If Al Makes Marketing Easy, Why Is Growth Still Hard?
B2B go-to-market is being fundamentally reshaped by AI, from how buyers discover solutions to how marketing teams create demand, build trust, and measure impact.
In this episode of B2B Marketing Futures, senior marketing leaders come together to explore how AI is changing day-to-day marketing work, how the balance between demand creation and demand capture is evolving, and what role brand, trust, and human judgment play in an AI-enabled world.
This episode offers a candid, practitioner-led discussion on navigating B2B go-to-market in the AI era, including emerging buying behaviours, the rise of LLM-driven discovery, and the new skills and mindsets marketers will need to stay relevant over the next decade.
Guests
Andrew Soane, Former Director, Global Head of Service Line & Partner Marketing at Thoughtworks
Charlotte Wahlgren, Head of Partner Marketing EMEA at Shopify
Carl Ronander, VP of Marketing at Funnel
Transcript
Joaquin Dominguez (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Futures, the podcast for B2B marketers sponsored by AdSact. Today's conversation is about B2B go-to-market in the AI era. Over the last couple of years, AI has moved from being an experiment on the edges of marketing teams to something that is shaping how work actually gets done. Content, targeting, personalization, measurement, even how buyers discover and evaluate
products are all changing at the same time. What that raises is a bigger question. If AI makes execution easier and faster, what really differentiates B2B companies going forward? What happens to brand, to demand creation, and ultimately to the role of the marketer? So to explore that, I'm joined by the great panel of marketing experts. And before we get into the discussion, I love for each of you to...
briefly introduce yourselves. So, Charlotte, would you like to start a given sentence on yourself?
Charlotte Wahlgren (01:01)
Yeah, of course. So super, super happy to join us a guest today. I am Charlotte Valgreen and I'm leading the partner marketing function for Shopify in EMEA. So working with all of the partners within the Shopify ecosystem and helping bring more commerce to the world. And now in the world of agentic AI and
the world really changing. I'm super excited to meet you here today and talk more, dive more into this. yeah, joined in the handing over to maybe Carl.
Carl Ronander (01:42)
Yeah. So both Charlotte and I are calling in from the same city. it's a...
so I'm Carl Ronaner. I am the VP of Marketing at Funnel. And so for those of you who don't know Funnel, Funnel is a marketing intelligence platform. So in short, we allow marketers to work in a better way with their data and marketing measurement. So super happy to be here as well. And ⁓ Andrew.
Andrew Soane (02:06)
girl. ⁓ You'd need a really long throw if you're to throw a rock at me because I've obviously been the UK. Nice to meet you all Joachim, thank you for inviting us, really thrilled to be here. I'm Andrew Sohn. I've got 10 years marketing leadership experience in B2B technology consulting and services. First at Thought Accenture, then ThoughtWorks. So my last role was as director of global service line and partner marketing.
Charlotte Wahlgren (02:10)
Okay.
Carl Ronander (02:10)
Yes.
Joaquin Dominguez (02:31)
Well, thank you so much for those great introductions. Let's start with the first question, which is a broad one. So it's about how has AI changed the way you approach marketing? I know that in many different ways, but what feels really different now compared to a couple of years ago?
Charlotte Wahlgren (02:49)
where to start? mean, I am now looking back at the past 10 years, it has truly been a transformation, right? And I think what has been the most clear big shift is really how the teams internally need to work today. And going from now looking at it more from a a partner marketing and and the B2B marketing standpoint.
just how we think about brand and growth not being two separate things anymore. It's one single system, right? And I think we see it everywhere in most organizations, but that is something that is truly evident. And the fact that you need to be a generalist today. As a marketeer, you need to be a generalist. can't be focused in pure bucket anymore. And...
that type of talent, it's hard today to find. I don't know about you guys, but it is hard to find that generalist marketeer today. Okay.
