B2B Reads: AI Adoption, Brand Equity, and Event ROI

Summary

Some of our favorite B2B sales and marketing posts from around the web this week.

Every Saturday morning we share some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web from the last week (so it’s fresh!). We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please let us know.

How to Drive AI Adoption: Lessons From 21 GTM Leaders by Sophie Buonassisi, GTMnow
MIT found that 95% of GenAI pilots produce zero P&L impact, and the gap isn’t model quality, it’s adoption. Twenty-one GTM leaders share what actually moves the needle: free unlimited experimentation, standards and a starting point, dedicated time to build, and turning one person’s hack into a tool the whole team uses.

Run This AI Audit Before Your Next Budgeting Cycle by Melissa Reeve, MarTech
Most marketing leaders can rattle off AI benchmarks but can’t tell you where their own team actually sits on the adoption curve. Reeve maps a seven-stage terrain, from “confusion zone” to “hyperadaptive future,” with a diagnostic question for each stop. Run it before your next planning meeting and you might find your biggest opportunity isn’t where you expected.

Your Brand Might Be Invisible to AI by Neil Barrie, Fast Company
About half of web searches now run through LLMs, and the systems doing the recommending weigh four signals most brands never think about: coherence, currency, authority and advocacy. Notion, Lego, Shopify and Patagonia each win on a different lever, and none of it comes down to who has the bigger media budget.

The 4 Marketing Decisions That Seem Smart, But That Can Weaken Great Brands by François Bazini, Michel Sara & Manuel Montes, Adweek
A CEO once waved off a slogan change as “not worth fighting the CMO over.” That’s the whole problem in one sentence. The piece names four disguises bad strategy wears well: impatience as agility, personal legacy as consumer-centricity, flashy work over unglamorous fixes, and short-term metrics standing in for real financial discipline.

Stop Thinking of Events as Expenses by Natasha Miller, Inc.
Most companies treat events as a line item, then wonder why nobody can prove they’re worth the spend. Miller’s fix: anchor every event to one business outcome before you book a venue, track ROI at 3, 9 and 12 month intervals, and get marketing, sales and HR aligned on what “success” means before planning starts. One Fortune 500 client beat both its retention and pipeline targets once strategy came first.

Have a wonderful weekend and thank you for reading! If you have B2B news sources you rely on we’d love to hear about them. Please share them with us.