#ai

Nectar Social raised a $30 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund. The company simultaneously rebranded as Nectar Agent according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/nectar-social-raises-30m-rebrands-itself-as-nectar-agent/53121/).

The 2026 B2BMX Summer Camp will run July 15 through July 30 as a multi-week virtual series instead of a single-day event. The program focuses on practical B2B marketing execution with sessions covering AI, ABM, buyer influence, trust in marketing and AI-native go-to-market workflows.

B2BMX Summer Camp will release new sessions every Wednesday. Attendees can participate live or access recordings on demand.

MarTech reports that most brand teams rely on dashboards, weekly reports, and periodic social feed checks for competitor tracking. These systems surface what happened last week but do not identify shifts or openings. Social listening tools count mentions and score sentiment after activity occurs.

AI changes the scope by tracking messaging shifts, audience sentiment themes, content strategy changes, and positioning gaps across more competitors daily.

Nearly half of B2B SaaS companies have cut or reduced marketing roles because of AI. The reductions occurred mainly through companies stopping backfills and allowing attrition to shrink teams rather than through announced layoffs.

The findings come from a survey of 100 directors, VPs, and heads of marketing at mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies.

Nearly half of B2B SaaS companies have cut or reduced marketing roles because of AI. Most reductions occurred through quietly stopping backfills and allowing attrition to shrink teams, according to MarTech.

Wynter’s report “How B2B Marketing Actually Uses AI” surveyed 100 directors, VPs, and heads of marketing at mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies.

Brand teams maintain dashboards, weekly reports and periodic social feed reviews to track competitors. These systems report what happened last week but do not identify shifts or upcoming moves.

Social listening tools count mentions, score sentiment and surface activity after the fact.

2X appointed Emily Atkinson as Chief Client Officer and Drew Murphy as Chief Financial and Operating Officer. The subscription-based go-to-market services partner for B2B organizations made the announcements to expand its executive team.

Atkinson will lead the global client organization and unify strategy, execution, technology and AI as one GTM engine.

According to [MarTech](https://martech.org/ai-is-not-the-skill-email-marketers-need-most/), 35% of companies prioritize AI skills when hiring email marketing teams based on Litmus The State of Email 2026 findings. At the same time, 31% of teams prioritize email campaign strategy and planning.

The MarTech article states that AI serves as a tool for drafting campaign copy, suggesting subject lines, generating content variations, and revealing patterns.

According to MarTech, 35% of companies now prioritize AI skills when hiring for email marketing teams, making it the leading skill cited in The State of Email 2026 report.

Nearly a third (31%) of teams prioritize email campaign strategy and planning. Marketing automation and workflow development ranks next at 27%. Data analysis and reporting follows at 24%.

Nearly 80% of surveyed organizations are actively executing an ABM strategy, according to the 2026 Account Based Marketing Benchmark Survey from Demand Gen Report. The remaining organizations plan to add one soon. The findings indicate ABM has moved beyond the pilot stage into the established B2B go-to-market mix.

52% of respondents said their ABM efforts are meeting expectations. Another 23% said programs are exceeding expectations, and 10% said they are greatly exceeding expectations.

Many marketers missed the initial opportunity to reimagine their organizational models before implementing AI technology, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/ai-wont-save-a-broken-organization/). They now operate at the evolving intersection of AI, data, and modern marketing strategy.

Ryan Warren, chief CRM officer at Razorfish, states that marketing teams had an opportunity to harness AI and change the way they work but many missed it.

According to two new surveys released by Gartner at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference, B2B buyers now use an average of seven information sources during purchases, with 45% employing GenAI primarily to gather vendor and product information. Buyers reported a strong preference for low-friction experiences, as 67% favor a sales-rep-free process and 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience.

The Gartner survey of B2B buyers found that 69% prefer to validate...

AI is the main driver of increased martech budgets, according to MarTech. Research on martech performance finds that only 49% of martech tools are actively used and only 15% of organizations qualify as high performers who meet strategic goals and demonstrate positive ROI.

This gap has produced what MarTech describes as workslop: low-quality, generic output that results when teams are pressured to use AI for higher volume while receiving less time for quality control.

Leadership often fails to...

AI is now the main driver of increased martech budgets, according to MarTech. Research on martech performance finds that only 49% of martech tools are actively used. Only 15% of organizations qualify as high performers who meet strategic goals and demonstrate a positive ROI.

This gap produces workslop, defined as low-quality generic output that results when teams face pressure to use AI for higher volume without time for quality control.

