My 9 Predictions on the future of B2B Marketing
And the massive impact of AI
Hey welcome to this edition about;
My 9 Predictions on the future of B2B Marketing
I’ve been a marketer for 9 years and I’ve invested over 16,800 hours into this skill. I saw the rapid evolution but it was nothing compared to what’s happening now.
So I sat down and wrote my vision of what’s going to happen. You’ll learn:
What will be the disruption in the next few years?
How to adapt as a founder or marketer?
What will be the marketing trends to know about?
Let’s jump in my 9 predictions;
For each prediction, I’m adding a short recap 💡
1/ Legacy businesses are going to compete with AI-native businesses that work 10x faster
“We need to open an instagram account”, or “we need to host webinars”. Those are current projects of big legacy businesses. They’re still catching up to the digital age of marketing.
On the other side, there are native-AI businesses that are built on the foundation of social media (X, YouTube, LinkedIn) to serve a specific audience with a problem. They ship fast, have a direct feedback loop with users, and use AI as an integral part of the business.
Legacy Businesses: Traditional companies that rely on older technologies and business models, often struggling to adapt to new innovations. Built in a pre-AI world.
AI Native Businesses: Companies built around artificial intelligence, where AI is central to their products, services, and operations. Build in an AI world.
We can say there was a clear ‘before and after’ with AI. And businesses built in a pre-AI world are now by definition late. Because they’re competing with native-AI businesses that do everything 100x faster at their core.
This will create a massive disruption as we saw it in B2C (with Uber disrupting the taxi industry for example). The question now is this:
Are legacy businesses going to catch up, buy AI businesses, and win, or;
Are native-AI businesses going to win?
💡 Some big legacy businesses are still catching up to the digital age of marketing (e.g., creating social accounts). They’re now competing with AI-native founders who build features based on community polls. Let’s see who buys whom in 5 years.
2/There will be more AI products so there will be more competition to build an audience
I made this app in 24 hours' is the new flex in entrepreneurship.. But building the app is NOT the bottleneck anymore.
A friend of mine raised millions to build an HR marketplace in 2014. Now, it can be done in 1 week with a vibe-coding tool. But if it’s easy for you, it means it’s easy for everyone else (except if you are really early).
The hardest part now is to:
Build an audience of engaged people
Create a community of early adopters
Find the first 1000 users for the app
💡 It’s going to become increasingly easy to build products and services with AI. So, building an audience will become increasingly competitive.
3/You’ll be able to hire an AI agent to centralize and manage your entire tool stack.
💡I'm sure you'll be able to talk to an AI agent that centralizes and operates your entire tool stack.
4/B2B creators with an audience will win big with sponsorship, partnership, and even equity
As explained in point 2, building an audience will be increasingly competitive.
Therefore, B2B businesses will try to grab their customers attention through creators.
I see 3 options:
B2B creators launch their own business based on their audience needs
B2B creators get a large equity amount in one startup
B2B creators get small equity shares in multiple startups
And this is already true. Every week, I receive around 5 requests from AI startups for sponsorship opportunities. Building an audience in a specific B2B niche will definitely be a great asset.
💡B2B creators will receive equity in startups and join their boards. In exchange, they’ll offer access to their audiences and bring an audience-first mindset.
5/The new B2B marketing formula will be high-quality content at scale + intent gathering + warm outbound
As I keep exploring B2B Marketing, I’m starting to identify the best playbook for the upcoming years. It’s actually very simple in theory: talk about what you do, see who is interested, and go talk to them.
When you’re using this playbook in a room with 10 people, it’s very easy. You speak on stage about your expertise, you see who is interested in the audience, then you go talk to them at the end of the talk.
But it gets harder when your TAM is 5M potential users, scattered everywhere on the internet.
Here are the 3 components of this playbook you need to master:
High quality content at scale: how do grab your target customers attention in a noisy world?
Intent gathering: how do you know who is interested by your product?
Warm outbound: how do you contact them directly? What do you say?
There is honestly still a lot of room for those 3 problems (especially 2)
💡 The big winners will be the ones who crack this formula: high-quality content at scale + intent gathering + warm outbound.