Carl Ronander (03:51)
I completely agree with that statement. Although what's really interesting with AI is that
it also allows us to become more generalist in our approach to our work and do more of the things that perhaps before you needed a specific skillset to be able to solve. So I believe it's really about that. I think this has been something that's been said for a long time, but finding that T-shaped marketer who...
might have that specific skill set and be very specialized in something but then be able to work across several areas of marketing. to your point, think what we're looking more and more into is that you also now need to be able to or you're allowed also maybe to work more hands-on with stuff. So as a marketer, you can take on a wider
field of tasks. So I would agree with that. If I follow up on what's ⁓ changed, so I come from a background where I spent most of my career in creative agencies, so working in advertising and design, always with a strategic focus, but that's where I come from.
What I think is amazing now, and this is just like the past six months, I would say, where sort of generative AI has really enabled creators. We talk a lot about this, like, is it a threat to creators or is it actually an enabler? And we have the discussion a lot about this where ideas that we now have that before we weren't able to do.
we can now actually execute on them. So creative people can be more creative and execute their ideas and do more things. So think that's very exciting. ⁓
Charlotte Wahlgren (05:32)
A lot faster.
I think that the speed of it, right? Today you have one strategy and tomorrow you can pivot it completely, just giving Lovable as an example. It's so interesting to see how
different business models can pivot overnight due to competition or just a new trend and thanks to companies such as Lovable, that is possible today. Even in a small company, mean, working with a lot of small entrepreneurs at Shopify, it's so inspiring to see people taking their dream and overnight transferring it and getting it out to the market within 24 hours, which is just...
crazy to think about just a couple years back it was not possible and here we are today.
Andrew Soane (06:18)
And I think that scale of change will accelerate, Charlotte. I don't know if you saw the announcement. I know you've been at NRF last week, but the announcement two weeks ago from CES 2026, Nvidia announced the new Rubin architecture, which is the new chip which has been designed for agentic AI. Rubin is essentially six chips in one. So it offers a number of benefits. It's going to cut the time it takes to think about stuff. It's going to speed up the time for inference calculations.
by a factor of five times. It's going to cut the cost of AI and thinking by a factor of 10. It's going to squeeze more out of the data center. So physically, because it uses six chips in one, you'll be able to get more out it. You don't have to expand your data center six times. You can just replace those chips to get six times as much capacity. So AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, and everybody will be fast leaning over to the Rubin chip. So I think
Charlotte Wahlgren (06:54)
Okay.
Andrew Soane (07:13)
that's going to scale the growth in a much faster way that we've even seen now. So I think that kind of innovation, that kind of exponential growth is going to get even more faster going forward. It's fascinating.
Joaquin Dominguez (07:24)
That's a great start and that gives us a good sense of how execution and workflows are changing. I'd like to zoom out now and talk about how this affects strategy and investment decisions. so historically, how have you balanced demand creation and demand capture? And how are AI and personalization at scale influencing that balance today?
Andrew Soane (07:49)
think a big change, we talk about tooling a lot, right? And of course, you know, both Charlotte and Carla talked a little bit about, you know, some of that stuff, of course, it's changing the way we go to market, it's changing the way the skill sets that we need. And I know we'll talk a little bit about that later. But it's also changing the way that our buyers are engaging with our services, right? The funnel is fundamentally changing, you know, once upon a time, Google would have been the first stint for most B2B buyers, you know, and increasingly, that's being
That's going to be chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, you know, tool you use. that's, that means that we've got to be thinking about, you know, being visible to the LLMs. And that's fundamentally changing, you know, the processes that we have to think through, how we balance brand and performance marketing. Charlotte, you know, already said, actually they are part and parcel of the same thing. They are connected and they are not different. And I think that's true. So, I mean, it's not just the tooling.
It's also the fact that AI is changing the way our buyers engage with us. And that's meaning we need to rethink the broader strategy, as well as the tooling and the skill sets that we're using. It's challenging time.
Carl Ronander (08:56)
So I think this is really interesting from what you're mentioning from several perspectives, but my kind of take it because I do agree with it, but I think what we're changing is actually going back a bit to where we were prior to the introduction of digital and this whole conversation around performance marketing, which I might just be an old dinosaur here, but...
