The current state of B2B marketing is as challenging as it is dynamic, with data from this year’s State of B2B Marketing survey showing a sector in flux

A majority of B2B marketers say their role has become more strategic over the past year, with over 58% reporting greater influence within their organisation and more than half claiming the function has increased in importance.

The data also reflects significant shifts in tactics: two-thirds of respondents are evolving their approaches to generating leads, placing a greater emphasis on events and social media in order to give their brand’s storytelling a more human feel.

Changes in tactic are then compounded by the rapidly evolving world of martech, especially given the rise of AI, and the switch to both LLMs and agentic software.

With more change on the horizon, Marketing Week has identified five B2B trends that will shape 2026, to help marketers get to grips with the fast-evolving landscape.

1. AI will change the idea of ‘findability’

B2B buyers are becoming increasingly likely to inform their purchase decisions with assistance from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

Indeed, 94% of B2B buyers used LLMs during their buying journey in 2025, according to research from software development firm 6sense. This means that if your brand isn’t visible in AI-generated answers, you’re losing pipeline before you can measure it.

That said, the volume of output from AI search means that trust, and the idea of quality over quantity of sources, becomes ever more important.

“Brands that focus on a steady stream of mentions from voices that LLMs trust — earned media, influencers, and other online advocates — will have a higher chance of being trusted and therefore cited,” says Davang Shah, VP of marketing for LinkedIn.

He also points to “well-organised content” as essential for brands to be findable. This can include things such as FAQs and subheadings in text, which make it easier for AI to ‘read’ your content.

Davang continues: “The age of AI discoverability will democratise B2B marketing and shift the B2B marketer’s strategy from building awareness through budget and keywords to building a credibility-driven reputation across the public internet.”

‘No magic pixie dust’: How B2B marketers are approaching the rise of agentic AI

2. ‘Buyer enablement’ will become a dealbreaker

If there is one trend set to reshape B2B marketing in 2026, Gartner’s Philip Black believes it is “buyer enablement” and the need to be customer-centric rather than business-centric.

What was once considered a “nice to have” has hardened into a hygiene factor. “B2B buyers are penalising brands if they have poor buyer enablement,” he says.

That expectation is rising fast, and it is reshaping what buyers want from digital experiences, meaning a company’s website is now “just as important to buyers as sales reps”. In some industries, he notes, the digital offer is more important, which flips a long-standing assumption in B2B that buyers rely primarily on sales teams for guidance.

“Most buyers say if your website sucks, they’re going to avoid doing business with you,” Black adds.

But effective enablement requires precision. Buyers are overwhelmed by quantity and frustrated by irrelevance. Most will avoid a supplier that sends “crap messages”, as Black puts it.

The task for marketers is no longer to provide more content, but to help buyers progress through the buying cycle by ensuring they have the right information to make an informed decision at the right time. That means answering the questions they actually have—how to implement, what the business case looks like, how competitors compare, which configurations fit their needs.

“You want to help them progress through their journey, not just blast them,” he says.
Underpinning all of this is insight. “You’re not going to do real good enablement unless you understand exactly what they’re wanting to do,” Black warns.

‘Panicked and pressured’: Why are B2B marketers doubting their skills?

3. Agentic AI will shift the martech stack

If the last decade of marketing technology was defined by expansion, the next may be characterised by replacement. For translation software firm DeepL’s CMO, Steve Rotter, agentic AI is not another layer in an already crowded stack, but a potential reset.

“Marketers are overwhelmed with big SaaS systems that are chunky, long-term deployments,” he says. “I believe agents are going to be the new martech stack.”

Rather than replacing core platforms overnight, AI agents are expected to sit alongside them. They will also fill gaps where existing systems are slow, rigid or poorly suited to real-world tasks.

This shift, however, won’t happen overnight. Large SaaS platforms are deeply embedded and expensive to unwind. But their role as primary interfaces may erode quickly.

“Their prominence as the interfaces people most often touch will start decreasing very rapidly,” Rotter predicts, as agents become the layer marketers actually interact with day to day.

Despite inevitable missteps – and widespread “agent washing” – he sees adoption as irreversible. “I don’t think anybody’s dismissing the long-term viability of agents,” he says. “It’s not about whether they last. It’s whether you picked the right one.”

You’re not going to do real good enablement unless you understand exactly what they’re wanting to do

Philip Black, Gartner

If the first phase of agentic AI was defined by individual tools solving isolated tasks, the next wave will be about orchestration. For document generation software Templafy’s CMO, Glen Hagensen, the most consequential shift ahead isn’t better agents – it’s agents that work together.

“What we’ll see in marketing is agents starting to talk to each other way more,” he says.

He describes a future in which a revenue-focused agent identifies where the business is actually making money, triggering a creative agent to generate personalised messaging, prompting a channel agent to deploy the work, before returning performance data to restart the cycle.

Whoever solves agent-to-agent interoperability will be the platform that reshapes how B2B marketing is run, he says, adding that this will happen next year.

4. ‘Fair-trade’ data and user experience evolves

As the use cases for AI are constantly shifting, how B2B brands use data has to change too. Johann Wrede, CMO for software firm UserTesting, says the next big step will be the idea of ‘fair-trade’ data.

The process of clicking accept to multiple cookies when visiting a brand website, in his opinion, is not consent but rather the wearing down of the buyer.

“For years, consumers have been conditioned to click through endless cookie banners, toggle confusing consent settings, and endure dark pattern UX designed to wear down resistance,” he says.

The shift, he says, will come in the form of “permission-based” personalised data: “The smartest brands will flip the script and simply ask, ‘What kind of personal experience do you want?'”

Choosing different data options will then become the norm so that customers can trade their data for experiences he describes as “genuinely valuable, not invasive”.

5. Human connection will reassert itself

For all the momentum behind automation and AI-enabled marketing, one of the most notable shifts emerging is a renewed emphasis on human connection. Rather than being displaced by digital acceleration, face-to-face engagement is regaining strategic weight.

“There’s almost a craving for people to get back in a room together,” says Nicole German, CMO for corporate and institutional banking at HSBC.

“We’re always online, there’s lots of information, but people really want to come together face-to-face to talk through what’s coming, what’s changing, what’s happening,” she says.

This is not a rejection of technology, but a recalibration of its role. “It’s not all digital and not all online,” German adds, pointing to executive roundtables, third-party events and curated forums as spaces where credibility is built through conversation rather than content volume.

At the same time, marketing operations themselves are undergoing structural change. AI-driven workflows promise scale and efficiency, but they also raise questions about quality, accuracy and source integrity.

“There’s a lot of information being put out—some of it purely AI-driven,” she notes. “It comes back to brand trust and the credibility of the source.”

As part of The Year Ahead, Marketing Week will be identifying the key opportunities and challenges that will shape marketers’ roles in 2026. As well as flagging what we think marketers should be spending time and money on next year, it is also a commitment from us to focus on these topics.