B2B marketing’s AI problem is organisational readiness, not skills, says MaryLee Sachs

MaryLee Sachs argues that AI is exposing an organisational readiness gap in B2B companies far more than a marketing skills gap.

She describes a conversation now common in B2B executive meetings: the chief executive wants to know why marketing is not moving faster on AI, while the CMO is asking which AI tools they are permitted to use. Each question makes sense, she says, but one is about ambition and the other about execution.

In a recent discussion with a dozen B2B CMOs, Sachs found a clear pattern. Their chief executives want marketing to speed up its use of AI, boards are pressing, investors favour AI stories and vendors are promising large gains in efficiency and effectiveness.

The pressure is real, she says, but so are the constraints. “At its heart, this isn’t an AI problem. It’s an organizational one.”

Inheriting the tools

Most CMOs she speaks to are not resisting AI but testing it and searching for places to use it. But they also have to make it function in companies set up well before generative AI existed, contending with fragmented data, governance rules, cyber security worries, legal sign-off, procurement and teams that are still developing the skills to use the tools well.

One finding stood out. In many large marketing departments Microsoft Copilot is now the standard AI platform, less because marketers favour it than because it belongs to an already approved tech ecosystem and satisfies security demands.

“Many marketing leaders aren’t choosing their AI tools. They’re inheriting them,” Sachs writes. In large organisations, the most widely used platform is often the one that has already cleared security, governance and procurement, so CMOs use the AI they are permitted to use rather than the AI they would choose.

Boardrooms often believe AI progress is being held back by people who do not understand the technology. Sachs argues that it is more often held back by businesses attempting to fit new technology into operating models built for another age.

Embedding AI in the enterprise

She points to research from the AI-Driven Enterprise Institute, reported by CNBC earlier this month, which listed the 20 S&P 500 companies leading on AI adoption. She was struck less by the familiar names than by the kind of company on the list: many operate very complex systems in areas such as infrastructure, energy, enterprise tech, healthcare, logistics and industrial services.

Those companies are not winning because they can produce content faster, she argues, but because they are building AI into how the whole enterprise works.

For B2B marketers, she says, the real opportunity is not just better campaigns or more content but improving how insight flows through the organisation: the use of customer data, alignment between sales and marketing, better service experiences and the way decisions are taken.

The CMO's wider challenge

Sachs links this to a familiar tension in the CMO role. Expectations have changed faster than organisational structures, and CMOs are increasingly expected to deliver growth that depends on functions they do not control.

AI shows the same strain. CEOs want faster adoption, innovation and competitive advantage, yet many companies have still to bring together the governance, data, decision processes and shared ownership across functions needed to achieve it.

“It’s easy to ask why marketing isn’t moving faster. It’s harder to ask whether the organization has created the conditions that allow it to move faster,” she writes.

That means hard discussions about who owns what, appetite for risk, access to technology and who makes decisions; marketing, IT, legal, finance, procurement and operations working together; and seeing AI as a capability for the whole enterprise rather than a marketing project.

While the conversation at Cannes Lions will focus largely on what AI can do, Sachs suggests the more important question may be what organisations are prepared to do to use it effectively.

Chief executives are correct to demand pace and CMOs are correct to flag the practical obstacles, she concludes. The organisations that pull ahead will not be those talking loudest about AI, but “the ones that make it easier for ambition and execution to meet.”