2026 where it's going to get very very crazy this is the show for you so subscribe We have the biggest use cases, the best tools, and the biggest guests. And we will see you for all of 2026 chaos and mayhem coming up. Thanks, everybody. See you real soon. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot. Grow better.

*7 AI Tools you'll need in 2026 (Free Guide, Prompts, Workflows):* https://clickhubspot.com/vcf
Ep. 389
What are the five AI skills every marketer needs to win in 2026?
Kipp and Kieran dive into the top five AI launches and must-have skills transforming marketing in 2026, breaking down what matters amid an overwhelming wave of new technology. Learn more on using Gemini 3 for content remixing and competitive intelligence, mastering next-level image and video creation with cutting-edge models like Nano Banana Pro and Veo 3.1, and the critical importance of automation, agentic workflows, and vibe coding to unlock 10x marketing scale.
Mentions
Gemini 3 ⁠https://gemini.google.com/app
Claude Opus 4.5 ⁠https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5
Nano Banana Pro ⁠https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation
Veo 3.1 ⁠https://deepmind.google/models/veo
Sora 2 ⁠https://openart.ai/video/i2v/sora-v2

Timestamps
00:00 Gemini 3 Transforms Content Remixing
04:09 Gemini 3 Video Analysis Tool
09:02 Streamlined Visual Branding with Nano Banana Pro
12:35 AI Video Innovations Surge Ahead
15:34 Mastering Veo 3.1 Workflow
17:59 AI Agents Empower Skilled Experts
20:05 AI-Powered Marketing and Sales Tools
24:57 Claude Code Boosts Productivity
27:35 Future Opportunities and Insights

Host Links:
📲Kipp Bodnar, https://twitter.com/kippbodnar  
📲Kieran Flanagan, https://twitter.com/searchbrat 

‘Marketing Against The Grain’ is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Produced by Darren Clarke.

About the Show
Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot’s CMO and Kieran Flanagan Hubspot's SVP of Marketing, lead you down the rabbit hole of marketing trends, growth tactics and innovation. On the way you’ll pick up undiscovered strategies to give you that slight edge for success. These are not your typical twitter thread regurgitated marketing tactics that everyone is doing. These are new methods, with unfiltered examination of successful fresh ideas.