Lisa Gately

Principal Analyst Jess Lloyd began her CX Forum keynote session, “Distrust In The Age Of AI,” with an endearing personal introduction. She described her hectic mornings, cheering her children on at their sporting events, her early career in London, and how losing a bet led her to compete in a famous cheese wheel race. The problem? None of it was true. The deception underscored a critical point. “Consumers are living in a world that they expect to deceive them,” Jess said.

At B2B Summit North America this spring, Ian Bruce and Kelvin Gee opened their keynote session, “Make Brand + Demand Your Preference Multiplier,” with a lesson from Formula 1 racing: The real competition often happens before the race begins. In F1, securing pole position during qualifying dramatically improves a driver’s odds of winning on race day. The race may be decided before the Sunday green flag drops. The same is increasingly true in B2B buying.

Each marketing leader I talk to has many of the same capabilities now. Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise, and Gemini are standard in most enterprises today. But those same leaders are now in a harder conversation with IT and their CFO: why isn’t enterprise AI enough? Why do they need separate content creation and optimization (CCO) solutions. That conversation is happening because the bottleneck moved.