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How are you going to stand out in 2026?
Buyers are in control of the buying process. Over 70% of it is happening online. And they are putting companies on their short list of vendors that provide value and establish trust with their content.
How are you accounting for this in your 2026 strategy?
You need to stand out. To make sure your buyers notice you. Let us help you build that into your strategy for next year -->
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The Revenue Marketer
Don't settle for 10%. Get 10x from your AI.
Are you playing the long game or still under pressure to "generate leads"?
If you relate to the latter, we feel you! Old habits die hard and form fills are still a key metric at a lot of companies. But with the advancements in technology and AI, listening to and building a relationship with your buying groups through marketing is well within reach. Need help making the shift? We're here to help.
I walked away from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) this year with a much different feeling than the last. It wasn’t panic. It was clarity.
Clarity that the conversation around AI in marketing is focused on incremental optimization when a fundamental, 10x transformation in buying behavior, workforce dynamics, and strategy is already here. Most businesses are asking the wrong questions. Clinging to old playbooks isn't just inefficient; it's a strategic risk.
The 10% trap
Here’s the thing: most businesses are stuck in "optimization mode." They’re using AI to do the same things, just a little bit better, faster, or cheaper. This is 10% thinking, and it’s a trap.
I saw it all over the conference. People celebrating a "10% increase in SDR conversion." Let's be real honest for a second: a 10% gain on a 2.3% call conversion rate is meaningless.
The obsession with improving the SDR function is the perfect example of this trap. We're pouring resources into optimizing a model that is rapidly becoming obsolete instead of asking the bigger question: should this model even exist?
The strategic shift we need is to move from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?" That is 10x thinking. It’s about automating to innovate, not just to be more efficient. It's automating the 80% of low-value work to free up your best people to focus on the 20% that will actually transform your business.
The strategic shift is from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?
How we broke B2B marketing
This obsession with short-term, incremental gains didn't happen in a vacuum. For years, B2B marketing has been twisted into a "promotional factory."
CMOs and CROs are under extreme pressure from the C-suite and the board to generate revenue this quarter. So they do whatever it takes to hit the number. The problem is, "what it takes" usually means chasing any deal, regardless of fit. You pull in customers outside your ideal profile who were never right for you, who don't see value, and who churn quickly. Long-term profitability is sacrificed for a short-term win.
And this creates a cycle of diminishing returns. The business suffers from high churn and low lifetime value. Because overall performance is down, marketing's budget gets cut. You're told to "do more with less," forcing an even greater focus on low-cost, low-value activities. There's no time or money for the good marketing - the brand building, the deep research, the authoritative content - that actually builds long-term value and attracts the right customers.
Eventually, the CMO is held accountable for the poor results and they're out in 18 months, only for the cycle to begin again with their replacement. We no longer allow marketers to do the foundational work that takes time but delivers sustainable growth.
Your new buyer is an AI agent
The buyer journey as we know it is being rewired. This isn’t about minor SEO tweaks; it's about an entirely new Go-To-Market model being born. And it's going to punish the broken, short-term model hard.
The biggest change is the rise of the "agentic" buyer.
- Awareness is shifting from a human Googling a problem to an AI agent proactively identifying that problem ("Hey, based on your system data, your go-to-market strategy is failing with this segment") and educating the buyer.
- Consideration is shifting from a human comparing vendors on websites to an AI agent doing the shopping, running the analysis, and building the shortlist on the human's behalf.
In that world, your website and content are no longer just for people. They must be built to serve AI agents. AI as a primary viewer has two massive implications:
- Content no longer equals presentation: Your beautifully designed PDF, your slick webinar - the AI doesn't care. It will crawl your assets, pull the core idea and its supporting data, and re-format it for the buyer in whatever modality they prefer: a bulleted list, a podcast summary, an infographic. The utility and authority of your underlying information is all that counts. The wrapper is irrelevant to AI.
