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In the age of AI influence, you win or lose before the conversation starts. Here’s what a room full of B2B leaders learned at Spotlight on the Road in San Francisco.
B2B marketing has a trust problem, and most teams are funding the wrong solution.
The established playbook prioritizes what a vendor says about itself: branded content, owned channels, and campaigns with start and end dates. But in the era of AI influence, the sources buyers trust most are entirely different: analyst reports, peer reviews, community forums, and expert commentary.
Marketers instinctively know that “earned” content carries more clout, but “owned” earns more budget and resources because it’s scalable, predictable, and controllable.
That gap between where trust is built and where marketing invests is increasingly problematic in a world where 94% of buyers leverage generative AI tools (Forrester), and half of buyers start their discovery with AI search (G2). Why? Because the sources AI trusts are the same “earned” sources buyers trust most.
Spotlight on the Road: San Francisco put that challenge — and opportunity — in front of a room full of B2B marketing and analyst relations leaders. Here’s what we heard.
Kim Celestre has watched trust form from three vantage points: as a Forrester analyst, an AR practitioner, and a B2B marketing leader. Today, she’s an executive coach and the founder of Brandmia — where she helps B2B marketing executives scale AI without eroding the trust, judgment, and credibility that drive real performance. All of that experience and perspective gave Kim’s session unusual authority: she’s seen the same dynamic from every side of the table.
Her central argument was simple and pointed. The buyer moved on. The funnel didn’t.
Trust compounds during discovery, through what Kim calls the Trust Gravity Effect — three interlocking signals that build buyer confidence: market credibility, customer evidence, and peer and expert validation. The problem is that most organizations run these as separate programs with separate owners. They don’t compound because they were never designed to.
Her three moves to act on now:
Kerry Cunningham, Head of Research and Thought Leadership at 6Sense, shared uncomfortable but clarifying data about exactly when and how B2B buyers decide.
The average B2B buying journey runs about 10 months. But buyers don’t engage with vendors until they’re 61% of the way through it. By that point, 85% have already established their requirements, 94% have ranked their shortlist in order of preference, and the preliminary first choice wins the deal 77% of the time.
The implication is uncomfortable: most of what revenue teams do (outreach, campaigns, BDR sequences) happens after the decision is functionally made.
Kerry’s framework reframes the buying journey into two distinct phases.
Consider these dynamics of the shortlist: buyers typically put four or five vendors on their day-one list, and 95% of the time the winner comes from that list. That shortlist is built almost entirely from prior knowledge and reputation — not from ads, not from outreach, not from a well-timed email sequence. And three-quarters of buyers say they’re already receiving calls and emails from vendors during the selection phase. They’re not ignoring them because the messaging is bad. They’re ignoring them because they’re not ready. And when they are ready, they already know who they want to call.
There’s also an internal dynamic that doesn’t get enough attention. More than 40% of B2B buying journeys fail not because the wrong vendor won, but because the buying group couldn’t reach internal consensus. Kerry’s point: revenue teams need to stop chasing leads and then only engaging with the person who filled out a form. They need to start helping all stakeholders involved reach agreement.
The strategic shift Kerry called for is to aggressively enable buyers long before they’re ready to talk, without expecting immediate response. Thought leadership, events, and community presence aren’t brand-building niceties. In a two-phase buying world, they’re how you get on the list.
Everyone in the room was wrestling with the same challenge: how to build and maintain influence in a world where AI is reshaping how buyers discover, evaluate, and trust vendors.
Katie Nafius, Director of Analyst Relations at Visa, and Mark Miller, Senior Director of Industry Analyst Relations at Intel, are no different. Except they were generous enough to share what they’ve learned so far from their early journeys into that territory.
Both are actively working to understand how their brands surface in AI-generated responses, and both spoke openly about what they’ve found along the way: surprises, assumptions that didn’t hold up, and early signals of what’s actually working.
It was a rare and honest look at two world-class AR programs in the middle of figuring something out, rather than a finished case study from the other side (which no one has yet). That kind of in-progress candor is hard to come by. And that’s exactly why it was so appreciated by everyone in the room.
Mary Shea, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Meerkat and former principal analyst at Forrester, closed the morning with something the previous sessions had been building toward: the human answer to an AI problem.
Her central argument: “AI scaled content. It did not scale trust.” In a world of infinite content, trust is now the only scarce asset. And scarce assets are where the opportunity is.
So what does it actually take to build trust from scratch in an AI-always world? Mary’s playbook is less about budget and more about conviction. Stand for something specific. Find your first believers before you have anything to sell. Be consistently helpful without expecting immediate return. Co-create with your community rather than just marketing to it.
The lesson wasn’t just “do what Meerkat did.” It was something more transferable: credibility precedes brand. People follow you before they follow your company. And in an AI-always world where expertise has been flattened and content has been commoditized, the professionals and companies that invest in genuine human trust — consistently, over time, without expecting immediate return — are building the only kind of influence that compounds.
She closed with a line that landed in the room and deserves to travel further: “The future of influence isn’t louder. It’s more human.”
What made San Francisco such a great start to our 2026 Spotlight On the Road series wasn’t just the exceptional content. It was the community in the room.
My goal for the day wasn’t to send people home with a new checklist. It was to create the conditions for a mindset shift. To invite a room full of smart, experienced professionals to question assumptions that may have served them well for years but are increasingly out of step with how buyers actually behave today.
What struck me most was a theme that cut across every session: trust in the AI era isn’t a machine problem. It’s a human one. The teams and professionals who will win are the ones who are smart about both — who understand how machines work and never lose sight of how humans actually decide.
Kim, Kerry, and Mary brought analytical rigor and genuine conviction to that argument. And Katie and Mark did something harder: They showed up as trailblazers willing to share what they’re learning in real time, before the case study is written. That kind of generosity is what makes a room feel like a community rather than an audience.
Influence + Advocacy + Visibility = Trust
September 14-16 | Kansas City, Missouri
Registration is open!