Most HubSpot portals have a job in them that someone does by hand. Building the same set of pages every quarter. Rebuilding the same report every month. Emailing a list of customers one at a time because the list only exists in your head.
All of it is reachable through the API, and an AI assistant with the right access can do the work. Here is what that setup looks like, in broad strokes.
Three pieces
1. A key, scoped to the job
In HubSpot, create a private app and grant it only what the job needs. For anything touching customers that is usually:
crm.objects.contacts.readcrm.objects.deals.read
Content work needs a different set — pages, blog, files. Keep them as separate keys. A key that reads deals cannot touch your website, and a key that publishes pages cannot see a customer. You can revoke either one on its own, and the scopes list is a plain answer when someone asks what the tooling can reach.
2. A mailbox, if the job sends anything
Email goes from your own address on your own domain, so what lands in an inbox looks like a person wrote it, because a person did. You need an app password for the sending account, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC published so the mail is authenticated.
None of this touches Marketing Hub. This is one-to-one mail from your mailbox, and replies come back to you.
3. The strategy, written down in plain words
This is the part people expect to be technical and it is not. You describe the rule the way you would to a colleague:
Take everyone who has bought from us. One email per person, not per purchase. Ask them about their biggest purchase, not their most recent one. Skip anyone who has already left a review. Skip anyone who bought in the last month, they have not used it yet. Write it from me, in my voice, and mention what they bought and when.
That paragraph is the specification. Everything after it is execution — reading the records, working out who is in and who is out, drafting each message, sending, and logging what went where.
What it looks like in practice
We ran exactly that job on our own portal. The read came back with every purchase and the person behind it, the rules removed the people who should not be contacted, and the mail went out from our own address, each one naming the product that person bought and the month they bought it.
Start to finish it was an afternoon. The same job by hand is a week of copy-paste and a spreadsheet you stop trusting halfway through.
What a key like this can reach
- Pages and blog posts — created, updated and published in bulk, in your own theme
- Themes and modules — one change applied across every page that uses it
- CRM records — contacts, deals, and the associations that join them
- Files, redirects and menus
Which is to say: most of the repetitive work in a portal, and almost none of the interesting work. That division is the point.
What still needs a person
Four things, and they are worth knowing before you start:
- Deciding who gets contacted. The rule is a judgement call about your customers. Getting it wrong is not a bug, it is a bad email to a good customer.
- Checking the sender. Mail can send successfully and still go out under the wrong address, with no error anywhere. One test message to yourself catches it.
- Reading the list before it goes. A list you have looked at is a different thing from a list a script produced.
- Approving anything that publishes. Staging changes for review costs minutes and prevents the kind of mistake that is public.
When to use something else
For marketing sends — subscriptions, preference centres, nurture sequences, tracked campaigns — use Marketing Hub. It exists for that and the compliance handling comes with it.
This approach suits one-to-one mail with a person behind it, and portal work that repeats. Either way the basics still apply: say who you are, include a real postal address, and honour an opt-out when someone asks.
If you would rather not build it
The setup is a key, a mailbox and a written rule. The work is in scoping the job properly and knowing where it fails quietly.
We build these for teams already on HubSpot. Operations automation covers what that includes, or tell us the job and we will tell you whether it is worth automating.