As we close out 2025, I recently hosted a webinar with three brilliant marketing leaders, Karan Premi, Emma Wharton-Love and Graham Wylie, to discuss what’s really working (and what’s not) in B2B marketing, and what we all need to focus on in 2026.
The conversation was refreshingly honest. These aren’t people selling silver bullets or magic solutions. They’re in the trenches, managing real budgets, real teams, and real pressure to deliver results. Here’s what stood out.
AI is only as good as your data
Karan put it perfectly: “With AI, whether that’s an agent or any other tool, it’s only going to be as good as the data that you feed it.”
The challenge most organisations face isn’t finding AI tools; it’s getting their data house in order first. Marketing databases, ERPs, CRMs are all holding critical information in silos. The companies making real progress with AI are the ones who’ve invested in breaking down those barriers and creating a genuine single source of truth.
But here’s the reality check from Karan: “You can’t go too far down the rabbit hole and start to build an agent for everything. I fall into that trap where I spend hours building an agent to do something so simple.”
Start small. Build simple agents that solve real problems. Show proof points. Get buy-in. Then scale.
The brand vs performance rebalancing act
Graham shared something I’ve been seeing across multiple clients: “Having milked this brand asset for maybe a decade and not really investing in brand because we’ve been so focused on performance, now the performance numbers are struggling. Customer acquisition cost is climbing, cost per click is climbing.”
After years of short-term performance marketing dominating budgets, there’s finally recognition that brand investment matters. Not because it’s nice to have, but because competing for the same keywords as everyone else is becoming prohibitively expensive.
The marketers that succeed in 2026 will be the ones brave enough to rebalance their portfolio, accepting a couple of quarters of discomfort while they build brand awareness, knowing they’ll come out stronger with lower customer acquisition costs.
Invest now or fall behind
When I asked about balancing capability building with quick ROI, Karan was direct: “If you want to move into this space and you want to play with AI and augment your processes, you’ve got to invest now, otherwise you’re going to be behind in the future.”
Emma reinforced this:”2026 is going to be the year where organisations need to move from experimentation to actually implementing at scale. It’s not enough anymore to just have a few people playing around with ChatGPT.”
This means treating AI as a change and transformation programme, not just a tech project. It means investing in your people, upskilling your teams, and changing ways of working. It means governance and guardrails so teams understand what they can and can’t do.
The stop, start, continue for 2026
At the end of our discussion, I asked each panellist for their “stop, start, continue” advice. The answers were brilliant:
Stop wasting time on manual processes that could be automated (Karan). Stop treating AI as disconnected experiments with no clear business link (Emma). Stop the fear – of AI, of change, of the consequences (Graham). And stop over-communicating the wrong things to business leaders when meaningful metrics would tell a better story.
Start building your data foundations now (Karan). Start treating AI as a wholesale transformation programme, not a tech add-on (Emma). Start using AI day-to-day in your own life to get comfortable with it (Graham). And start investing in your people – the capability building, the mindset shifts, the skills development.
Continue focusing on outcomes, not activity (Karan). Continue spending time understanding your customers deeply – that context makes any AI implementation exponentially more effective (Emma). Continue pushing boundaries and bringing creativity and joy into your work (Graham). Continue building repeatable, scalable approaches and systems.
My takeaway
What struck me most about this conversation was the balance between pragmatism and ambition. These leaders aren’t waiting for perfect conditions. They’re making tough choices about where to invest, what to stop doing, and how to create space for their teams to do better work.
Graham’s advice resonated particularly: “Most marketers know the outcome they’re required to deliver and have smarter ways of achieving that. So, lose the fear and dive into doing it.”
2026 will belong to the marketers who combine three things: clarity on what they’re trying to achieve, courage to do things differently, and commitment to building the foundations (data, people, processes) that make transformation sustainable.
If you’d like to watch the full webinar it’s available here
By Zoe Merchant, Founding Director, Bright Innovation