Your 2026 Readiness Guide

Nathan Weill here.

I'm the CEO @ Flow Digital, where we help companies unleash their full potential by strategically automating every inch of their workflows. Each week, I share AI and automation tips to help you move your business into the future successfully.

Speaking of future planning, we're offering limited 2026 Strategy Sessions this quarter. And below, you'll find free resources to kickstart your planning process.

HubSpot Tickets in Slack

Support teams lose over 20 minutes per ticket jumping between Slack, email, and HubSpot to piece together customer history.

The real problem? Critical discussions happen in Slack threads but never make it back to the ticket – forcing the next agent to start their investigation from scratch.

The fix:
HubSpot's Slack integration automatically syncs threaded conversations directly to tickets and contact records, creating a single source of truth.

• Teams have full context immediately, resolution times drop by 30%

• Every customer interaction gets logged automatically, creating complete audit trails for compliance

• New support reps can read full ticket histories to learn how more experienced team members resolve similar issues.

• Ticket properties update automatically based on Slack activity, cutting out the need for manual entry of new information.

Learn about other key HubSpot integrations here.

Year End Reports

Leadership teams waste time buried in spreadsheets, pulling data from six or more disconnected systems. Only to produce reports with backward-looking data rarely capable of driving strategic decisions.

Impactful Ideas:

Strategic Question Framework: Design your reports to answer the questions that actually drive 2026 decisions: Are we spending more to acquire customers than they're worth?

Predictive Insights Layer: Use cohort analysis and seasonal modeling to forecast 2026 trends. Tools like Coefficient and Parabola can help you identify customer churn patterns and flag a slow down in your sales cycle.

Automated Executive Reports...

Get a data recap every Monday morning with zero manual work by using Zapier workflows to automate report distribution.

Unified Dashboards: Consolidate CRM, finance, and marketing data into a single source of truth, eliminating the spreadsheet shuffle. Use tools like together like Power BI and HubSpot Operations Hub.

Prepare Your 2026 Plans for Launch

Strategic Initiatives → Confident Execution

Now is your window to validate whether your digital transformation plans are grounded in reality or destined to become another pile of abandoned pilots.

AI & Automation Readiness:

• Assign Initiative Owners: Put one person's name next to each project—someone who wakes up thinking about it.

• Map Integration Requirements: Outline where data needs to be passed and ensure your tools can perform each workflow function.

• Define Failure Protocols Upfront: What happens when the model gives a bad answer? Who gets alerted? What's the rollback plan?

  
  

Tech Stack Optimization:

• Run a Utilization Audit: What tools are being used, which are producing results, and where is your team spending too much time?

• Map Redundancies: Create a capability map to visualize overlapping functionality- Are you paying for three different tools that all do the same thing? Did one of your tools recently release new features?

• Identify Orphaned Workflows: Someone built an automation two years ago and left the company. It's still running. It might be broken. You're likely still paying for it.

Quality Control Frameworks: Build Before You Scale

• Establish human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Not everything needs to be 100% automated. Define exactly where humans need to verify AI decisions.

• Build your quality playbook. Document what "good" looks like and what triggers a review.

• Document your failure cases. When something goes wrong (and it will), capture what happened and why. Create output checklists and define clear escalation paths.

"When AI Starts to Decide"

Key Insights from Web Summit Lisbon

A panel discussion last week examined the practical implications as AI systems begin making decisions independently in business operations. Key takeaways for leaders:

• Trust is now your competitive differentiator: Whether between your company and customers, your team and AI tools, or your brand and stakeholders, trust has emerged as business's most valuable currency in the AI era.

• Demand transparency in your AI systems: Too many AI models operate as black boxes—expect a push toward explainable AI where algorithms deliver outcomes and explain why, as building trust in AI is no longer optional for adoption.

• Ethics must keep pace with capability: The challenge isn't chasing every AI innovation, but interpreting them meaningfully and grounding technology in empathy and ethics, or progress will outpace responsibility.

• Start with augmentation, not replacement: The panel explored automation myths versus realities, emphasizing that successful AI implementations focus on tools that enhance human decision-making rather than eliminate it entirely.

SMART WORDS OF THE WEEK:

Leon C. Meggison. You don’t need a top-level budget to win in 2026. You simply need to invest in adapting your operations before the market forces you to.

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