We sat down with five marketing leaders across industries and org sizes to have a deep discussion about what’s really going on behind the data in our recent Voice of the CMO Report.
Anonymous
Enterprise B2B CMO
Almost 9 in 10 (89%) CMOs are using Generative AI, while almost 4 in 5 (78%) are leveraging traditional AI. Nearly 3 in 5 (58%) CMOs who have adopted AI say it has exceeded expectations and has been a gamechanger.
However, consumers are less enthusiastic: they are almost twice as likely to have mixed feelings about AI (31%) than they are to be excited and optimistic (16%). There is also a clear disconnect between the extent to which CMOs use Generative AI and how comfortable consumers are with it.
In my team, we are all using generative AI. We’ve got access to a bunch of different models — LLMs like Gemini and Copilot that sit behind our firewall. We use them to expedite and add velocity to content creation.
I encourage it, but only with the human in the loop. I don’t want them to just run something through the model and not read it carefully to make sure that it aligns with our brand voice and to make sure that the model didn’t pull in something that is either not factual — which can happen — or steers away from the points we’re trying to make or the proposition that we’re trying to convey.
I think it’s an incredibly useful tool in website content development, for example. We’re launching a new website and stakeholders from across our business are providing the content. They all have different styles and levels of competency in writing website content, as well as different levels of understanding of our business and different levels of sophistication in terms of how we talk about our services and our products.
We built an entire AI model to run all of the content through so we could standardize tone of voice and get consistency in the direction of the content. We were able to do it significantly quicker — a few days, rather than several weeks — than if we were consolidating the content manually. After the information architecture and sitemap is done, that last mile of content creation can be the hardest part. With a human in the loop checking it and refining the content, it did a great job. The website tone of voice is consistent and the content follows a consistent structure.
When it comes to trust, I trust my team. I trust that they’re not just churning content through AI and leaving it at that. It’s kind of like my GPS — I don’t put all my trust in that because sometimes it tells me to make a turn or to go somewhere that doesn’t seem right. Technology can be flawed because it doesn’t have the whole, real world context. A recent example is the driverless Waymo that drove straight through a police standoff. It obviously didn’t have the ability to recognize the danger like a human driver would.
The human in the loop also makes sure the quality is there. You don’t want it to feel like a human hasn’t crafted the content or that we took the lazy way out. There is still a cultural feeling that using AI is just being lazy, which might be contrary to what most marketing leaders would tell you. AI can allow you to spend more time on strategic and higher value work, which means we’re delivering more. It’s not lazy. It’s using the tools put in front of you to maximize what you can do.
Trust in a B2B context is a little different than trust in consumer marketing. The question is more: does it align with your brand promise? Because in our world our service is the brand promise we make to our customers — our brand is our ability to deliver that service. So anything we do has to be true to that. And part of our brand is tech-enabled services, so we’re layering AI on top of what we’re delivering for clients, while keeping a human in the loop to deliver at speed and scale. So the trust comes from being consistent and transparent.
Notably, the primary metric CMOs track has shifted from sales in 2024 (46%) to brand awareness in 2025 (62%), perhaps indicating a broader, more brand-building mindset. The findings suggest that CMOs in 2025 are operating with a sharper strategic focus. While financial pressures remain high, there’s a clear pivot towards prioritising long-term brand equity over short-term sales metrics, and a more comprehensive approach to measuring marketing effectiveness across the board.
Broad brand awareness is not a priority investment for our business, because our market is so small. B2B tends to be far more sales driven, versus marketing driven. Marketing, in the service of sales, delivers brand awareness. And the measurement for that is demand and lead generation via building the understanding within potential buyers that leads to customer acquisition.
We look at things like engagement metrics — click throughs, open rates, things like that — that indicate qualified marketing-sourced leads to really track what marketing activities are driving revenue through closed opportunities. That’s how we’ve built our team’s credibility, and that’s how we continue to get C-suite investment.
So demand gen is about brand awareness plus targeting into your market. It’s building awareness within potential buyers that have the right need, that you’re the people to provide it for them, creating that demand.
That’s much more important than a broad brand awareness approach. For example, a few years ago one of our operations leaders came to a budget meeting and said: “Here’s what we should be doing for brand awareness. I’m in the airport and I see HSBC, HSBC, HSBC. It’s all over the jetway and the digital signs while I’m waiting for my luggage. We should do that. Then everybody will know who we are.” He had no idea how many millions of marketing dollars we would need to successfully do that, and that “talking to the stadium” is not an effective way to spend that budget because not everybody can buy our services. Our target market is really specific. We want to spend less money targeting the right people with exactly what we want to say to them.
It’s about user journeys and meeting our buyers where they want to buy. I’m putting a lot of hope in sophisticated ABM platforms and partnering with big media platforms in our target market — if we advertise through them, we can leverage whatever engine they’re using to advertise to a really specific segment of a specific market.
