During Oct. 13-15, the 2026 Marketing AI Conference returned to the shores of Lake Erie in everyone’s favorite city, Cleveland, Ohio.
The agenda was packed and the speaker list included big fancy names and fellow marketers working in the weeds. There was much to learn, so let’s get into some of the big takeaways on AI in B2B marketing you can use right now.
What Can You Do That AI Can’t? A lot!
There are powerful AI tools out there that can take on tasks and automate just about anything. But in marketing, that has also led to a huge increase in noise known as AI slop. It’s easier than ever to create a blog post, so the value of a blog post has gone down.
But here’s the good news: that slop is easy to tune out because it’s ‘beige’ content. It has no life or vibrancy since it’s just a big mashup of everything that a language model can sop up.
So your differentiator is being a human. Here are a bunch of B2B marketing angles that AI cannot use because it doesn’t have a deep enough well of knowledge:
- Customer conversations
- Lived experience
- Unique business perspective
- Industry or company data
- Taste specific to your niche
- Subject matter interviews
- Breaking news
Subject matter expertise (SME) content is king. Make only what AI can’t create. If you’re competing on a blog around “7 things you didn’t know about XYZ”, AI can create it faster than you and turn it into social posts before you’ve had a chance to review your writing.
The LLM is the New Digital Advisor
In business, referrals from trusted advisors are like gold. Now, people are treating the tool in their pocket like their closest advisor.
SmarterX’s Mike Kaput pointed out that organic clicks are down 42 percent in 2026. In another session, Webflow’s Guy Yalif shared 2026 data that 94 percent of B2B buyers in a Forrester survey said they used AI as part of their recent buying research.
As the Jedi say, search your feelings. You know this to be true. Are you going to be doing more Google searches in the future or less? Instead, people are talking with the bot in their hand, looking for direct answers.
Attribution is about to get really tricky (was it ever easy?). Buyers are going to appear on sites ready to purchase or fill out a form and you might not ever know where they came from.
So what can you do? Get in front of answer engine optimization (AEO) now. If you’d ever wished you were a leader in SEO instead of playing catch-up, now is the time to act on AEO.
Don’t Lose the Big Picture
AI is powerful, but it needs a human head. Guy Yalif told a great story about a friend testing out a small parachute meant for tricks. Because it was a newer type, he wore a traditional parachute in case there was an issue. There wasn’t… until the new parachute allowed him to get lower than usual at a high speed (by design), but the automatic trigger in the traditional parachute perceived that as a threat and launched itself. Oops.
Both items worked properly. Human design and strategy could have prevented everything from going wrong. There is still only so much trust we can put in any system or automation before human oversight has to come in and review and test.
Is SEO Dead? Don’t Abandon It Yet
Organic traffic is down 15 to 40 percent in the last year, depending on the industry and the studies you read. So it’s dead, right? Not exactly. AEO is growing rapidly, but even if your SEO is producing 40 percent less traffic, it’s still holding that other 60 percent. If you were at 1,000 visitors per month and you dropped in half, you’d still get 500. Probably not something you should throw away.
It’s also worth noting that the fundamentals of good SEO help AEO.
There is no doubt that AEO is the future. But its huge growth numbers don’t mean it’s the only channel. In a great session, CallRail’s Ryan Johnson highlighted that AI referral conversions were up 178 percent year over year across their 30 million calls tracked. WOW!!!
But read the fine print: It made up less than 1 percent of total conversions. Obviously, they are in the calling business where attribution is tough, but huge growth does not immediately equal huge market share.
Talk to Your Buyer Personas
Building out personas has always been a fruitful exercise for understanding where you sit in your market. But on some level the persona has always been the marketing team’s imaginary friend. Sally Simpleton, the Regional Manager with a budget of $1 million. She’s not real, but she is a data research project of what we’re marketing to.
Today, we can have actual conversations with our personas (kind of). If you have good persona research — and I want to emphasize that it has to be GOOD — you can bring your persona to life and talk to your buyer. How? There are many ways, but the best way we’ve found so far is with Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). When you have all your customer research, data, and interviews populated into Notebook, you can ask it about marketing messaging, product ideas, etc.
Don’t Fall in Love With the Tech
Can I be cruel? I’ve been to this conference the last three years and when I walk through the show floor, there are always 15 to 20 new companies with booths. Each time I wonder how many of them will still be around by the next conference. Many have that brand-new business look and feel.
Like protein, they are putting AI in everything now. But the industry is very young and the great consolidation will come. One of the best thoughts I heard at the conference was from a live recording of Drew McLellen’s Build a Better Agency Podcast: own the playbook, rent the tech.
Right now our job as the human lead of AI is to figure out where and how it can be used. From there, the tech underneath is not something we should marry.
Slop Grenades Clog Productivity
I’m perhaps even more in love with the term “slop grenade” than I am with AI slop. Google Cloud Marketing’s Izabelle Macedo is the first person I’ve heard use this term, but I’ve felt the effects of these grenades. What’s a slop grenade? It’s a giant AI-produced document that no one will read, but it gets lobbed at you as if it’s a value-add.
An example: a client recently sent us an audit done by an agency trying to win them over. It was an 89-page report. Does anyone think they did 89 pages of original research to possibly have a conversation with a prospect? Second question: has anyone anywhere read this document?
Everyone is playing with AI now and often they confuse output for results. Those who win will measure being productive in the right direction (see above about owning the playbook and not the tech) and not total emails sent or content published. We always say slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Cleveland!!! This is For You!
The MAICON team calls Cleveland home and I am forever grateful they host this conference here in our city. I talked with marketers from across the world that week. If Cleveland is good enough for Liz Lemon, it’s good enough to be the marketing thought leader of the world. Shoutout to the MAICON team for showing off the city — and shoutout to the Guardians for winning a playoff game while everyone was in town!
