Most B2B marketing teams have now tried AI, far fewer have changed how they work because of it. That gap was the thread running through a recent panel on AI Adoption in Marketing at B2B Marketing Leaders Forum Asia 2026 in Singapore.
Our Director of Strategic Growth, Rajhev Rajkumar, moderated the conversation with four leaders who are putting AI to work inside large, complex organisations: Shoma Narayanan (DBS), Colin Png (SAP), Ljubica Radoicic (Thomson Reuters) and Sameer Thakkar (SAS).
The consensus was clear; the advantage won't go to the teams with the most AI tools. It will go to the teams most willing to rethink the way they work. Here are three shifts that came out of the discussion, and what they mean for B2B marketers.
1. Your buyer's journey now starts with AI
The first touchpoint in a B2B purchase is increasingly not your website, a search results page or a sales rep, it's an AI platform. Buyers are asking AI assistants to shortlist vendors, compare capabilities and summarise the market before they ever speak to anyone.
That changes who your content is written for. It now has two audiences: the machines that find, read and summarise it, and the people who act on it.
For machines: content needs to be clear, well structured and authoritative enough to be surfaced and cited. If an AI assistant can't easily understand what you do and why it matters, you may not make the shortlist at all.
For people: the human channels (events, sales conversations, account-based programs) carry more weight, not less. When the research is done by machines, the human moments need to be genuinely personalised to stand out.
The practical question for marketers: if a prospect asked an AI assistant about your category today, would your brand show up, and would it be described the way you want?
2. Think transformation, not automation
The most common way teams approach AI is to ask, "Where can we fit it in?" They take an existing process and speed up one step: drafting copy faster, summarising reports, generating image variations.
That helps, but it caps the upside. The panel argued for a different starting question: if we were designing this workflow today, with AI available from day one, what would it look like?
Asking it that way tends to surface three opportunities:
Remove manual handoffs: many marketing delays sit between steps, not within them: briefs waiting for approval, assets waiting for review, data waiting to be pulled. AI can close those gaps, but only if the workflow is redesigned around it.
Simplify the process: steps that existed to manage complexity or volume may no longer be needed.
Challenge what's needed at all: some reports, approvals and outputs exist out of habit. Transformation is a chance to stop doing them.
Automation makes today's process faster. Transformation asks whether it's the right process in the first place.
3. Your next team member might be an AI agent
AI is moving from tool to teammate. Agents can now carry out multi-step tasks with limited supervision, and that's starting to change how marketing leaders think about resourcing.
When a role opens up or a new capability is needed, "Could an agent do this?" is becoming part of the hiring conversation. It's not about replacing people. It's about deciding which work needs human judgement, creativity and relationships, and which can be handed to an agent.
That raises a new leadership skill: managing and measuring agent performance. Marketing leaders will need to set clear objectives for agents, check the quality of their output and decide when a human needs to step in. In other words, the same disciplines they apply to their people.
It's a mindset shift, not a tools shift
Across all three shifts, the message from the panel was the same. Which AI tools you use matters far less than how willing you are to rethink the way you work.
Where to start
If you're wondering what to do next, start with these questions:
Test your AI visibility: ask two or three AI assistants about your category and your brand. Note whether you appear and how you're described.
Pick one workflow to redesign, not automate: choose a process with lots of handoffs, map it end to end and ask what it would look like if you built it today.
Add the agent question to resourcing: before the next hire or agency brief, ask which parts of the work an agent could take on, and how you'd measure it.
Rethink your human channels: if machines do more of the research, make sure every human touchpoint is worth the buyer's time.
Where is your team on this journey? We'd love to hear how you're approaching it.
Thank you to Shoma, Colin, Ljubica and Sameer for a generous and insightful conversation, and to the B2B Marketing Leaders Forum Asia organisers for having us.