Leadership often fails to define how to use AI and what...

Revenue teams have added AI copilots, summaries, prompts, and workflow add-ons that accelerate pockets of the sales process. Gartner research found that 39% of chief sales officers say AI-focused sales initiatives have increased the percentage of sellers who meet or exceed quotas.

AI is now the main driver of increased martech budgets, yet only 49% of martech tools are actively used and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers who meet strategic goals and demonstrate positive ROI, according to MarTech.

Research on martech performance shows that leadership often fails to define how to use AI and what success looks like.

The May 2026 MarTech Conference featured seven live panel discussions for marketing and marketing operations professionals. All told, the event transcripts totaled nearly 150 pages. According to [MarTech](https://martech.org/10-of-the-most-insightful-quotes-from-the-may-2026-martech-conference/), organizers mined the transcripts and selected 10 quotes.

Alec Haase, general manager of AI products at Hightouch, stated: “The value exchange isn’t really a one-time thing at the point of collection.

Marketing leaders face growing pressures as AI transforms how brands gain visibility, with only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers holding the CMO title, down from 55% a year ago, according to a Forrester report cited in a MarTech article. Over one in five Fortune 500 companies have changed their entire marketing leadership in the past 12 months, and the average CMO tenure has fallen to 3.9 years, the shortest in the C-suite.

Marketers obtain stronger outputs from large language models when they treat the systems as sparring partners instead of answer machines, according to MarTech.

Tech columnist Christopher Mims described a test using prediction scenarios from Polymarket. Pure AI models outperformed human-only groups. Hybrid teams that accepted AI answers without challenge performed worse than AI alone.

Marketers obtain better results from large language models when they challenge outputs instead of accepting them directly. According to MarTech, an experiment described in The Wall Street Journal tested AI alone, humans alone, and hybrid teams on one-hour predictions of real-world events drawn from Polymarket scenarios. Pure AI models outperformed human-only groups but trailed prediction market benchmarks.

At B2BMX 2026, LinkedIn’s Ty Heath, Global Director of Thought Leadership GTM Strategy and co-founder of The B2B Institute, focused on why B2B deals stall due to buying groups lacking collective confidence rather than losing to competitors, emphasizing that marketers must solve buyability by reducing hidden friction.

G2 has released new product capabilities to help MarTech software companies build trust in the era of AI-driven buying, including tools like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) powered by Claude, according to Demand Gen Report. These features aim to enhance AI-driven buying with trusted data signals, as B2B buyers increasingly rely on AI search for software evaluation.

A Gartner survey conducted in early 2026 found that CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, even as only 30% report that their organizations have mature or fully developed AI readiness capabilities. This gap highlights that 70% of CMOs view becoming an AI leader as a critical goal for 2026, yet the same percentage admits their internal processes are not mature enough to implement and scale AI effectively, according to...

At the May 2026 MarTech Conference, a panel moderated by A. Lee Judge, co-founder and CMO of Content Monsta, featured marketing leaders Dale Bertrand, Melanie Deziel, Lexie Haggerty from Braze, and Jordache Johnson discussing how to preserve authentic storytelling in an AI-driven era, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/reclaiming-the-power-of-the-story-fueled-by-data-and-ai/).

Organizations have long treated enterprise content as a storage issue, with documents organized and archived across shared drives, PDFs, presentations, and internal systems, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/you-could-already-have-the-data-ai-needs-to-deliver-value/).

Organizations have long treated enterprise content as a storage issue, organizing documents across shared drives, PDFs, presentations, and internal systems, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/you-could-already-have-the-data-ai-needs-to-deliver-value/).

Organizations have built large libraries of customer research, campaign data, transcripts, and institutional knowledge stored in shared drives, PDFs, presentations, and internal systems, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/you-could-already-have-the-data-ai-needs-to-deliver-value/). Teams often search through folders and reopen old reports to piece together information manually across disconnected systems, making it difficult to use existing data efficiently when decisions are needed.

Amplitude and Statsig, previously competitors, announced a partnership in May 2026 where Amplitude will manage the Statsig brand and customer base. This arrangement follows OpenAI's $1.1 billion acquisition of Statsig last year, with the original Statsig team remaining at OpenAI. As a result, Amplitude inherits the platform's code and customer relationships while handling its roadmap and support, potentially affecting customers who valued Statsig's rapid innovation.