- Omni-channel authority is non-negotiable: To even make the AI's shortlist, you must have a compelling, authoritative presence across multiple channels (your site, third-party publications, industry forums, review sites). This is where "Good Marketing," the kind focused on brand and value, returns. If the AI can't find proof that you're the undisputed authority on the problem you solve, you're invisible.
The Workforce Talent Shift
The pace of this change is staggering. A year or two ago, we were all laughing at AI's six-fingered hands. Now, it's producing national TV-quality ads for a few hundred dollars. And the C-suite is no longer dodging the question of AI’s impact on jobs. Leaders at Walmart and IBM are openly saying it: headcount will be reduced or frozen because of AI.
This creates a clear dividing line in the workforce between two types of employees: those who treat AI as a simple tool and those who treat it as a strategic teammate.
- The Average Performer (The Tool User): This employee uses AI for task automation. They write emails faster, summarize meeting notes, and draft social media posts. They're chasing 10% efficiency gains. This is valuable, but it is not transformational. This level of use should be the new baseline for all employees.
- The High-Potential Employee (The Strategic Partner): This employee leverages their experience, curiosity, and critical thinking to use AI as a thought partner. They bring far more value. They use AI to research competitors in minutes, identify new audience segments, find differentiators, and build tailored strategies that resonate with buyers. They are the ones who will drive 10x impact by doing on their own in days what used to take teams weeks.
The future of work requires AI literacy, but in terms of its strategic application. The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable. Those who don't will find their efficiency gains are easily replicated and, eventually, fully automated.
The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable.
How to lead the change in a 10x world
You must start preparing your organization now. Leading the 10x shift requires a deliberate strategy for upskilling your people and re-architecting how work gets done.
Choose innovation over optimization
Every leader faces a choice. The obvious response to AI is to simply cut headcount and bank the short-term savings. The strategic response is to automate and use the time-savings to innovate. Free your people from low-value work so they can focus on brainstorming and exploring new ways to drive growth. This is the only way to offset the job displacement coming from AI. You must commit to growth and innovation.
Instead of just making your current services a little cheaper, ask: What does a smarter version of our business look like? What does AI make possible that was previously impossible?
Use a framework to enable your team to think bigger
Innovation should be a process. Use a simple framework to accelerate your business transformation:
- Ideate: Generate ideas that lead to real growth. Focus on three types of innovation:
- Problem-based: Solve a high-impact problem for your business or your customer.
- Goal-based: Pursue an ambitious new goal.
- Value-based: Generate extraordinary (and not just financial) value.To spark this thinking, ask the hard questions: What do we want to 10x? What do we want to disrupt? How can we accelerate growth into new markets or solutions?
- Design: Map out what the solution looks like.
- Break: Test the idea on a small scale and try to break it. How often does it work? The same amount as the average employee? That’s a winner.
- Scale: Roll out the proven concept across the organization.
Cultivate the right human skills
As AI handles routine tasks, hiring should focus on certain human capabilities. Focus your training and hiring on three core areas:
- Cognitive skills: Creativity, imagination, and especially critical thinking. The value is no longer in finding the answer, but in knowing if the answer is any good.
- Interpersonal skills: Communication and emotional intelligence (EQ) become more critical than ever for collaboration and leadership.
- AI collaboration: Mastery involves knowing what tools are available, how to use them, what order to use them in, and in knowing what questions to ask and what to do with the answers.
Do it now
We know the common trite answers here: “Crawl, Walk, Run.” “POC, Pilot, Scale.” Whatever your approach, start it now. Don’t worry about how many tools are out there because most won’t be around in 2-3 years. Start with the commonly available LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini) if you need to. If you think you need a purpose built tool, then figure out the exact problem you’re trying to solve first. Don’t pick a tool because it’s new, cool, and will drive 10% increase in [insert small-time metric here]. Pick a tool or process based on the big ideas it will enable your team to focus on.
The "AI Agent" era (2025–2027) will force a radical transformation of talent and teams. The choices you make now will determine whether your organization becomes AI-Native, an AI-Emergent leader, or simply obsolete.
