How To Win At B2B Marketing In The Age Of AI

Almost every day I have this conversation with one B2B marketer or another

AI has completely changed the game for B2B marketing, but not in the way everyone thinks

The majority of people think that AI has changed the game because it can set up, manage and optimise your campaigns

But that has only changed B2B marketing in the short term

The impact is far greater

Today I’m going to show you the real impact, and how you can win

Competing For Finite Attention

I gave a keynote on this last week at the Enterprise Sales Insider summit in London

Every GTM engineer thinks they are a genius because they have Claude automating intent-based hyper-personalised cold outreach at scale

Or they have an agent running and optimising their ads to the Nth degree

Yes, you’re GTM machine looks impressive, but guess what, there are 70k+ other GTM engineers out there running the exact same playbooks, selling to the same people

There are only so many people in the world to sell to, and their attention is finite

Not only are we getting through to less of the market due to crackdowns by the ESPs and LinkedIn, but the few replies left are spread between thousands of companies competing for the same attention

Many think AI will make marketing more efficient, therefore marketing will become cheaper

In reality, the opposite will become true. More output and spend will be required to compete, and the results will reduce, pushing up the cost per lead.

Read that again. AI will increase the cost to generate a lead.

Cold outreach and paid ads might not die, but at some point the ROI will drop below 1x

For many that day has already come

Selling To AI Agents

Many have speculated that one day there will be very few people to market/sell to. Instead we’ll have to market to AI agents, who will then loop a human into the buying process

I believe that day is virtually here

Purchasing decisions are already AI-mediated

Regardless of how I hear about a new vendor, my first point of call is to ask my LLM whether it can solve the problems I have in my business

Then my LLM compares it to all the other providers in the market and tells me if there are other tools I should consider

Depending on how much of an investment it is, I might then book demo calls with the top few to determine which I like and ask specific use case questions

Then after that I use my LLM to do due diligence on the company (read reviews etc)

The fastidious buyers always compared competitors and did their due diligence, but the majority couldn’t be bothered and went with their gut. Now AI does competitor comparisons and due diligence for us all in seconds.

AI makes it increasingly difficult to hide an inferior offering behind superior marketing

The Proof

Perhaps you think these things are in the future

I can tell you that they are an issue today, and things are only going to get worse

In 2026 I ran virtually every B2B marketing channel you can think of the to generate leads for my company

Only cold email, events and AEO provided a positive ROAS.

Cold calling, LinkedIn outreach, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, Google Ads, ChatGPT ads, content, SEO… they all produced a negative ROI.

Cold email provided around a 2x ROI, but rates are still declining. Soon it won’t be worth it at all.

Events work well. The ROI doesn’t set the world alight, but it’s predictable and reliable, and particularly effective for enterprise sales. This is why I started CXO & Co, but more on that another time.

70% of the ICP match leads I had in 2026 found us via an LLM, despite AEO making up less than 5% of our marketing budget

So should I invest in AEO, I here you say?

Growth Hacks

The growth hacker in me always wants to find the next arbitrage

The prominent arbitrage in B2B right now is AEO

But the arbitrages don’t last for years like they used to

The secret is out in days, it spreads like wildfire within weeks, and the window is closed within months

AEO might work get you some quick wins, but what happens when 50% of your market is putting the same effort into AEO in 12 months time? You can’t all be recommended. And eventually AEO hacks won’t work at all, because AI will find a way to ignore your false signals and recommend the truly best product.

Arbitrages might buy you some short term relief, but once our AI agents become good enough to find an execute new arbitrages, they likely not be worth chasing at all

So How Do We Win?

My prediction is that AI will remove a lot of the need for marketing

In a perfect world, no one would do any marketing at all

The best product/service would just always win

Of course we’re unlikely to ever get there

But I think AI will bring us closer

So perhaps after all, the answer is ‘build it and they will come’

The winners in the age of AI won't necessarily be the companies with the most sophisticated marketing machines.

They'll be the companies with the strongest products, the clearest differentiation, the happiest customers and the most credible reputations.

Marketing won't disappear. But its job will change.

Instead of finding increasingly sophisticated ways to convince buyers we're the best, we'll need to make sure we actually are the best, and make the evidence impossible to ignore.

AI is going to make marketing easier to execute and harder to win at.