But I never truly bought into that and always believed that, of course, you need to do both. You need both to capture your ⁓ short-term demand and then build your brand over the long term. And another thing, introducing this question, an interesting question to have or discussion to have is whether you can create demand at all. Is it possible to create demand? That's maybe a separate question. But anywho.
Charlotte Wahlgren (09:21)
Mm-hmm.
Carl Ronander (09:47)
What I think is interesting, so Funnel, where I'm at now, that's a company that, ⁓ like I think a lot of tech companies or SaaS companies in the past couple of years, we've grown a lot through.
capturing demand, being really sort of short and making sure we fill the pipe all the time with booking meetings. And to your point, Andrew, I think that we know that that possibility is going away for a lot of companies, not only us, but with their regulations and how you can track visitors and et cetera, but also with the behavior changing and how LLMs and GPTs operate.
What I believe there that we will see is a resurgence of building ⁓ brand because, you know, and there's several factors there. I think it's both of how the models actually work and they will go a lot on how you're mentioned, how often you're mentioned and what your reputation is. But I think there's also, and I think this has been shown in research,
There is this idea that in B2B, you need to be on the first day buying list to be considered even. think it's 80 or 90 % of all the brands that are picked in a procurement process are on the buying list on the first day. So even if we might have a customer that comes in with a different behavior, having used GPTs, if they don't know our brand, if they don't know of us, I think there's still a...
good chance that you will be rejected, even if the GPT might give you another answer. So in my mind, we're actually going back to something that I think is a much more wholesome view of marketing, perhaps starting to understand that it has never been truly deterministic. It's a bit more of a sort of a probabilistic way of working and that demand is...
or marketing is a weak force to impact demand. And I think maybe we might be going back to that reasoning a little bit through the help of, yeah.
Charlotte Wahlgren (11:37)
Yeah, and I think it's an interesting point and I think 2020...
In general, the last couple of years we have seen the transition and we talked, think the big trend 2024 was that B2B was going to become the new B2C. And I think we are far away from that. Now it's we are not talking about B2C and B2B anymore, right? It is the buyers and the buyers, have a new way of finding what they want.
I think it all comes back again to a little bit of the old legacy in some companies. We see that still remaining, but then we see these hyper growing companies that really adapted to that full life cycle way of leveraging LLMs and making that their new business model. just thinking a little bit again, going back to the life cycle that we talked about in the beginning, I think
It comes back again to the fact that we don't have that funnel anymore, right? We need to make sure we are at the right spot at the right time. And it goes so quickly now and we see how the LLMs just increase their capability. Crazy coming now from NRF. can say that the only thing that...
all retailers were talking about was agent e-commerce, right? So I think in that, there is a certain risk, of course, that we lose that human touch. And really, that's where we need to find them. I think the balance going forward, and I think that will maybe not be 2026, but I think definitely going into 2027, I think we will see a big pivot towards what you said, Carl, making it feel more authentic in that.
sense and looking at the brand building portion as a performance level, right? It's not that long term bet. It's really that performance that will help you drive demand.
Carl Ronander (13:34)
So really, really interesting to those, you mentioned brands that are leverage AI in a really good way. Did you have any examples of brands that you worked with that have done that very well? Or is that sensitive?
Charlotte Wahlgren (13:44)
Yeah,
yeah, no. So we have Gymshark, which is a brand that Shopify has been working on for several years now. And I think it's very cool to see how they are super focused on the in-store experience, but they do it in a way where they are actually leveraging AI in-store.
So making sure that customer get that experience of really getting the support of what they want to find in store. They actually take those components and they build everything from these super cool AI mirrors and building out that kind of experience, but it's in person. So I think those types of examples in retail, we see evolving a lot.
And it's very interesting to see how other brands start to go back more and more again to that human interaction in one part of the touch points. But at the same time, they have an agent that buys their Christmas gifts. was a fun thing looking at my cousins here, a little anecdote. They have a...