Your first actionable step
Don't just take my word for it. Go run a test. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and use their deep research functions. Ask the questions your buyers are asking about your market, your industry, and the problems you solve.
Does your name come up?
If it does, great. If it doesn't, look at the sources the AI cites at the bottom. Who does it list as the authority? That’s your new marketing plan. Start there. Because in the new world, if you're not the answer, you're not even in the conversation.
About the author
Service page feature
Artificial intelligence
I walked away from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) this year with a much different feeling than the last. It wasn’t panic. It was clarity.
Clarity that the conversation around AI in marketing is focused on incremental optimization when a fundamental, 10x transformation in buying behavior, workforce dynamics, and strategy is already here. Most businesses are asking the wrong questions. Clinging to old playbooks isn't just inefficient; it's a strategic risk.
The 10% trap
Here’s the thing: most businesses are stuck in "optimization mode." They’re using AI to do the same things, just a little bit better, faster, or cheaper. This is 10% thinking, and it’s a trap.
I saw it all over the conference. People celebrating a "10% increase in SDR conversion." Let's be real honest for a second: a 10% gain on a 2.3% call conversion rate is meaningless.
The obsession with improving the SDR function is the perfect example of this trap. We're pouring resources into optimizing a model that is rapidly becoming obsolete instead of asking the bigger question: should this model even exist?
The strategic shift we need is to move from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?" That is 10x thinking. It’s about automating to innovate, not just to be more efficient. It's automating the 80% of low-value work to free up your best people to focus on the 20% that will actually transform your business.
The strategic shift is from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?
How we broke B2B marketing
This obsession with short-term, incremental gains didn't happen in a vacuum. For years, B2B marketing has been twisted into a "promotional factory."
CMOs and CROs are under extreme pressure from the C-suite and the board to generate revenue this quarter. So they do whatever it takes to hit the number. The problem is, "what it takes" usually means chasing any deal, regardless of fit. You pull in customers outside your ideal profile who were never right for you, who don't see value, and who churn quickly. Long-term profitability is sacrificed for a short-term win.
And this creates a cycle of diminishing returns. The business suffers from high churn and low lifetime value. Because overall performance is down, marketing's budget gets cut. You're told to "do more with less," forcing an even greater focus on low-cost, low-value activities. There's no time or money for the good marketing - the brand building, the deep research, the authoritative content - that actually builds long-term value and attracts the right customers.
Eventually, the CMO is held accountable for the poor results and they're out in 18 months, only for the cycle to begin again with their replacement. We no longer allow marketers to do the foundational work that takes time but delivers sustainable growth.
Your new buyer is an AI agent
The buyer journey as we know it is being rewired. This isn’t about minor SEO tweaks; it's about an entirely new Go-To-Market model being born. And it's going to punish the broken, short-term model hard.
The biggest change is the rise of the "agentic" buyer.
- Awareness is shifting from a human Googling a problem to an AI agent proactively identifying that problem ("Hey, based on your system data, your go-to-market strategy is failing with this segment") and educating the buyer.
- Consideration is shifting from a human comparing vendors on websites to an AI agent doing the shopping, running the analysis, and building the shortlist on the human's behalf.
In that world, your website and content are no longer just for people. They must be built to serve AI agents. AI as a primary viewer has two massive implications:
- Content no longer equals presentation: Your beautifully designed PDF, your slick webinar - the AI doesn't care. It will crawl your assets, pull the core idea and its supporting data, and re-format it for the buyer in whatever modality they prefer: a bulleted list, a podcast summary, an infographic. The utility and authority of your underlying information is all that counts. The wrapper is irrelevant to AI.
- Omni-channel authority is non-negotiable: To even make the AI's shortlist, you must have a compelling, authoritative presence across multiple channels (your site, third-party publications, industry forums, review sites). This is where "Good Marketing," the kind focused on brand and value, returns. If the AI can't find proof that you're the undisputed authority on the problem you solve, you're invisible.