Artificial intelligence sits at the center of modern demand generation, touching nearly every buyer interaction through targeting, personalization, content creation, and journey orchestration, according to Demand Gen Report. This technology promises greater relevance, faster execution, and more efficient scale, with AI adoption having surged in recent years. However, buyer confidence hasn’t kept pace, as just 32% of U.S. respondents say they trust AI, based on the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer.

Digital marketing has settled into a stable system over the past few decades, relying on predictable cores like SEO, content marketing, social media, and digital advertising, but AI search has disrupted this by drawing on broader signals and exposing inconsistencies in fragmented campaigns, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/ai-seo-punishes-lazy-marketing-strategies/).

Twilio announced a new conversation layer today at SIGNAL 2026, comprising three components designed to connect data, channels, and both human and AI agents for a continuous customer experience, addressing fragmented interactions across chat, voice, and email.

At Forrester's B2B Summit North America, the firm presented research from 'The GTM Singularity Is Here,' calling for B2B leaders to abandon outdated practices and adopt a customer-obsessed go-to-market (GTM) approach that leverages AI for enhanced buyer engagement and cross-team collaboration, according to Demand Gen Report.

AI is already transforming marketing by altering discovery, buying decisions, and market competition, yet many marketing leaders are primarily evaluated on campaign execution rather than guiding enterprise transformation, according to MarTech. Gartner research indicates that 82% of business leaders believe their company’s brand and culture must evolve to keep pace with AI, but only 15% of CEOs see their marketing leader as strongly AI savvy, creating a gap that threatens marketing’s strategic...

Companies invested $1.5 trillion in artificial intelligence in 2025, according to Gartner, yet 73% of enterprise data leaders identify data quality as the leading barrier to AI success, surpassing issues like model accuracy and compute costs. Additionally, 60% of companies report little to no value from their AI investments, indicating that the root problem lies in underlying data rather than the technology itself.

As discussions around the 'SaaSpocalypse' highlight companies replacing software vendors and IT services with AI-enabled tools, marketers are reassessing which platforms remain essential in their stacks, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/why-affiliate-marketing-still-needs-humans-in-the-ai-era/).

This week's updates, dated April 30, 2026, demonstrate AI's rapid shift from analysis to execution in martech, with companies like adMarketplace and Braze releasing tools that integrate AI into search responses and marketing automation, according to [MarTech](https://martech.org/the-latest-ai-powered-martech-news-and-releases/).

adMarketplace released a tool that places advertisements within AI search engine responses, using a machine learning model to match commercial results with user query...

In the rush to implement artificial intelligence for marketing and operations, organizations often neglect the importance of clean, accessible, and connected data, according to Demand Gen Report. The article highlights that AI systems may launch on time with sophisticated models and impressive dashboards, but marketing teams frequently abandon them within weeks due to untrustworthy recommendations stemming from weak data foundations.

Marketers are replacing SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives, which is driving churn and altering where value resides in martech, as detailed in a recent analysis. Mid-market firms have experienced a 35% year-over-year decline in renewals for single-function martech tools, according to reports cited in the article.

Marketers are replacing SaaS tools with AI-built alternatives, resulting in mid-market firms experiencing a 35% year-over-year decline in renewals for single-function martech tools, as detailed in Chiefmartec & MartechTribe’s “Martech for 2026 Report.” Chris Penn, co-founder and chief data officer at TrustInsights.ai, notes that this shift commoditizes software, with about 63% of Vibe Coding users being non-developers, according to Superframeworks’ “Vibe Coding Tipping Point 2026” report.

Mid-market firms have experienced a 35% year-over-year decline in renewals for single-function martech tools, as marketers increasingly replace these with AI-built alternatives, according to data from Chiefmartec & MartechTribe’s 'Martech for 2026 Report'. Chris Penn, chief data officer at TrustInsights.ai, notes that vibe coding makes software a commodity, with about 63% of its users being non-developers, based on Superframeworks’ 'Vibe Coding Tipping Point 2026' report.

Iterable, an AI customer engagement platform, announced the launch of Nova Agent, which uses real-time AI to adapt campaigns and ensure precise personalization at scale, according to [Demand Gen Report](https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/iterable-launches-ai-agent-to-scale-personalization/52538/).

At the Spring 2026 MarTech conference, participants in the MarTech Vibe Marketing Lab engaged in hands-on collaboration to create marketing tools for Harlem Grown, a nonprofit dedicated to urban farming and youth mentorship, where one team developed a story engine to transform a single impact story into various content pieces while maintaining consistent voice.