This is a POV I’ve found myself becoming more resolute on over this past week — a POV that has been buttressed by several client conversations, as well as a great new report I just reviewed from BlueWhale Research, “Artificial Intelligence in B2B Marketing: 2026 Benchmarks for Adoption, Budgets, and Talent.” (Great read. Thanks for sending this over, Chris Isham!)
My POV: Marketing Leaders — by and large — are truly doing AI ‘wrong’ at this point. And that is why they are failing to see the ‘big impact.’
Everyone has the best of intentions. But driven by the desire to ‘test out’ and ‘experiment,’ marketing leaders are not achieving the real performance lift they were hoping to get from AI. In fact — in many cases — they are perpetuating bad habits and getting ‘worse’ results than before.
So what are they doing wrong?
- Engaging in random acts of marketing: For too many in marketing, the last twenty-four months have looked like AI potpourri. Marketing and growth leaders, their executive teams and their IT colleagues have been asking their extended organizations to find a way to ‘AI everything’ … at whatever cost. Often walking away from successful, existing growth motions. This sentiment frequently is not guided by a business objective; instead, the objective literally is to use (more) AI. As a result, marketing teams are running in every direction imaginable … but not really advancing the state of their growth motions.
- Obsessing over content creation: According to BlueWhale, content creation is the leading use case for AI today in marketing. Period. The consistent objective is, “to accelerate production rather than to reinvent the strategy behind it,” according to Blue Whale. “For the modern marketing team, AI has become a tool for moving faster, not necessarily for thinking differently.” Yet no one is stopping to ask whether this is a good thing … whether AI-generated content will allow you to stand out and differentiate in a crowded marketplace … or whether you will just sound like everyone else. In fact, should content volume even be the objective? Or should we have less volume of the ‘right’ content, for the right stakeholders across all of their journey stages.
- Focusing on generative AI: Most of the use cases by Marketing Leaders right now for AI — inclusive of content creation — come back to ‘crawl a bunch of information’ and come up with a summary to populate a marketing asset — a content piece, a Web page, an email, a presentation (i.e., all of our use cases are generative). And the objective for the generative AI process ‘is’ the asset to be created. The problem is that at the end of that road, you still haven’t necessarily created any demand or driven any growth. You may know at most it’s possible to know about your target audience and have created the content the generative AI says will engage this audience, but you are no closer to executing programs to ‘go‑to‑market.’ Our focus on generative AI isn’t necessarily resulting in any net improvement to our actual marketing motion.
- Missing agentic AI — which is really the game changer for marketing: Agentic AI technology — and deploying agentic strategically — ‘is’ the AI game-changer for marketing. Leveraging agentic AI technology to drive an optimizable, multi-channel, always-on, perpetual demand generation engine. Orchestrating engagement with stakeholders at target accounts to drive sustainable lift to pipelines and revenue. And doing so in a game-changing mode — i.e., two-way and dialogue-driven and via a ‘system’ that increases well-timed and meaningful ‘connects’ between buyers and sellers (instead of generating “Leads” that someone still needs to chase down).
- Trying to build it (vs. buying it): What you should be ‘building’ is your demand engine. And you should be building this engine on the foundation of a next-gen Agentic Marketing Platform (e.g., what Qualified is building). IT leaders are brainwashing us all into thinking that our future state for marketing and sales will be one of “composable” AI — where we will all become developers, swizzing generative queries and tactical agents left and right. But that’s just not going to work. Marketers are just ‘not’ developers (and developers don’t make very good marketers). They need to be experts in buying journeys, engagement channels and qualification processes. They need to be managing growth motions, not tactical agents. They need a platform they can engage with that allows them to deploy and optimize processes and motions — in plain English. And that engine must be truly ‘awesome’ at the dialogue part — whether on-site, via email or other channels. This is not just something that is easily baked in an ‘agent laboratory’ … you can’t just do this on your own. There is a lot that goes into the interface and the engine — and its orchestration across multiple engagement channels and integrated systems. This capability is something marketing leaders should expect to ‘buy’ not ‘build’ (and don’t let someone convince you otherwise).
- Viewing AI agents as just for on-site chat: For some reason, when we think of agentic AI, we go straight to Web chat … and can’t envision anything else. We need to start think about agentic AI as something that can power a multi-channel engagement. Picture two-way e-mail nurture, where we can send something to a prospect and (s)he can respond with questions, which we then answer … and subtly segue that conversation into a booked meeting with a seller — all via agentic AI. We need to abstract the dialogue ‘engine’ from the channel — i.e., we need to realize that there is a platform brain, but that it can be accessed via Web chat OR email OR team chat … OR any channel that we’ve integrated it with. We also need to think about the idea that an Agentic Perpetual Demand Generation Engine operates as an inherently ‘multi-agent’ concept — where there may be a dozen or more ‘sub-agents’ that allow us to optimize specific pieces of the equation as we optimize the engine.
- Proceeding without a business objective: This is perhaps the most critical point. What are you trying to achieve through AI? How are you trying to raise the bar for your growth motions? Our business objective cannot merely be to deploy more AI … because nothing will lead us faster to ‘more’ random acts of AI (and lower marketing performance) than making ‘AI deployment as the objective.’
So let’s change this paradigm, marketing leaders. Let’s put agentic AI at the center of an always-on demand engine — and optimize and scale growth. Let’s deploy AI strategically and perpetually — not perpetuate the random acts.
Note: This post was ‘not’ written using AI in any way, shape or form.
