AIRops: Revenue Operations for the AI Age

AIRops (pronounced “air-ops”) is positioned to kill the traditional HubSpot Admin and redefine the RevOps role. It represents a fundamental change in how revenue operations work will be accomplished.

As the former CEO of HubSearch, I’ve had thousands of conversations with HubSpot customers and helped the recruiting team place more than 600 HubSpot Admins and RevOps professionals between 2020 and 2025. As a co-founder of Profoundly, I review every project submitted to the platform and have evaluated nearly 1,000 since March. Over years of exposure to hiring decisions and project budgets, a clear pattern has emerged.

The Admin role is declining. The RevOps role is evolving.

Dharmesh Shah (Co-Founder of HubSpot) was largely correct in a post he shared seven months ago stating that AIRops is the future of talent and professional services in the HubSpot ecosystem. Where I differ is in how this shift should be understood. This is not the emergence of a narrow specialty. It is a broad redefinition of how organizations think about RevOps, the people they hire to run HubSpot, and the role AI plays in that work.

The traditional HubSpot Admin and RevOps Manager roles are gradually being replaced by a single role: AIRops (pronounced “air-ops”), or AI Revenue Operations. This change will not happen overnight, but it is accelerating. Anyone who works in or around HubSpot will experience it over the coming months and years.

How We Got Here: Admin vs. RevOps

Historically, companies viewed their HubSpot owner in one of two ways.

The HubSpot Admin focused on keeping the system running. This role managed users, permissions, properties, routing, workflows, and reports based on incoming requests. Admins translated business needs into HubSpot configuration and were typically reactive by design.

The RevOps professional worked closer to the business. This role partnered with sales, marketing, and customer success leadership to design processes across the funnel, align systems to revenue strategy, and build scalable automation and reporting to support growth.

The boundary between these roles was often blurred, but most organizations still hired or contracted talent within these two categories. That model is breaking down.

The AI Shift Inside HubSpot

The driving force behind this change is not rebranding. It is AI.

HubSpot customers are no longer asking for someone who can simply manage the platform. They are asking for someone who can leverage native HubSpot AI as a force multiplier, design and orchestrate agents instead of building everything manually, integrate third-party AI tools intentionally, and replace repetitive work with automated systems.

The work itself has not disappeared. The way the work gets done is fundamentally changing.

Requests are shifting away from “manage our HubSpot instance” toward “design AI-powered systems that understand our go-to-market model and do the work of an entire RevOps team with minimal integration overhead.”

This is AIRops.

Defining the AIRops Role

AIRops is the next evolution of the HubSpot product owner. This role is responsible for ensuring HubSpot actively drives revenue outcomes rather than simply storing data.

An AIRops professional is a RevOps-minded HubSpot expert who takes a native AI-first approach to problem solving. They design, build, and orchestrate agents and automations that replace manual execution.

AIRops professionals operate with an AI-first mindset. Their default question is not how to build another workflow, but how to design systems that allow AI to do the work. They push HubSpot’s native AI stack as far as possible before adding third-party tools, prioritizing simplicity, reliability, and operational clarity.

They remain anchored in revenue outcomes such as pipeline health, conversion rates, cycle time, retention, and expansion. Efficiency is the currency. The goal is to expand team capacity without expanding headcount.

AIRops is not a technical admin role or a tactical RevOps generalist position. It is a HubSpot, AI, and revenue operations hybrid.

Why AIRops Replaces Admin and RevOps

Most small and mid-market companies cannot hire separate Admin, RevOps, solutions architect, and AI engineering roles. They hire one HubSpot owner.

Over time, titles such as HubSpot Admin, RevOps Manager, CRM Manager, Sales Operations, GTM Engineer, and Prompt Engineer will converge into a single role: AIRops. The actual title may end up being AIRops Strategist or Manager or Specialist, but the core of the role remains the same.

What HubSearch and Profoundly Are Seeing

This shift is already showing up in hiring and project demand.

Job descriptions are moving away from basic HubSpot administration toward ownership of AI-enabled automation, agent design, and native AI-driven productivity gains

Project requests are shifting from instance cleanup and dashboards to AI-powered lead routing, onboarding systems, lifecycle automation, and aggressive reductions in manual sales work.

Across both businesses, the pattern is consistent. Companies are moving from hiring doers who know HubSpot to hiring system designers who understand HubSpot, AI, and the business deeply enough to engineer revenue systems.

For Admins and RevOps Professionals

This shift should not cause panic. Demand for the old version of the role will decline, but demand for AIRops will increase rapidly.

Future interviews will focus on how candidates leverage native HubSpot AI, what agents they have built, how those systems were tested, and what business impact they delivered.

Security comes from being on the right side of that curve.

For HubSpot Customers and Partners

Organizations that still hire only for Admin or RevOps roles are already behind. Existing team members should be trained by true AIRops practitioners to solve problems using AI, not just consume content. The reality is the self guided video content is useful, but will never teach someone to solve a particular problem set, specific to their business, with an AIRops approach.

Agencies and partners must embed AIRops into their services, moving beyond HubSpot management toward AI-powered revenue systems. There is a massive opportunity for HubSpot Solution Partners here to differentiate themselves by adopting AIRops early, building service offerings around it and delivering outsized value to their clients.  

This Is the Beginning

AIRops will become the default HubSpot product owner role. Customers will hire for it. Partners will build services around it. App partners will build for it.

This article is intentionally high level. Future content from HubSearch and Profoundly will go deeper into job definitions, interview frameworks, reskilling paths, agency service design, and organizational structure.

The key takeaway is simple.

The HubSpot ecosystem is moving from people who do the work to people who design AI systems that do the work.

That is AIRops.