As AI continues to dominate vendor pitches and marketing decks, three senior B2B marketing leaders warn the technology is being oversold and underused, and that automation alone is neither the goal nor the differentiator for successful marketing.

Divya Handa, senior director of international marketing at tax and compliance provider Avalara believes “there’s a lot of AI-washing”.

Avalara has embedded agentic AI into its go-to-market engine for two years, using it across sales workflows, customer experience, and ABM programmes. But Handa said the technology remains a tool, not a replacement for strategic thinking.

“AI is an operational enabler. It helps with scoring, orchestration and surfacing early intent. But it does not replace human insight,” she said, talking at the Global ABM conference yesterday (5 November).

“It cannot tell you what’s motivating a buying team or what urgency is behind their search.”

For Sophie-Louise Vevers, senior marketing manager for demand programs at software development firm Nintex, the industry’s current problem is not lack of data but saturation.

“We’re drowning in insights, not data itself,” she said. Single signals, such as a white paper download, she argued, are too often treated as buying intent.

Vevers suggested meaningful insight only emerges when multiple data points are layered together. Datapoints like first-party behaviour, third-party intent, firmographic context and historical activity. “One signal doesn’t tell you anything. It’s about painting the picture,” she explained.

She also admitted that most marketing teams use only a fraction of the AI capability available to them. Nintex built its own internal AI model trained solely on proprietary data and customer content to help spot lookalike prospects and shape go-to-market pitches.

How B2B marketers are using AI to manage buying cycles

However, adoption is still in early stages. “We’re quite immature as an organisation in AI,” she said. “The opportunity now is designing workflows around it, not expecting automation to do the job for us.”

Conference platform Zoom’s EMEA integrated marketing manager, Laura Winnan, focused on the challenge of separating valuable buying signals from noise. Zoom blends first-party analytics, ABM platform insight, and firmographic data to validate whether signals reflect the personas and buying committees it aims to influence.

“We look at accounts, not individual contacts,” she said. “It’s the pattern of behaviour across the organisation that matters.” Winnan described AI as a powerful accelerator, particularly Zoom’s own AI Companion, but emphasised that orchestration requires teams to understand not only the signal but the appropriate next action.

Zoom uses the 95:5 model, meaning it operates on the assumption that only 5% of its total addressable market (TAM) is actively in market at any time. The remaining 95% requires consistent brand-to-demand activity that keeps Zoom top of mind.

“We stay present with the 95% so that when intent appears, we’re already ahead,” she said. But she warned that none of this works without sales alignment. “If sales aren’t on board at the beginning, the whole thing falls down. You need to give them the why, not just the data.”

New approaches

For Avalara, a renewed approach has already reshaped results. After reassessing its full data ecosystem, such as CRM hygiene, intent platforms, first-party behaviour, and account development representative (ADR) outreach.

Handa’s team discovered it was overspending on weak-fit accounts that rarely converted. “We slowed down to go fast,” she said. By refocusing on strong-fit accounts with meaningful signals and tightening coordination between SixSense data, Salesforce intelligence and enrichment tools, the company increased pipeline by 28% without increasing spend, according to Handa.

Handa also flagged a recurring tension between providing sales with intelligence and ensuring they act on it. Avalara created custom ChatGPT instances to help ADRs personalise outreach, but uptake has been mixed.

“You can take the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” she said. “We’re doing quarterly enablement to help sales use the intelligence properly. The orchestration is the challenge.”

Purists vs pragmatists: What is ABM’s role in the strategic mix?

Across the panel, it was agreed that what distinguishes high-performing ABM programmes is the intentional coordination of insight, activation, enablement and timing. AI can amplify this, but only when the technology is embedded within a cohesive operating model.

Handa said the market is shifting from a mass targeting approach where AI is used to scale up the number of accounts targeted to an approach where AI is used to find. “It’s not automation — it’s orchestration,” she said. “The winners are the ones who integrate their CRM data, intent data and first-party signals into a connected view.”

Vevers argued that success also depends on empowering teams, and keeping AI use limited where appropriate. “Don’t just use AI for activation,” she said. “Use it to upskill people. Humans are still behind the campaigns.”

Winnan closed the panel with a call for focus: “Know your tech stack. Remove what doesn’t work. Use what does. And build predictable workflows that allow you to pre-empt, not react.”