Andrew Soane (14:51)
Yeah.
Charlotte Wahlgren (15:00)
Santa agent that they ask what they should buy to their parents, right? So the new generation is really starting to ramp up here and now you can even check out. So we launched with Google actually this week ⁓ or use it, right? So it's now you can Shopify merchant, can sell directly in Gemini in
Andrew Soane (15:17)
Thank
Charlotte Wahlgren (15:25)
directly in perplexity but also in chachipa too and that makes just the new experience of buying completely different right it just goes so fast it goes in two seconds and then you have your your christmas gifts lined up which is super interesting so i see these two motions at at a scale now and it's bubbling a lot in the u.s not as much yet in in europe from my experience but
It is that retail side that requires more luxury and also those really big purchases. Those require that human touch and human connection. And those brands tend to go back even more to that interaction point while we see these very, very fast moving ⁓ e-com, sometimes just a two people chart.
that do only sell in the LLMs today. They don't even have a storefront. They just sell within the LLM, which is super interesting to see.
Andrew Soane (16:27)
I wish someone had told my kids about this By Your Parents app, you know, to be able to agent so that, you know, it might have changed what Christmas presents I got. if you send me the link, I'll send it to them. But I think the point you've made about that, those kind of human experiences from B to C, I think they're really, really important to cross both, as you say, B B, B to C. I think it's the same, right? We're all humans.
partly as a reaction against AI because we've all seen, I don't know, ads with pictures of someone with six fingers or, you know, we can all see a piece of content that's been written with AI. We all know what the telltale signs are. I think partly we're looking for human authenticity and experiences, partly because we are now surrounded by what's been created by machines, that we are looking for stuff that just feels and looks authentic.
regardless of whether we're B2B or B2C. And I think that's a really important point that you flagged for both sides of the market.
Carl Ronander (17:22)
Yeah, I think there was a report that came out today, the IPA Bell Weather Report, which is something that is published every year. And I think again, to that human connection, I think one of the things that were highlighted there, because it shows the investments that marketing teams are sort leaning into. And it was interesting to see that over last year, and the trend we're seeing now is that marketing investments were held flat. So they were kept at sort of 0 % growth. were
You know, the investments were going up during the year, but then it kind of dropped off. So it was flat 25 to 24, which is, ⁓ you know, interesting in itself. But looking at 2026, I think what stood out as one of the things that brands in B2B were wanting to invest in, it was events. And of course, again, we talk lot about NREF now, but we were there as well, Charlotte and you were there. So I think more.
in B2B, we will see a resurgence of those types of things as well. And the importance they will have to show that, you know, this is a company, this is a brand that you can trust, and there's real people behind it and building those connections. And it is, ⁓ because that also becomes, it becomes about signaling value. I don't know how familiar you are with that concept, ⁓ but like it signals that you are a ⁓
you a a big brand, can invest in it and it signals that you are someone to trust because you invest in this. So the human flex will have a great sort of signaling value for brands going forward.
Joaquin Dominguez (18:55)
I think you stole my example, Carl. I wanted to ask about events because, Charlotte, what you mentioned about having mirrors with AI, think every B2B marketer would dream to have something like that. But of course, not all of us, can afford having technology like that. However, we can definitely do things at events that are creative with the help of AI.
and applying personalization in one-to-one conversations. I don't know if you've seen in events things that are different comparing with a couple of years ago without the boom of AI. ⁓
Charlotte Wahlgren (19:34)
Yeah, definitely. mean, from now, what you pointed out there, Carl, I think the human connection there and meeting in person has never been as important as now and connecting within the community, not just a community that the brand has built up, but also a community such as retail associations and other type of communities that in the lot.
different industries and make sure that people feel that inclusiveness and especially I think in the world of again, we don't know where AI will take us in 2030, we don't know. So I think that's even more important now to help and bridge those gaps as well.