6/Full-stack AI Marketers will replace T-Shaped marketers
Vibe marketing is going to be a thing very soon. Vibe coding means talking to a machine (in your own language) to tell it what to do. As a result, the machine will build your campaigns, write your copy, design your visuals.
It’s going to take multiple shapes:
AI agents you hire to do the job
SAAS that produce your marketing assets
Agencies that charges a fees to manage your AI agents
The scope of possibilities is beyond what we can currently imagine, as progress is exponential.
We’ll move from T-shaped marketers to full-stack AI marketers.
T-shaped marketers know a wide range of skills but are specialized in one skill
Full-Stack AI Marketers externalize all the practical skills to AI, so they spend more time on strategy, and managing the tools + AI agents
💡 Companies used to hire specialists, then they preferred T-Shaped marketers. Now, they'll focus on hiring Full-stack AI Marketers that can do the job of 5 people.
7/ Automating Marketing ops with AI will make you win twice (let me explain)
They will win twice:
Automate the boring tasks and produce more
Free up time to do more human to human tasks or strategy
I wrote this post in 2024 about “the AI-augmented marketer” that automates time consuming tasks so they can spend more time on strategy and creation.
💡 Businesses that run AI Marketing ops will win twice. First, they'll automate the boring tasks. Second, they'll free up time to attend conferences, organize breakfasts with their prospects, or host a podcast with their clients.
8/B2B video marketing is entering its golden age
The SEO world is facing challenges right now. People are clicking less and less on links. Instead, they read the AI summary made by Google, or they head directly to an AI like ChatGPT.
People read the AI summary:
I didn’t invest in SEO in the past 3 years because I thought it was the end of a cycle. Articles were just long commoditized content only here to include CTAS. There was less and less original takes, only “top 10 trends”, with trend 1 selling the tool.
5 years from now, we’ll think “did we really scroll 10 articles to find 1 simple information?”. Because we’ll be able to find specific insights right away.
This is the context. Now, here is the link with video. As people spend less time scrolling in random blogs, they’ll move to social network, communities AND video platforms to find information.
So we’ll enter the golden age of B2B Video marketing with:
More video podcasts
More short videos
More 10-minute expert YouTube videos
💡 The golden age of B2B video marketing is yet to come.. We’ll see a shift in investment from blogs to video production (expert videos, shorts, podcasts, large-scale productions). Why? Because people are now used to consuming video, thanks to B2C habits.
9/How I will invest my time as a marketer (and founder)
Disclaimer: Please note: I am not a certified career advisor. The insights I share are based on personal experience and general knowledge. Please do your own research or consult a qualified professional before making career decisions.
Keeping up with AI and new tools is a full time job at this point. And as a marketer or founder, you might have AI anxiety:
AI anxiety refers to the worry or unease people feel about the growing influence of AI in society and in their job.
You could learn:
AI automation
AI GTM enrichment
AI creation
However, this will likely become obsolete in the next few months (6 to 24 months), in my opinion. Indeed, at this pace, we’ll soon be able to talk to AI agents to run the complex stuff for us. So if it will be obsolete soon, why should I even learn it now?
Here are things I will bet on as a marketer and founder:
Marketing strategy
Management
Psychology
Creativity
Video
Sales
💡 If you're a marketer, learning automation and GTM engineering is not the safest bet. You'll likely be able to vibe-code it in a few months. I’d bet instead on content, strategy, audience building, or video.
Alright, those were my 9 predictions! Let’s end the edition with a broader view on AI;
Conclusion and opening: the macro economic impact of AI
You’ve guessed it by now, the disruption started to happen in late 2022 with OpenAI releasing ChatGPT. This year, they changed the world as we knew it, putting us in a rush for innovations, productivity, and competition. When you think about it, what happened in 3 years is insane.
And it’s going to have a massive impact on B2B:
Jobs being replaced, and new jobs created
Entire businesses getting completely obsolete
Huge competition with all the new AI tools
Destruction of all the entry barriers of entrepreneurship
This will eventually create a “quaternary sector” in my opinion:
Incredible post!
Incredibly good read👍🏼