January Product Updates

This month, we shipped new features to make debugging, testing, and building on Bland faster and easier. We also launched a new HubSpot integration, so you can automatically trigger calls when a HubSpot object changes. Try them out and tell us what you think.

Watchtower: Enterprise Hallucination Prevention#

Your agent sometimes extracts the wrong value or thinks a loop condition is met when it isn't - that's just LLMs at scale. Watchtower runs critical decisions (variable extractions, loop conditions) multiple times in parallel and looks for consensus.

If the outputs are all over the place, it knows confidence is low and triggers a fallback:

• Retry with clarification
• Transfer to human
• Move to another node

With Watchtower, you can get visibility into which nodes are flaky and a system that fails safely instead of confidently wrong.

Node-Level Testing: Isolated Prompt Iteration#

Testing a node used to mean running your entire pathway or hoping you didn't break something downstream.

Now you can test nodes in isolation - edit prompts, tweak variables, run permutations, and see exactly what gets extracted without touching your live config. This includes:

• Pass/fail for loop conditions
• Variable extractions inline
• Ability to generate test variations or pull from historical conversation samples
• Changes stay ephemeral until you explicitly save, so you can iterate fast without fear

It's basically a sandbox for each node, which means you can stress-test the logic that matters without collateral damage.

Merge Pathways: Git-Style Conflict Handling for Versions#

If you're building features in dev branches and merging back to staging, you know the pain - exporting pathway JSONs, handling conflicts in VS Code, praying you didn't break something.

Merge Pathways brings native version control to Bland:

• Shows diffs between pathway versions
• Auto-accepts non-conflicting changes when there's a clear base
• Lets you either create a new merged version or push changes directly to staging

No more clunky JSON exports or manual conflict resolution in an IDE. Just clean, git-style merging for teams that iterate fast.

Native Triggers#

Now you can dispatch calls when a record in Salesforce, HubSpot, or any other external integration, changes. Check out the blog post and demo here.

HubSpot Integration#

Bland now integrates directly with HubSpot, enabling two-way sync across all major HubSpot objects - contacts, companies, deals, tickets, tasks, and meetings.

Users can map custom HubSpot properties, define their own validation rules, and set up event-driven automations that trigger when records are created or updated in HubSpot. The integration also supports HubSpot associations, so automations can resolve related records - for example, automatically calling the contact associated with a newly created ticket or deal.

‍