as a brand and as a company targeting the B2B audience, building those connections and trifectas because it is super hard to find one solution that fits all. And even though personalization has become more and more real time capability, It's still are those human connections that will play a super important role, especially in
the event forum. And I would say from having all of these interactive things with the B2B clients, what we have done at Shopify is really going back more and more to the product, doing those demos, making sure that we show that in person and not just pulling up a video on a screen, but actually showing how the whole experience
is end to end and doing that much more person to person, eye to eye, to create that trust. And I think to your point, Andrew, what you said before, I mean, we don't know what's real anymore. So I think that also that keeps people a little bit more conscious and they tend to take a little bit of a step back. creating those more smaller and intimate event is what we have really seen at Chopper 5 in...
been a profound new strategy for us.
Andrew Soane (21:47)
Agreed. I do think that there is a trend because maybe three years ago as the of the GPT kind of era exploded, just having AI as part of your offering, as part of your engagement mechanism, that in itself was a differentiator, right? But actually what's happened is that everybody, major enterprise is either experimenting or looking at scaling AI somewhere in the way they operate, whether they're B2B or B2C.
I've just talked about the Rubin announcement, which is going to even more accelerate the adoption and implementation of AI in enterprises. It's going to democratize it and it's going to reduce the buying point. It's going to make it less expensive for organizations to invest. Companies that would never have had the budget to be able to invest in AI are going to be able to do that because it's going to be much cheaper, which means just having AI is no longer a differentiator. So when we're thinking about experiences, we've got to think about, okay, how can we make them relevant?
How can we make that great, create that human connection? How can we create trust? Carl and Charlotte both talked about how important trust is. That's going to be the differentiator of how we use AI. Just having, if your business is predicated, if your proposition is predicated on, we've just got AI as part of our mix, that is, you you're dead in the water. That is no longer a differentiator. You've got to think about the relevance of how you're going to use it and connect with customers.
Carl Ronander (23:04)
I agree with that, And I thought of another thing, perhaps another perspective then to the event side of it and maybe a go-to-market where how you can leverage AI. And what we talk a lot about with an event is also that, of course, there's a difference between an event that we might be hosting ourselves, which I also believe is a truly important thing, like inviting your customers and your prospects and having that meeting. But if you're at a bigger...
event, you know, conference or something that the meeting, the personal meeting there might just be the start and how you can leverage AI in sort of and change your go to market from the individual or the contact and working the account or working the brand and how you can enrich data with the help of AI, which allows you to
target, find an interesting business and an interesting brand to target and allows you then to do more narrow targeting that is relevant for you and finding those other contacts within a business. Because again, this notion of buying committees in B2B, I think that is one of the big things that is the difference still between B2C and B2B is that
In B2B, you have to talk to a buying committee, a bigger group and impact them and be on that procurement list on day one and be recognized when that procurement starts. So if you find a contact at an event, maybe that's not the right contact, then you can, with the help of AI, find the relevant contact now in a very good way, but also see how do I target this entire company in a good way.
to make sure that when they might be interested in buying my services, the CFO, yeah, I've heard of that company as well. So, and I think that really like increases the velocity of the purchasing of your service or product. So yeah, that maybe is another perspective of how you can use events with the help of AI.
Joaquin Dominguez (24:59)
Yeah, I've talked with a lot with salespeople and they always say the only thing they need is being in front of a prospect who is interested in your product and ready to buy. And no matter if they are at an event or doing cold calling or, I don't know, having a dinner, they need time with them and they will sell. They just need valuable time, but they need...
Charlotte Wahlgren (25:00)
Hmm.
Joaquin Dominguez (25:24)
precision, they need to be sure that the account that you're targeting is the right fit for your business. And they are the right people and that they understand the journey that they've had. They're not just cold and they're so they don't need to start from scratch. They already have that knowledge, as you mentioned, Carl, like they need to know that the CFO knows my company. They know what we do. And then.
They just need time to sell and build that relationship that is so important.
