I’m back after taking some time out over the summer. Intentionally, I'd like to think, though in reality much of my time was spent in a futile chase of tradespeople who had, quite reasonably, decided that they were going to make the most of the sunniest of Welsh summers with long breaks away rather than on my house projects.
It made for an odd contrast. While my renovations moved at a pace best described as glacial, the conversations around how B2B marketing is, and should be, changing continue at pace.
Barely a week seemed to go by without another report, framework, or provocation landing.
So much so that it's taken me a while to summarise my reading and work out which of it actually mattered. Here are three key themes that have stood out for me:
1 - The gap between what CMOs are saying about AI and what's actually happening
The BCG report that landed in June surveyed 300 CMOs globally. 96% of respondents said AI is driving an end-to-end transformation of their function, yet only 8% have deployed autonomous multi-agent campaigns and 42% are still using AI only as an assistant for individual tasks.
This feels like a large gap between what CMOs say is happening and what is really happening. BCG calls this the agentic marketing gap, the distance between ambition and operational reality.
The question seems to be shifting too. From ‘are we using AI?’ to ‘is it actually improving our business?’ And, as most measurement frameworks simply haven't kept pace with either of these questions, I suspect this may be part of what's creating the gap.
2 - The debate about operating models and CMO capacity is converging on the same point
Gartner has added its own warning this summer. It states that marketing organisations built around campaigns, channels and manual coordination will struggle as AI absorbs more executional work. The underlying implication, that making an outdated operating model faster isn't transformation, is not exactly a revelation to anyone who's been paying attention, but I hope this message now starts to cut through.
Kieran Flanagan's recent analysis of B2B marketing leadership trends found CMO roles in B2B are down 10 percentage points in 12 months. Expectations of the role have risen faster than the available talent pipeline to meet them. The challenges of setting marketing leadership remits have been a popular topic for a while. And now, as Kieran articulates, AI is adding further pressure by pushing both halves of marketing (i.e. brand and demand gen) to extremes simultaneously. Finding the right strategic balance has always been a challenge but it’s becoming even harder to execute well, unfortunately at exactly the moment it matters most.
3 - Trust is the quieter debate underneath both
Underpinning both of these is something that remains as critical to marketing success as ever, but has become considerably harder to sustain.
Joel Harrison has written a thought-provoking piece about what has happened to trust, credibility and reputation in B2B since the titles that served as their guardians, primarily the vertical trade press, became a much smaller force. We've witnessed the decline of trade press across B2B for years, alongside increasingly fragmented channels, more stakeholders, more complex buying groups and the proliferation of voices. What's less well understood, and what Joel's piece gets at, is what that fragmentation is doing to trust, credibility and reputation.
When one editorial process did the vetting centrally on behalf of every reader, that verification cost was absorbed once. In an atomised world, as Joel calls it, it has to happen individually, every time - voice by voice, platform by platform, relationship by relationship. As Joel states: "The work of building trust hasn't disappeared. It's stopped being centralised, and started happening everywhere, continuously, one voice at a time."
Joel's article also provides the receipts for this trust gap. According to LinkedIn's Credibility Code research, produced with Ipsos, 94% of B2B marketers say trust is critical to their success but only 45% trust the vendors they actually engage with.
The environment we're all operating in
What does this snapshot of the environment B2B marketing is operating in right now reveal? Well, more pressure, more noise, less institutional backing, rising expectations, and AI tech that is genuinely powerful but only as useful as the operating model, the point of view and the customer understanding that sits underneath it.
As I look to share some further thinking on all of this, I plan to set my next focus on a pet peeve and something that's been bothering me for a very long time. Namely marketing's vanilla problem - it's still got it and, like everything else, AI has now industrialised it.
Sources:
BCG's June 2026 global CMO survey
Gartner on rethinking the marketing operating model
