This morning I attended the APAC B2B Marketing Leaders Forum at Doltone House in Sydney. I was one of only a handful of sales leaders in the room which, in itself, tells you something.

During the panel I spoke on ("B2B Tech ABX: Making Buyers Feel Something - at Scale"), I asked the audience who was in sales. A few tentative hands were raised. I pushed back suggesting that everyone in that room works for a company that exists to generate revenue. We're all in sales. The silence that followed was deafening.

Here's what else I took away.

AI is being dramatically undersold

Speaker after speaker talked about using AI to automate the mundane. Free up the team. Take the boring stuff off their plate. Don't get me wrong - I get it, but this framing fundamentally undersells what's in front of us.

AI isn't just a productivity hack for process-heavy work. It's a transformation lever for the entire marketing function. It can help rethink how you understand buyers, how you create and distribute insight, how you influence purchase decisions before a prospect ever raises their hand. If your AI ambition stops at "automate the admin," you're bringing a calculator to a chess match.

The relay race is broken - and customers have already left the track

Here's the metaphor that kept coming back to me today. Marketing and Sales are running a relay race. Marketing runs its leg, passes the baton to the SDR, who books the meeting and passes it to Sales, who takes it home. When revenue doesn't follow, Sales blames the quality of the baton. Marketing blames Sales for dropping it. And the SDR (often the most junior, least experienced person on the team) is left holding responsibility for the most consequential handoff in the entire revenue cycle.

Meanwhile, the customer has already finished the race without us.

The harsh reality is that most buyers today, empowered by their own research and increasingly by AI, arrive at a vendor shortlist before they engage with any vendor. They're not waiting for your nurture sequence. They're not responding to your MQL-triggering whitepaper download. By the time your SDR makes contact, the shortlist may already be set. And yet we handed that first human impression, often with a senior enterprise buyer, to an early-career SDR armed with a script and a sequence tool.

We don't need to run the relay better. We need a different race format entirely.

The new battleground - Answer Engine Optimisation

If buyers are forming their shortlist before they ever talk to you, the question becomes how are they forming it, and where are you showing up?

Increasingly, the answer is AI. Buyers are typing their problems into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and getting back synthesised vendor recommendations. This is before they've visited your website, read your content, or spoken to your SDR. This is Answer Engine Optimisation, and most B2B marketing teams don't have a playbook for it yet.

SEO was about getting found in search. AEO is about being recommended by AI. The rules are different. The content that wins isn't keyword-optimised landing pages. Instead it's authoritative, substantive, genuinely useful material that AI models learn to trust and reference. If your brand isn't showing up in the answers your buyers are getting from AI, you're not losing at the bottom of the funnel. You're not in the race at all.

This is where I'd be placing serious bets if I were running a marketing function today.

The metrics misalignment is costing everyone

Marketing teams in that room today are being measured on MQLs, impressions, hand raises, and downloads. These are activity metrics. They measure motion, not momentum.

If Marketing and Sales don't share accountability for pipeline and revenue, they are on different teams. The inevitable result is the blame cycle I described above.

Here's a simple question for you - is your Marketing team in the room when Sales reviews pipeline? In most organisations I've seen, the answer is no. That's not a relationship problem. That's a design and cultural problem.

Buying groups are nothing new, but finally getting real attention

There was significant discussion today on buying groups. I'll be honest though - the concept surprised no one. Buying groups have always existed. What is changing is the recognition that each member of that group needs a differentiated message, calibrated to their role they play in the buying decision. The CFO, the end user, the champion, IT, the blocker - they're not reading the same playbook, and neither should you.

The agent question nobody can answer

There's real anxiety in the room about fully agentic marketing. The idea that AI agents will eventually handle the entire buying process with no human in the loop. I don't think anyone has a clean answer yet. But the question itself is clarifying. If a human isn't in the loop, what uniquely human value were they adding in the first place? That's the harder conversation.

One thing I'd do differently

I shared this on stage today and I'll say it again here. If I had my time over as MD, I would have invested far more in uplevelling the SDR function.

We handed the responsibility of first human contact with a prospective customer (often an enterprise account) to the most junior, least tenured, least experienced person on the team. Then we wondered why the customer experience at the top of funnel didn't match our brand promise.

That's not a people problem. That's a strategic misalignment between where we invested and what we said we valued.

In summary

The B2B buying journey is being rewritten. The question isn't whether Marketing and Sales need to change. It's whether they'll do it together, or keep blaming each other for the gap.

I know which approach will move faster.