Carl Ronander (25:55)
Yeah. And
I think what we're allowed to do now, or what we're seeing is that, you know, we are able to find better audiences than what the platforms might have allowed us, you know, and be more precise and more wasteful still doing broad targeting. I still believe in that, but,
there's a difference between being broad and being wasteful in B2B, right? So we're seeing a lot of interesting things happening there and allowing us to be much smarter with our targeting and much more efficient. ⁓
Joaquin Dominguez (26:18)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Soane (26:26)
I
completely agree with Carl's point and would add to that, I would add that the buyer is also more informed when they get to that sales conversation. That's the other dynamic that's changed because of AI and everything else.
Joaquin Dominguez (26:38)
100 percent.
Charlotte Wahlgren (26:38)
Definitely. I
think, mean, if we just look at how taking that really big perspective, right, of AI, I we have truly seen and speaking from now the Shopify lens is, I mean, thanks to that, we can do a lot better decision making, not just better content, not just pushing better campaigns, but really in a very, very early stage.
making sure we pivot the strategy for each market to be there at the right timing. really that is something that wasn't possible to do in such a quick turnaround. Just going into a market here in Europe is not as easy as expanding within the US and Canada, right? So it's like that...
data tool set and how we work with brand, with the growth and the commercial organization. Thanks to that overarching company tooling is just amazing to see.
Joaquin Dominguez (27:43)
Yeah, and I think all of this points to a broader shift in what it means to be a marketer and looking ahead, what new skills and mindsets will marketers need to stay relevant by 2030 or 2040 as AI takes on more on execution? So what becomes the human advantage?
Andrew Soane (28:05)
some bad news for you all before we answer that question. was a, and you're not going to be familiar with this, there's a newspaper in the UK called The Daily Mail. don't read it. But on LinkedIn I saw today that they published an article yesterday and the article was headline, nine AI-proof jobs that will keep you in demand for decades. And it was published with an employment agency. And the really bad news is that marketing wasn't on the list,
incredibly recruitment consulting was, which I'm thinking is right for AI disruption. But anyway, marketing is not on that list. So bad news. So maybe we need to sort of rethink our career steps.
Carl Ronander (28:39)
Yeah, there was some other thing I saw the other day as well that where they did a test comparing fully generated campaigns compared to those that were a hybrid between human and AI and those that were purely human. And in this case, of course, this is not a conclusive study, but actually they saw that the AI totally AI created communication marketing.
outperformed the hybrid and the human, humanly created. Of course, you know, I don't think this study is conclusive in any way. And I think it depends a lot of what you look at, right? But what we do know is that I think
what will happen is that the average, the amount of average stuff out there will like just increase. So
you need to, you need to think about that. And for me, it's really about
what are the skillsets? Well, we talked about this generalist marketing, this T-shaped marketer that might have a specialty. But I think you also, everyone needs to one, understand the principles of marketing, because I don't think that those will actually change because as we've been talking about today already,
We're trying to impact people and working with things like memory structures and things like that. And that will not change. It hasn't changed evolutionarily for the past couple of thousand years. So it will very much remain the same. And there are principles of marketing that I believe still apply even if the tools at our disposal are different today. So I think that's...
Charlotte Wahlgren (30:15)
Hmm.
Carl Ronander (30:17)
Like understanding the principles of marketing is one. And then of course, you know, we work a lot with, I work with data and marketing data and just like understanding marketing data and being able to work in a more data driven way because marketing will as this recruitment ad or a study showed, we will be more and more questioned. we relevant?
budgets will continue to be challenged and you then need to be able to prove the impact your marketing is having. It will not do to sort of guess or kind of know. You need to be in control of your marketing data. I think that's a skill set that we will see not only for the more analytical roles in marketing, but for all roles in marketing.
Charlotte Wahlgren (31:02)
Definitely agree with that. And I think as well, one thing I would like to add to it is just you need to be a very bold market here to survive in the transition of
how we do marketing in the next coming years. You need to be experiential. You need to be agile. You need to be able to look outside the marketing box and how we have done things in the past. And I think to your point, yeah, I think both yes and no from my perspective. I think the foundation will tilt because of the new way that we see customers now buying.
