B2B brands on using AI as a ‘creative sparring partner’

From research to conception and execution, no stage of the marketing funnel has been left untouched by AI.

However for B2B brands, it’s within content creation and creative work where artificial intelligence is having its most significant impact.

According to findings from Marketing Week’s State of B2B Marketing survey, 79.8% of B2B brands say they use AI for content writing, while 70.1% use the tech for developing creative/creative ideas. That’s 15 percentage points higher than the third most common application: market research. In large companies (250 employees and over) that proportion is slightly higher still, with 81.3% using AI for content versus 78.4% in SMEs.

“We’re already seeing B2B brands use gen AI at various stages of the creative journey,” says Vera Sidlova, global creative thought leadership director at Kantar.

“The customer experience firm 8×8 used it in its video ads [and] MailChimp used it to ideate and visualise the ‘Clustomer’ idea at an early stage, for a production done with real people. Gen AI can democratise creativity and make new ideas come to life.”

However, with no shortage of controversy around the application of AI across creative and content creation, how are B2B marketers deciding how and when to use it? What challenges, if any, are they encountering? And how convinced are they AI will be part of the creative toolkit for B2B brands for the foreseeable future?

We use AI like a creative sparring partner. It helps us brainstorm, test messaging angles, explore campaign concepts and even simulate audience reactions.

Verity Hurd, Duel

“AI is playing an increasingly important role in sparking creative ideas,” says Mark Barry, senior vice-president of sales and managing director of EMEA at HubSpot.

“Marketers are using AI to brainstorm campaign themes, test different messaging and analyse what content resonates best with their audiences. Many teams use AI tools to generate multiple creative routes quickly, which they then refine further. We’re [also] seeing B2B brands use AI to create a diverse range of content, including website copy, email campaigns, blog posts and sales materials.”

There’s some variation in the extent to which B2B brands are integrating AI into the creative process.

At cybersecurity company Dope Security, for example, the team is circumspect about how often it applies AI.

AI is used to help with drafts of content teams could “easily lose hours on by overthinking”, explains head of design Erica Remmele. This includes newsletters, short text blurbs or quick social posts. However, for more technical writing – such as web copy, documentation resources, sales enablement docs – they stick to human thinking.

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“We already have several years of company and product history to sift through, and we’re building new technology every day, so AI can’t quite catch up to our mastery of the content,” explains Remmele. “There’s a lot of specificity in what we convey to the audience.”

Similarly, when it comes to creative ideas, Dope Security likes to use AI to “jumpstart the research process”, accelerating the team’s capacity to rule out less achievable ideas.

“It’s also useful for message testing. We can access a larger percentage of market data to assess A/B messaging and cut out some of the personal biases,” says Remmele.

This measured addition of gen AI into its work helps the firm’s “small and efficient” marketing team more easily meet tight deadlines.

“Gen AI didn’t replace writers or designers – it just replaced time spent on low-stakes drafting and varianting,” she adds.

Brainstorm, test, measure

Brighton-based PR firm Magenta Associates uses AI tools to outline ideas for website copy, blogs or event write-ups, but every piece of content is written, reviewed and approved by humans, explains digital lead Greg Bortkiewicz.

“AI can be a useful sounding board when we’re developing ideas, but it’s just one tool in the creative process. It doesn’t know our clients or their audiences like we do, so human experience and judgement always take the lead,” he states.

While AI literacy is championed by senior leadership – the PR firm’s managing director is studying for a Master’s in AI, Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge – the business has introduced a clear policy and training to ensure the team “experiment responsibly”, sharing what’s working and what isn’t.

At brand advocacy platform Duel however, AI is deeply embedded into the daily workflow, positioned as a teammate rather than a tool, says head of brand marketing Verity Hurd.

“We’ve invested in training function-specific AI collaborators for content creation, reporting, audience insights and campaign strategy,” she says. “These ‘teammates’ know our tone, workflows and objectives, which means they help us scale our work without losing the nuance and human perspective that makes it resonate.”

The main challenge is maintaining nuance at speed. The temptation is to over-automate, which risks sameness.

Georgia Harrison, Braze

The technology is used to build dynamic landing pages, draft proposals, website copy, email sequences, ad copy and SEO content.

“You name it,” says Hurd. “We also use it to turn a podcast or a long conversation into blogs, social posts, decks, newsletters, even playbooks.”

AI is just as integral in the team’s creative process.

“We use AI like a creative sparring partner,” she adds. “It helps us brainstorm, test messaging angles, explore campaign concepts and even simulate audience reactions. It’s great for generating multiple options fast and surfacing ideas we might never have considered.”

The accessibility of generative AI tools and platforms has opened up use cases beyond technical roles.

