Last week, Jennie, our Chief Growth Officer, attended The Drum’s Predictions 2026 event, where marketing leaders from HSBC, Red Bull Racing, General Mills, and WPP gathered to share what’s working, what’s changing, and what’s complete noise for the year ahead. While there was the expected discussion about a certain global sporting event and the inevitable AI commentary, several insights cut through that we think really matter for B2B marketers right now.
Here’s what we learned – filtered through a B2B lens and hopefully useful to you for the year ahead.
Rethinking How You Plan
The most honest moment came from Caroline at Red Bull Racing: “The premise that you can plan 12-18 months ahead is becoming ever more fictional.” This isn’t about abandoning planning – it’s about fundamentally rethinking what planning means.
Nicole German from HSBC shared their approach: 60% planned content with 40% reactive and agile capacity. This represents a massive shift in team structure and resource allocation, particularly around go-to-market content strategy.
For B2B, where sales cycles run 6-18 months, and campaigns often require extensive stakeholder buy-in, this feels both terrifying and necessary. The challenge isn’t just creating space for agility – it’s getting your organisation comfortable with that level of uncertainty.
Several speakers emphasised moving from detailed quarterly plans to ‘if X happens, then Y’ frameworks.
Joy Talbot from Analytics Partners shared that plans previously reviewed annually are now being re-evaluated monthly. She used a plane analogy: “The destination doesn’t change, but there’s turbulence along the way.”
How Marketing Leaders Are Actually Using AI
Mark Ritson opened with a contrarian take: “AI will dramatically reduce the number of marketing roles… but I don’t think it’s going to have much of a play in the next 12 months.”
Nicole German outlined three practical applications of AI at HSBC:
- Productivity: Accelerating content creation and campaign development
- Insights: Data analysis and pattern recognition at scale
- Client interaction: How clients discover and engage with content – treating ‘the agent’ as a new audience segment
That last point deserves a whole discussion in itself: HSBC is actively considering AI agents as a distinct audience segment in its marketing strategy. When your potential customers are using AI assistants to research suppliers, evaluate solutions, and make recommendations, your content needs to work for both human and machine readers.
Caroline Buckland from Red Bull Racing echoed this: “Where we’re cautious is where AI simulates what our brand is known for.” For brands built on trust and credibility – which describes most B2B companies – this is critical. Automate the repetitive tasks, but orchestrate the brand moments that matter.
Daniel Hulme, WPP’s Chief AI Officer, shared insights on multi-agent reasoning: “The real power is getting agents to collaborate.” For B2B marketers, this translates to using AI not just for single tasks, but for complex workflows that mirror your actual buying journey – one agent identifying high-intent prospects, another creating personalised content variations, a third optimising send times and channel mix.
His critical advice: “Spend 80% of your energy testing agents. AI’s decisions are very opaque.” What will actually differentiate AI success isn’t the technology – it’s data (‘it’ll never be in order – don’t wait’), differentiated talent with the right AI skills, and leadership with strategic focus.
Joy Talbot’s observation was stark:
AI-led search has completely changed how people are finding brands. It’s an interesting behavioural shift on a scale we haven’t seen before.
For B2B, where the buying journey often starts with research and supplier comparisons, this matters immediately. Your content strategy needs to account for:
- How AI tools are parsing and surfacing your content
- Whether your value propositions are clearly extractable by machines
- How competitors are being positioned in AI-generated comparisons
The consideration phase is compressing. If an AI assistant can provide a supplier shortlist in seconds based on specific criteria, your brand needs to be in that shortlist – and you won’t get there through traditional SEO alone.
Customer Experience × Emotion
The CX panel introduced ‘Customer Experience 3.0’ – moving beyond transactions and basic personalisation to emotional connection. For B2B, this might sound fluffy, but the examples were anything but.
An example of Monzo’s work was shared to demonstrate how to bring a human connection to every touchpoint through carefully crafted verbal identity. The principle for B2B: every email, every piece of content, every automated message should feel like it comes from a human who understands the recipient’s challenges – not from a marketing automation platform.
Graham Sykes from Landor emphasised that every brand should be inspirational, reassuring, confident, and focused on continuous learning. But most importantly: “Every brand needs to know its role in their customers’ world.” For B2B, it’s about understanding your role in your customer’s business success.
Social Media: From Reach to Real Relationships
Callum McCahon from Born Social highlighted a fundamental shift happening in social media – one that matters for B2B brands who’ve long struggled with translating B2C social tactics.
The key insight: audiences are looking for more depth with the content they consume. There’s a shift towards more community-based platforms, and a predicted reversal in the volume of content.
What does this mean practically? Slower storytelling and being more intentional with what you put out. For B2B marketers who’ve been pressured to ‘post daily’ or maintain high-volume content calendars, this is permission to focus on quality and meaning.
Callum also predicted a massive rise in creator content, driven by the ‘is it real?’ concern around AI-generated material. In B2B terms, this translates to employee advocacy, thought leadership from your actual experts, and authentic customer and industry voices over polished corporate messaging.
Perhaps most interesting was the discussion around silent engagement – saves and shares happening in dark social and among peers. These ‘hidden metrics’ are often where B2B purchase intent actually lives. Your content might not get public likes, but it’s being forwarded to decision-making committees behind closed doors.
What’s Not Changing
Mark Ritson’s controversial central prediction: “2026 will look dramatically like 2025. It’ll be borderline impossible to determine between the two.” After an hour of discussing change, this grounded the room.
His point: focus on what’s NOT changing so you can build on solid ground. For B2B marketers:
- Buyers still need to trust you before they’ll buy from you
- Complex B2B decisions still require multiple stakeholders and lengthy evaluation
- Relationships and expertise still matter more than perfect automation
- Your brand’s role in customers’ success stories remains the foundation
The five takeaways worth your attention:
- Restructure your planning process: Move to 60% planned, 40% reactive. Build ‘if/then’ frameworks instead of detailed quarterly plans.
- Start marketing to machines: Optimise content for both human readers and AI agents. Test how your brand appears in AI-generated shortlists, comparisons and research summaries.
- Invest in AI testing, not just deployment: Spend 80% of your energy testing AI outputs. Don’t automate brand-critical touchpoints.
- Prioritise quality over volume on social: Slower storytelling, authentic voices, and depth metrics matter more than posting frequency. Track the hidden engagement happening in private channels.
- Focus on the fundamentals that aren’t changing: Trust, relationships, and expertise still trump automation. Build emotional connection at scale while knowing your role in customers’ worlds.
Tom Goodwin closed with this:
We now have the most amazing tool to help us do our jobs – let your imagination run wild. This should be one of the most exciting times to be in the marketing industry – if embraced correctly.
The tension is real: planning is harder, budgets are tighter, and AI is simultaneously a game-changer and disruptive to our world. But the opportunity is equally real – for marketers willing to think differently, test obsessively, and focus on what actually matters to customers.