⁓ I think that the foundation, the core of it, some will stay, of course, but I would definitely say that we are in a transition phase in how you shop today. And in the next coming years, I think we will see this pivot a lot more to actually us being fed, people using their agents to do things for them because they already do it. The young generation, they...
They also have trained their agents to be so mindful with their shopping advices and giving those recommendations. I think that we will see an expansion into B2B marketing going forward as the LLMs start to develop over the next five to 10 years.
Andrew Soane (32:25)
Agreed, agreed. I completely agree with everything that you've both said. I would add three things to it. We've all heard the quote, What's the quote? AI won't steal your job, but someone who understands AI will. There's lots of different versions of that. I think understanding the fundamentals of how AI works, I think it's helpful. I did, for instance, the Gen.ai course for leaders, which is a free course, a 10-hour course by Google. I really, I mean, I encourage everybody, honestly, it's...
absolutely worth an investment of 10 hours of your time to do that because it kind of takes you through from the basic fundamentals all the way through up to how to create your own agent using you know Google AI Studio and stuff like that so it takes takes people through pretty you know pretty broad learning spectrum that so that just understanding that stuff I think is important I think the other two things there was a really interesting ⁓
⁓ PCI. think it was yesterday McKinsey announced that they have 60,000 employees globally and 40,000 of them are human but 20,000 of them are AI agents and they've even issued like email addresses and enterprise IDs to the agents. We're all of us going to work with agentic colleagues effectively and I think that's a mindset shift that we probably will need to make in the next few years actually sooner rather than later. You know think that the mindset shift is
AI augment augments my thinking it doesn't replace it and so I've got to learn to work with it. And then the other thing is we're to have to become I think adaptive leaders you know we've all agreed and talked about the rate of AI's change is increasing it's accelerating and that means that having a static skill set I mean I was really nervous about your question Joaquin because you don't want to see what skills you need by 2030 I don't even know what's going to happen like two months from now around AI sometimes it's really hard so
predicting what's going to happen in the next four or five years is really difficult. But I do think that things will continue to evolve. that static skill set will start to decay, right? So having a learning mindset and embracing that change and being comfortable with ambiguity and all of those things, I think that will be something else that makes marketers, actually not just marketers, every profession successful.
Carl Ronander (34:29)
Yeah, I agree with that. And I just want to second what you said, Charlotte, about experimentation, because I think that's something also, and to your point, Andrew, as well, we don't know. So we need to be open for experimentation and we need to be allowed to experiment. So we just did a bit of research of our own and we publish every year a marketing intelligence report where we sort of look at the land of the market.
And ⁓ this year, one of the things we looked specifically on was sort of the ability to experiment and the willingness to experiment if marketers felt that. And it was really interesting to see that there was a really low appetite or a low level to experiment or an acceptance for it. And that you always need to
generate results quickly, right? And we're sort of obsessed with that ROI and proving that. And then of course we become afraid to experiment. And it was really interesting to see coming back to the point I made earlier of you need to be data-driven as a marketer. We saw that companies and brands that...
were more advanced in their marketing measurement. working with attribution in some shape or form, were much more willing to experiment. And so that was really interesting that actually, being on top of your data and being in control gives you the evidence to show that my experimentation, my, if we want to call it a bold action is actually having a result.
So I thought that was really interesting to see that they actually are connected. And that's a way for it.
Andrew Soane (36:05)
I'd love to see that research, sounds really interesting. Thank you.
Carl Ronander (36:07)
I can share with you.
Joaquin Dominguez (36:08)
Well, we are coming to an end. Unfortunately, this has been such a great discussion. And I think if there is one thing that stands out is that while AI is transforming how marketing gets executed, it doesn't remove the need for strategy, judgment, or a brand. yeah, so those things will be even more important, I think.
the upcoming days. So to our listeners, thank you so much for joining us on B2B Marketing Futures. And if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with your team and follow our guests for more of their thinking. Until next time, thank you so much.
