B2B Reads: AI Measurement Gaps, Pricing Power, and CMO Priorities

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.

AI And The Choice For B2B Marketing Leaders: Cost Reduction Or Performance? by George Couris, Forbes
AI is handing marketing teams a productivity windfall, and George Couris says leaders have to pick a lane: bank the savings or reinvest in bigger swings. He leans hard into the second path, arguing that companies using AI to deepen customer insight and creative work build advantages competitors can’t easily copy. The gap between the two camps is only going to widen from here.

AI Is Changing Media Faster Than Marketers Can Measure It by Constantine von Hoffman, MarTech
IAB surveyed over 200 ad buyers and found spending is up while nobody can quite measure where it’s working anymore. AI-driven discovery is scrambling the usual signals: 45% say comparing AI journeys to the old-school ones is their biggest headache, and a third can’t tell bots from real buyers. For now everyone’s just layering new metrics on top of the old ones, since nothing’s actually being replaced yet.

2026 CMO Survey: Talent Rivals Tech As Growth Driver by MarketScale Newsroom, MarketScale
Deloitte’s latest CMO Survey found marketing leaders split right down the middle on what actually drives revenue growth: half point to having the right people, half point to the right tech. Some CMOs are also quietly retreating to playbooks that already worked as pressure from the rest of the C-suite piles on.

Your Pricing Strategy Is Your Most Powerful Growth Lever, But Most B2B Leaders Are Not Using It by Tracewell (Trace) Gordon, Forbes
Most B2B companies still price by cost-plus math and call it a strategy. Trace Gordon points to the McKinsey stat that should change that: a 1% price increase lifts operating profit by 8.7%, well more than cutting costs or chasing extra volume ever could. His fix is building an actual pricing function instead of just handing reps a discount button.

CMO Tenure Ticks Up As B2B Marketing Adopts AI by MarketScale Newsroom, MarketScale
Fortune 500 CMOs are sticking around a little longer these days, 4.3 years on average, and most who leave land somewhere better. Meanwhile Forrester says 88% of B2B marketing orgs have adopted AI tools, but plenty still can’t say how they’re measuring what it’s actually doing. Job security is up. Measurement clarity is not.

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.