EXECUTIVE PERSPECTIVE

Michael Cichon is a B2B marketing executive and CMO with 20+ years in technology and cybersecurity, contributing to successful exits at Agari and ThreatMetrix. Most recently, as founding CMO at 1Kosmos, he built go-to-market strategy and demand generation programs that positioned the company for Series B funding. Based in the Phoenix area, he focuses on brand strategy and revenue growth for emerging technology companies.

A recent report published by ON24 cited 87% of US-based B2B Marketers as already using AI tools, and most are pushing deeper into automation for content creation, segmentation, and outreach. But, is this a new and better approach to building brand recognition and generating demand or just the latest shiny object distraction that can actually set the business back? It might depend on how marketers use their new found capabilities.

The Balancing Act: Brand Building vs. Demand Generation

One immutable truth is that we go about marketing to meet and engage people. We look to create an early emotional connection with our brand and then engage people at a time and place they choose and in a mindset that is open to engage. This is fundamentally a human dynamic that goes beyond correlated data points.

Despite AI’s capabilities to consume vast datasets, identify statistical patterns and correlations it lacks the experience, emotions and real-world context essential to the core of marketing. Consider the international B2B cloud services provider that set their AI system to send promotional emails. But, after a major outage, the AI mistakenly sent “upgrade now” offers to clients still dealing with disruption.

The takeaway: AI serves as a wonderful assistant, but it is not emotionally intelligent or empathetic and doesn’t do well managing the nuance that is so very common to Marketing and Sales engagements.

Where AI Actually Helps

AI excels at pattern recognition – things like spotting trends, identifying micro-segments parsing through volumes of content to inform initial messaging frameworks. For example, AI can track and identify brand citations, locate influencers, provide visual design inspiration, and even etch out basic ICP trigger messages.

For advertising outreach, AI can quickly build segments based on geography, firmographics, demographics, news, hiring trends, personal details such as promotions, job changes, and more. AI can even construct emails, call scripts and short messages based on all of this context.

But as we get closer to meeting and engaging people, AI needs to take a back seat, or it risks falling into the same interruption-based path advertising has already proven as a failure

Where Things Go Wrong

AI can’t read the room. Using AI for mass outreach raises concerns because every email, call, or social message interrupts someone's day. Scale without empathy becomes noise – prospects and customers can tune out fast. When the pattern repeats, automated tone-deaf messaging can create real brand damage.

The risk – in their zeal to be heard marketers can forget that on the other end of every outreach is a person who decides in seconds whether your message deserves their attention. When moving toward volume, extra attention needs to be directed to how the outreach happens versus how to throttle progressively higher volumes of outreach.

What Two-Thirds of Marketers Already Know Versus What They Believe

Most B2B marketers will see through the hype. They will recognize it as a tool, not a solution. But many of these same marketers will turn to optimize websites using meta tags, JSON-LD, summarized text files loaded in their website root directory or apply any other number of bells and whistles. I’m not here to say this is wrong, but as much as some of this might help, Google primary guidance continues to be “create helpful, reliable, people-first content” and focuses on time tested SEO strategies with blogs, news articles, and other thought leadership content. We are back to people writing for people.

The Bottom Line

AI works best when it amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it. Use it for insights, efficiency, and scale. But keep humans in charge of the moments that matter—the creative decisions, the relationship building, the oversight that prevents automation from becoming alienation.

Brands will continue to need effective communication through content, visual design, assets and marketing motions that are crafted for short attention spans and that showcase key brand attributes such as authenticity, credibility, authority, and trust.

The automation piece matters too. Freeing teams from repetitive campaign tasks gives them more time for strategy and actual relationship building. That's the promise, anyway.