“No code platforms mean everyone from junior marketers to senior strategists, and all the way up to CMOs can experiment,” notes Georgia Harrison, general manager UK and Ireland at tech platform Braze.

“That being said, AI utilisation looks very different across the levels of the marketing function. For instance, while junior and mid-level marketers may rely on generative tools to draft copy or automate campaigns, senior leaders are beginning to get to grips with more advanced systems like MCP [model context protocol] servers.”

These servers enable a two-way connection between data and AI-powered tools, allowing CMOs to interact with data “conversationally” and use it to inform strategic decisions, says Harrison.

Beware ‘blanding’

With the first GPT model less than a decade old, it’s no surprise AI, and generative AI in particular, aren’t without their sticking points. Many of these overlap with common concerns around AI in general.

Hurdles include data privacy concerns, gaps in training and fragmented tech stacks, says Barry.

“We see that while enthusiasm for AI is high, the supporting infrastructure and skills are still playing catch-up in some organisations,” he states.

When it comes to content and creative, some challenges are also amplified. Trust is the biggest sticking point, believes Sitecore CMO Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek.

“It is the word that comes up most often – within our teams, with our partners and with our customers,” she explains.

“Data isn’t just information, it’s someone’s story. That is why transparency and governance matter so much, especially when AI is creating and personalising content. Customers trust us with their data so we can make their experiences more relevant, and we can’t take that trust for granted.”

Over-reliance on AI can yield empty results if left unchecked. It’s important to collaborate with AI, as it’s a tool and not a solution.

Erica Remmele, Dope Security

Creative work underpinned by AI can also be dogged by a lack of originality or – even worse – plagiarism. Remmele has seen this first-hand.

“We once saw a new competitor sell their product with language that is proprietary to our infrastructure. They used terms coined uniquely for how we work,” she recalls.

“As flattering as it was to see our language adopted, it was out of place and contextually unclear – a giveaway that AI was involved. We have a very product-led narrative in our GTM [go-to-market] strategy and that was created way before gen AI became available for consumer use, but easily crawlable now for any AI tool to pick up in competitive research.”

It’s definitely a wider problem, agrees Sidlova. Kantar’s own research found many gen AI ads suffer from what it calls “blanding”.

“That’s when creatives converge on generic aesthetics and language, making different brands look and sound the same,” says Sidlova.

When this happens, it directly impacts the effectiveness of content. For instance, Kantar found ‘obvious’ uses of AI – i.e. identifiable by the average viewer – tended to score lower on branding.

“In testing these tend to score lower on branding, often because the model isn’t trained on the brand’s distinctive assets or tone of voice, something a lot of B2B brands struggle with,” she explains.

For Harrison, the solution is human oversight.

“The main challenge is maintaining nuance at speed,” she points out. “The temptation is to over-automate, which risks sameness. The solution lies in embedding AI into creative workflows, allowing quick experimentation while keeping a human check on voice and originality.”

Accelerating adoption

AI adoption shows no signs of slowing down across the B2B marketing landscape.

“The conversation has moved on from simple content generation to much broader applications, such as using AI for real-time analytics, personalised customer experiences, smarter segmentation and workflow automation,” says Barry.

“There’s a growing recognition that AI can fundamentally change how marketers understand and engage their audiences.”

For Hurd, the next frontier for Duel is AI-assisted analytics.

“Surfacing insights from campaigns and customer behavior and feeding them directly back into messaging, content and community-building. This is where AI can really drive smarter, more strategic work in B2B,” she explains.

In these ways B2B brands can begin to lift from the B2C playbook, says Sidlova.

“Applications like insight mining speed up the ideation process,” she explains. “Teams can visualise more ideas and get feedback on them in ad testing and gen AI can be a superpower when it comes to scaling creative or translating both concepts and assets for different markets and channels.”

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At Dope, the team plan to use AI responsibly to summarise their own ideas, reframe them for a wider audience and “get ahead of bad ideas”, says Remmele.

“We hope to lean into it to support localisation in the future. But there is a big takeaway – over-reliance on AI can yield empty results if left unchecked,” she states.

“It’s important to collaborate with AI, as it’s a tool and not a solution. Guide the tool to stay focused on the right facts. Gen AI is an acceleration layer and originality is still driven by humans.”

Harrison agrees the next phase of AI adoption is about trust and building long-term relationships. She argues AI helps “scale relevance”, but great B2B marketing relies on “empathy and storytelling”.

“We shouldn’t be looking to automate everything, but instead create experiences that feel personal. Adoption will only accelerate as marketers see AI as a creative partner, not just an efficiency tool,” Harrison adds.

Marketing Week will continue reporting from our State of B2B Marketing survey over the coming weeks.