A new study from The Wharton School, highlighted last week in the Wall Street Journal, reports that nearly half of business leaders now use AI daily. But when they launched the study in 2023, just over a third of executives used AI once a week.
Count me among the daily users (or close to it). And while those are interesting data points, I’m not surprised.
Having spent my career at the intersection of media, marketing, and technology, I’ve witnessed every major tech shift of the last three decades. From personal computing to the internet to mobile, each wave reshaped how we work. But the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence—especially generative and agentic AI—is different. AI won’t just change how businesses operate. It will redefine how they grow.
This transformation is especially profound in B2B marketing. Many high-performing marketing teams already use AI in various capacities, but this is just the start.
One thing is clear: 2026 will be the year that smart AI use separates high-performing B2B marketing teams from low-performing ones.
The AI Differentiator
B2B marketing has been undergoing profound change. Budgets are flat or shrinking. Buying cycles are longer. Marketing leaders must do more with fewer resources, while delivering more measurable pipeline impact. Buyers, meanwhile, expect every interaction to feel personal, relevant, and effortless.
At Pipeline360, we see this reality every day. Our promise is to deliver predictable pipeline with precision and scale to our customers and help them find simpler paths to revenue growth, despite what’s happening in the market. And we’ve seen firsthand that when human expertise and automation work together, performance accelerates—fast.
For example, AI has helped us cut campaign setup and optimization by half, delivering faster customer ROI. Using AI in quality assurance has driven a 99% lead acceptance rate by customer sales teams. And AI-enabled data expansion has grown our marketplace to reach more than 150 million global buyers.
Put simply, when marketers apply AI as an enhancer of human judgement, the results compound.
But the next wave of innovation won’t come from using AI as a tool. It will come from embedding AI into the foundation of how marketing operates. That’s why earlier this year we partnered with Bounteous, a global leader in digital innovation, to build the next generation of AI-native solutions for B2B marketing.
I’m confident that what we’ll deliver from this partnership in early 2026 will raise the bar for our industry. Keep an eye on this space.
AI and the Customer Impact
The Wharton School survey found 72% of executives formally measure their ROI from generative AI, and about three out of four report positive returns. In the same Wall Street Journal article, Stefano Puntoni from The Wharton School said it well:
“I’m a marketing professor, and I get excited about productivity, but I get more excited about what kind of new customer experiences we can create (with AI). What kind of new products and services can we generate? What kind of better, stronger customer relationships can we forge using this technology?”
Exactly. At Pipeline360, we share that excitement, because that’s what we’re building toward. AI that doesn’t replace marketers but empowers them. AI that helps customers move quickly, with precision, to reach their revenue goals.
This is the next great wave in marketing transformation. And we’re not waiting for it to happen—we’re building it.
