Insight

Exciting. Chaotic. Anxious. Energized. Exhausting. Dizzy.

That’s how a room of senior B2B marketers described the job right now at our recent Humanize. Systemize. event at Soho House.

We’re in the middle of what we’ve been calling the great redesign of B2B marketing. AI is changing what we can make, how quickly we can make it and how marketing itself operates. At the same time, the things machines can’t easily replicate – judgement, creativity, relationships, emotion, taste – are becoming more valuable.

So we invited a small group of clients and friends of Rooster Punk to explore both sides of that equation: how we humanize the market and systemize the machine.

Through new research, creative experiments, a candid CMO conversation with Sarah Thomas of Capgemini, and plenty of debate around the table, one thing became pretty clear: framing the future as human versus AI misses the point. The more useful question is where each adds value – and where it really doesn’t.

Here are four things I’m still chewing over.

1. 'Good enough’ is getting easier with AI. But the hard bit is still human.

In our new B2B Marketing’s Final Frontier research report , we analysed 700 B2B brands to understand how ‘human’ they really are. The average established B2B brand scored just 2.51 out of 5 – with Emotional Impact the weakest of the five dimensions we measured. 

B2B is pretty good at knowing its audience – but woefully inadequate at making them feel anything.

This matters when AI can make competent work incredibly quickly. ‘Good enough’ is becoming easier to achieve – making original ideas, judgement, taste and stories people care about all the more valuable.

But our discussion about AI-generated creative landed somewhere refreshingly unsensational: if an idea is clever, has something to say and earns your attention, does the audience really care which tools helped make it?

At the same time, we talked about how real-world production is taking on some of the cachet of handmade luxury goods – valued partly because humans made it.

Either way, the bar for creativity is only getting higher as we all work harder to stand out from the slop. AI can work as creative lighter fuel – but it can’t give someone a reason to care.

2. AI can do the grunt work. But there’s still value in doing it ourselves.

One of my favourite conversations came from Sarah Thomas, EVP & Group CMO at Capgemini, on what AI means for the next generation of marketers.

Sarah spoke positively about the emerging talent she sees experimenting with AI: hungry, curious and willing to put the time into understanding what these tools can do.

But alongside learning the tools, people still need to learn the ropes – experience that has traditionally come as part and parcel of more junior roles.

Know your market. Know your customers. Understand your portfolio. Talk to people. Follow what’s happening in the world. Develop the commercial judgement and softer skills that come from actually doing the work.

It chimed with something that came up again in the afternoon: if AI takes on the tasks people traditionally learn through, then how do the next generation build the experience and judgement they’ll need later?

There’s huge value in removing repetitive work, but today’s efficiency can’t come at the expense of tomorrow’s expertise.

3. More customer data doesn’t mean we know our customers better

For an industry obsessed with customer centricity, there was a surprising amount of conversation about whether we actually know our customers anymore.

One guest observed how sales teams are becoming increasingly reliant on LinkedIn and digital outreach, without necessarily picking up the phone or building the relationships that give you a richer understanding of the person behind the prospect.

Sarah brought this to life through her experience of client and prospect events. Senior decision-makers get invited to a lot of dinners, drinks and corporate hospitality – but when you have a busy job, family and life outside work, another evening away from home isn’t necessarily a gift.

She shared an example from a previous organisation: her team hosted a film premiere for clients and prospects where guests could bring their families. It was a way to build relationships, designed around their guests as people – making the experience genuinely valuable rather than another demand on their time.

As our martech stacks get whizzier, it’s worth remembering: knowing more things about someone isn’t the same as knowing them.

4. AI isn't just for making more – it’s for remembering more.

Asked how AI-enabled their marketing functions currently are, 70% of the room said they were still experimenting. And when we asked where their AI focus lay, creation came behind both operations and organisational learning.

For all the noise around Gen AI producing more copy, imagery and content, the bigger conversation was about making the marketing organisation itself smarter.

How do you stop customer knowledge disappearing with individuals? Brand strategies becoming PDFs gathering dust in SharePoint? Or AI adoption creating a Wild West of rogue platforms, inconsistent workflows and questionable data?

The discussion moved towards the idea of a brand operating system or digital brain: turning the knowledge an organisation already owns into something living, connected and usable.

Because putting an LLM on top of bad data doesn’t create intelligence, and automating a bad process just gives you a bad process that moves faster.

The opportunity isn’t simply to ask AI to do more of our marketing for us. It’s to build marketing organisations that remember more, learn faster and create more of what matters.

Human vs AI was always the wrong fight

Perhaps that’s where the human vs AI debate goes wrong. It assumes there’s a winner when there isn’t one.

The interesting bit isn’t choosing between them – it’s getting much better at knowing when we need which.

We didn’t solve the great redesign of B2B marketing over lunch. But Humanize. Systemize. gave us a chance to get smart people with different experiences around the same table and ask some of the questions that don’t have neat answers yet.

If you’d like to be in the room next time, register your interest for future Rooster Punk events.