The Workforce Talent Shift
The pace of this change is staggering. A year or two ago, we were all laughing at AI's six-fingered hands. Now, it's producing national TV-quality ads for a few hundred dollars. And the C-suite is no longer dodging the question of AI’s impact on jobs. Leaders at Walmart and IBM are openly saying it: headcount will be reduced or frozen because of AI.
This creates a clear dividing line in the workforce between two types of employees: those who treat AI as a simple tool and those who treat it as a strategic teammate.
- The Average Performer (The Tool User): This employee uses AI for task automation. They write emails faster, summarize meeting notes, and draft social media posts. They're chasing 10% efficiency gains. This is valuable, but it is not transformational. This level of use should be the new baseline for all employees.
- The High-Potential Employee (The Strategic Partner): This employee leverages their experience, curiosity, and critical thinking to use AI as a thought partner. They bring far more value. They use AI to research competitors in minutes, identify new audience segments, find differentiators, and build tailored strategies that resonate with buyers. They are the ones who will drive 10x impact by doing on their own in days what used to take teams weeks.
The future of work requires AI literacy, but in terms of its strategic application. The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable. Those who don't will find their efficiency gains are easily replicated and, eventually, fully automated.
The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable.
How to lead the change in a 10x world
You must start preparing your organization now. Leading the 10x shift requires a deliberate strategy for upskilling your people and re-architecting how work gets done.
Choose innovation over optimization
Every leader faces a choice. The obvious response to AI is to simply cut headcount and bank the short-term savings. The strategic response is to automate and use the time-savings to innovate. Free your people from low-value work so they can focus on brainstorming and exploring new ways to drive growth. This is the only way to offset the job displacement coming from AI. You must commit to growth and innovation.
Instead of just making your current services a little cheaper, ask: What does a smarter version of our business look like? What does AI make possible that was previously impossible?
Use a framework to enable your team to think bigger
Innovation should be a process. Use a simple framework to accelerate your business transformation:
- Ideate: Generate ideas that lead to real growth. Focus on three types of innovation:
- Problem-based: Solve a high-impact problem for your business or your customer.
- Goal-based: Pursue an ambitious new goal.
- Value-based: Generate extraordinary (and not just financial) value.To spark this thinking, ask the hard questions: What do we want to 10x? What do we want to disrupt? How can we accelerate growth into new markets or solutions?
- Design: Map out what the solution looks like.
- Break: Test the idea on a small scale and try to break it. How often does it work? The same amount as the average employee? That’s a winner.
- Scale: Roll out the proven concept across the organization.
Cultivate the right human skills
As AI handles routine tasks, hiring should focus on certain human capabilities. Focus your training and hiring on three core areas:
- Cognitive skills: Creativity, imagination, and especially critical thinking. The value is no longer in finding the answer, but in knowing if the answer is any good.
- Interpersonal skills: Communication and emotional intelligence (EQ) become more critical than ever for collaboration and leadership.
- AI collaboration: Mastery involves knowing what tools are available, how to use them, what order to use them in, and in knowing what questions to ask and what to do with the answers.
Do it now
We know the common trite answers here: “Crawl, Walk, Run.” “POC, Pilot, Scale.” Whatever your approach, start it now. Don’t worry about how many tools are out there because most won’t be around in 2-3 years. Start with the commonly available LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini) if you need to. If you think you need a purpose built tool, then figure out the exact problem you’re trying to solve first. Don’t pick a tool because it’s new, cool, and will drive 10% increase in [insert small-time metric here]. Pick a tool or process based on the big ideas it will enable your team to focus on.
The "AI Agent" era (2025–2027) will force a radical transformation of talent and teams. The choices you make now will determine whether your organization becomes AI-Native, an AI-Emergent leader, or simply obsolete.
Your first actionable step
Don't just take my word for it. Go run a test. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and use their deep research functions. Ask the questions your buyers are asking about your market, your industry, and the problems you solve.
Does your name come up?
If it does, great. If it doesn't, look at the sources the AI cites at the bottom. Who does it list as the authority? That’s your new marketing plan. Start there. Because in the new world, if you're not the answer, you're not even in the conversation.
