More Marketing. Less Patience.
Six ways to make your AI advantage matter to buyers
AI can help you produce more marketing before lunch than your team once managed in a week. Your buyers, inconveniently, still have the same number of hours in the day. “Even when it’s really good, it’s like seven pages of scroll,” one CMO said of increasingly elaborate vendor follow-ups. “And if I get that from four vendors a day, I’m not going to read it.”
That comment came from Thursday’s CMO Super Huddle workshops, where our founding sponsors brought ideas and marketing leaders brought real-world experiences. Across the conversations, a useful question emerged: with all this new capacity, how do we make marketing more helpful to the people receiving it? Here are six answers worth borrowing.
1. Give the Buzzwords a Break
“AI-powered” is getting quite a workout. Bob Wright of Firebrick offered a more durable assignment: “Sell the problem, not the product.” In one workshop example, a compliance software company worried that a competitor had claimed the AI spotlight first. Its slower rollout reflected time spent validating the technology, a meaningful consideration for buyers who couldn’t afford mistakes.
The resulting story centered on “compliance-ready AI” and “unshakable confidence.” Before refreshing your headlines, ask a customer what problem brought them to you and what getting it right would mean. Their answer may contain more useful language than your last three messaging meetings.
2. Borrow Your Buyers’ Questions
Your content calendar has opinions. Your customers have questions. In Kishan Panpalia’s Pepper workshop, he described a company targeting broad educational searches while missing the more specific questions its actual buyers asked. The team mined sales conversations and shifted its content toward those questions.
“Trust your primary research,” one CMO concluded. Start with the questions that recur in sales calls, support conversations, and customer meetings. Which objections keep returning? What do people need to understand before they can move forward? Those are useful assignments for your next article, video, or FAQ, and a better starting point for deciding what AI searches to monitor.
3. Remember What They Told You
“How many handoffs does your buyer experience?” asked Amanda Kahlow of 1Mind. Participants counted the transitions between website, business development, sales, technical experts, and customer success. Then they added employee turnover. Somewhere in that procession, buyers get to explain their problem all over again.
A participant in Neil Tewari’s Conversion workshop described a related frustration: “None of them spoke to each other. There was no actual integration.” Before creating another personalized campaign, follow one customer’s information through your existing process. Can the next person see what the customer already asked, what they were promised, and what matters to them? Remembering those things is a pretty good form of personalization.
4. Put the Expert at Ease
“We are struggling finding authentic people who actually can put their faces on camera and tell a story,” one participant said in Oana Manolache’s Sequel workshop. Anyone who has persuaded a reluctant subject-matter expert to record a video knows that particular production challenge.
“We created the fireside chat,” Manolache explained, and “we supply the questions in advance so they can prepare for those.” Give the expert someone to talk with, a specific problem to discuss, and room to sound like themselves. Once you have a useful conversation, AI can help extract clips and develop supporting content. The hardest part may be getting the first good story out of someone’s head.
5. Retire “Thanks for Attending”
Manolache also challenged the familiar webinar follow-up: “Why am I getting the same message?” Someone may have asked a detailed question, explored a customer story, or returned to learn more. Yet the response often lands with all the warmth and specificity of a parking receipt.
Use what the person actually did to make the next interaction useful. Answer the question they asked. Send the example that fits their problem. And check your information before getting too clever. As one participant cautioned in Jim Bell’s LeanData workshop, “You do more harm by sending the wrong thing to someone than if you’re sending something more generic, right?”
6. Give Useful a Promotion
The temptation is understandable: when AI makes something easier to produce, produce more. But one marketer in the LeanData discussion had a wonderfully concrete priority for customer content: help customers do their jobs faster. “I want AI to help with that more than a cool brochure.”
That’s a useful test for your next project. Will it help someone evaluate a choice, understand a product, complete a task, or get more value from something they already bought? Another CMO put the creative challenge plainly: “It’s the message. It’s the content. It’s your positioning.” Faster production gives you more chances to get those things right. Your audience still decides whether you did.
These ideas came from workshops led by founding sponsors Firebrick, Pepper, Conversion, 1Mind, Sequel, and LeanData. The conversations were candid because the work is still unfolding. Marketing leaders are testing new capabilities while discovering which familiar problems need fresh attention.
If you’re assessing your own next steps, explore the AI maturity calculator and the FOMO Task Force report, The AI-Ready Marketing Organization: A Strategy First Playbook for B2B CMOs. Then pick one customer frustration to work on. Giving someone less to wade through and more they can use would be a fine place to start.