Resources
About the author
Service page feature
Artificial intelligence
Don't settle for 10%. Get 10x from your AI.
Speakers
Other helpful resources
I walked away from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) this year with a much different feeling than the last. It wasn’t panic. It was clarity.
Clarity that the conversation around AI in marketing is focused on incremental optimization when a fundamental, 10x transformation in buying behavior, workforce dynamics, and strategy is already here. Most businesses are asking the wrong questions. Clinging to old playbooks isn't just inefficient; it's a strategic risk.
The 10% trap
Here’s the thing: most businesses are stuck in "optimization mode." They’re using AI to do the same things, just a little bit better, faster, or cheaper. This is 10% thinking, and it’s a trap.
I saw it all over the conference. People celebrating a "10% increase in SDR conversion." Let's be real honest for a second: a 10% gain on a 2.3% call conversion rate is meaningless.
The obsession with improving the SDR function is the perfect example of this trap. We're pouring resources into optimizing a model that is rapidly becoming obsolete instead of asking the bigger question: should this model even exist?
The strategic shift we need is to move from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?" That is 10x thinking. It’s about automating to innovate, not just to be more efficient. It's automating the 80% of low-value work to free up your best people to focus on the 20% that will actually transform your business.
The strategic shift is from asking, "How can we use AI?" to "What business problems can we solve now that were previously impossible?
How we broke B2B marketing
This obsession with short-term, incremental gains didn't happen in a vacuum. For years, B2B marketing has been twisted into a "promotional factory."
CMOs and CROs are under extreme pressure from the C-suite and the board to generate revenue this quarter. So they do whatever it takes to hit the number. The problem is, "what it takes" usually means chasing any deal, regardless of fit. You pull in customers outside your ideal profile who were never right for you, who don't see value, and who churn quickly. Long-term profitability is sacrificed for a short-term win.
And this creates a cycle of diminishing returns. The business suffers from high churn and low lifetime value. Because overall performance is down, marketing's budget gets cut. You're told to "do more with less," forcing an even greater focus on low-cost, low-value activities. There's no time or money for the good marketing - the brand building, the deep research, the authoritative content - that actually builds long-term value and attracts the right customers.
Eventually, the CMO is held accountable for the poor results and they're out in 18 months, only for the cycle to begin again with their replacement. We no longer allow marketers to do the foundational work that takes time but delivers sustainable growth.
Your new buyer is an AI agent
The buyer journey as we know it is being rewired. This isn’t about minor SEO tweaks; it's about an entirely new Go-To-Market model being born. And it's going to punish the broken, short-term model hard.
The biggest change is the rise of the "agentic" buyer.
- Awareness is shifting from a human Googling a problem to an AI agent proactively identifying that problem ("Hey, based on your system data, your go-to-market strategy is failing with this segment") and educating the buyer.
- Consideration is shifting from a human comparing vendors on websites to an AI agent doing the shopping, running the analysis, and building the shortlist on the human's behalf.
In that world, your website and content are no longer just for people. They must be built to serve AI agents. AI as a primary viewer has two massive implications:
- Content no longer equals presentation: Your beautifully designed PDF, your slick webinar - the AI doesn't care. It will crawl your assets, pull the core idea and its supporting data, and re-format it for the buyer in whatever modality they prefer: a bulleted list, a podcast summary, an infographic. The utility and authority of your underlying information is all that counts. The wrapper is irrelevant to AI.
- Omni-channel authority is non-negotiable: To even make the AI's shortlist, you must have a compelling, authoritative presence across multiple channels (your site, third-party publications, industry forums, review sites). This is where "Good Marketing," the kind focused on brand and value, returns. If the AI can't find proof that you're the undisputed authority on the problem you solve, you're invisible.
The Workforce Talent Shift
The pace of this change is staggering. A year or two ago, we were all laughing at AI's six-fingered hands. Now, it's producing national TV-quality ads for a few hundred dollars. And the C-suite is no longer dodging the question of AI’s impact on jobs. Leaders at Walmart and IBM are openly saying it: headcount will be reduced or frozen because of AI.
This creates a clear dividing line in the workforce between two types of employees: those who treat AI as a simple tool and those who treat it as a strategic teammate.
- The Average Performer (The Tool User): This employee uses AI for task automation. They write emails faster, summarize meeting notes, and draft social media posts. They're chasing 10% efficiency gains. This is valuable, but it is not transformational. This level of use should be the new baseline for all employees.
- The High-Potential Employee (The Strategic Partner): This employee leverages their experience, curiosity, and critical thinking to use AI as a thought partner. They bring far more value. They use AI to research competitors in minutes, identify new audience segments, find differentiators, and build tailored strategies that resonate with buyers. They are the ones who will drive 10x impact by doing on their own in days what used to take teams weeks.
The future of work requires AI literacy, but in terms of its strategic application. The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable. Those who don't will find their efficiency gains are easily replicated and, eventually, fully automated.
The employees who learn to collaborate with AI on high-level cognitive tasks will become indispensable.
How to lead the change in a 10x world
You must start preparing your organization now. Leading the 10x shift requires a deliberate strategy for upskilling your people and re-architecting how work gets done.
Choose innovation over optimization
Every leader faces a choice. The obvious response to AI is to simply cut headcount and bank the short-term savings. The strategic response is to automate and use the time-savings to innovate. Free your people from low-value work so they can focus on brainstorming and exploring new ways to drive growth. This is the only way to offset the job displacement coming from AI. You must commit to growth and innovation.
Instead of just making your current services a little cheaper, ask: What does a smarter version of our business look like? What does AI make possible that was previously impossible?
Use a framework to enable your team to think bigger
Innovation should be a process. Use a simple framework to accelerate your business transformation:
- Ideate: Generate ideas that lead to real growth. Focus on three types of innovation:
- Problem-based: Solve a high-impact problem for your business or your customer.
- Goal-based: Pursue an ambitious new goal.
- Value-based: Generate extraordinary (and not just financial) value.To spark this thinking, ask the hard questions: What do we want to 10x? What do we want to disrupt? How can we accelerate growth into new markets or solutions?
- Design: Map out what the solution looks like.
- Break: Test the idea on a small scale and try to break it. How often does it work? The same amount as the average employee? That’s a winner.
- Scale: Roll out the proven concept across the organization.
Cultivate the right human skills
As AI handles routine tasks, hiring should focus on certain human capabilities. Focus your training and hiring on three core areas:
- Cognitive skills: Creativity, imagination, and especially critical thinking. The value is no longer in finding the answer, but in knowing if the answer is any good.
- Interpersonal skills: Communication and emotional intelligence (EQ) become more critical than ever for collaboration and leadership.
- AI collaboration: Mastery involves knowing what tools are available, how to use them, what order to use them in, and in knowing what questions to ask and what to do with the answers.
Do it now
We know the common trite answers here: “Crawl, Walk, Run.” “POC, Pilot, Scale.” Whatever your approach, start it now. Don’t worry about how many tools are out there because most won’t be around in 2-3 years. Start with the commonly available LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini) if you need to. If you think you need a purpose built tool, then figure out the exact problem you’re trying to solve first. Don’t pick a tool because it’s new, cool, and will drive 10% increase in [insert small-time metric here]. Pick a tool or process based on the big ideas it will enable your team to focus on.
The "AI Agent" era (2025–2027) will force a radical transformation of talent and teams. The choices you make now will determine whether your organization becomes AI-Native, an AI-Emergent leader, or simply obsolete.
Your first actionable step
Don't just take my word for it. Go run a test. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and use their deep research functions. Ask the questions your buyers are asking about your market, your industry, and the problems you solve.
Does your name come up?
If it does, great. If it doesn't, look at the sources the AI cites at the bottom. Who does it list as the authority? That’s your new marketing plan. Start there. Because in the new world, if you're not the answer, you're not even in the conversation.
About the author
Service page feature