When the Funnel Breaks: Seven Marketers on what comes next in the AI Era

McKinsey, Gartner, and Forrester all converged on six big predictions for 2026 (I wrote about them here). Trust as the new priority. Buyer enablement as table stakes. AI reshaping discovery. When the major consultancies align, it's worth paying attention.

I wrote my own critique of those shifts. But I wanted to test them with some of the smartest marketers I know - my friends in Mark Schaefer's RISE community. Not analysts. Real-life practitioners and marketing consultants, people running campaigns, fighting for budget, and watching the gap between what should happen and what actually gets funded.

What followed was 60 minutes of uncomfortable honesty that prediction pieces never include. The gap between what research says should happen, and what actually gets budget approval. The difference between strategic intent and operational reality.

Roxana Hurducas cut through the optimism immediately: "I see it more as a selfish reason. We've tried everything every year. We chased performance, we chased SEO, we chased content, we chased influencers. Then AI came and everything seems to be for nothing because we don't know what's going to happen next."

That's not the McKinsey narrative.

That's the truth underneath it.

Trust gets funding, fear gets action

"In every conversation I've been having, the word trust is maybe the most important word," Joeri Billast observed. Anna Zgadzaj agreed, noting how research now shows consistent brand building actually improves ROI. "People are finally realising this works."

But Sarah Stahl saw something else entirely.

"Everyone's fearful, freaking out and wanting to know how to gain a competitive edge. And I don't see people listening to the customer."

There it is. The gap.

Trust ranks as the number one CMO priority. Yet the behaviour driving investment is fear of missing out, not conviction in customer connection. Brands are being built as defensive positioning against AI, not as genuine relationship architecture.

Julie Van Ameyde described the pattern perfectly: "The customers who are coming to me are always the knee jerkers. They're not the folks that have ever thought of things in a strategic way. They are now panicking, trying to figure out how they get their brand and get their name out in this new competitive landscape before somebody else."

These are not teams building trust.

These are teams buying insurance.

The uncomfortable question: is brand investment rising because marketers finally understand its compounding value, or because it feels like the only defensible spend in a world where performance tactics are being commoditised by AI?

Both can be true. But one leads to sustained competitive advantage. The other leads to expensive theatre.

LLMs: The next trust collapse

94% of B2B buyers used large language models in their 2025 buying journey. That number surprised no one on the call.

Anna Zgadzaj raised the question no one wants to answer: "Customers at the moment trust LLMs so much. We just get it, we take it for granted. But as more brands start to game it, will people start being more sceptical?"

This is the cycle marketers keep repeating.

SEO worked until everyone gamed it. Social media worked until everyone gamed it. Influencer marketing worked until everyone gamed it. Now we have GEO - Generative Engine Optimisation - and the race to appear in AI-generated answers has already started.

Sarah Neely offered the antidote: "Make opportunities for your customers to have something worth talking about. The LLMs are picking up and weighing that human voice in what they're recommending."

Real customer voices. Not optimised content. Not brand-engineered messaging. The actual experience of using your product, told in language your buyers recognise as authentic.

But here's what that requires: being worth talking about.

Not just visible in search results.

Most companies are optimising for discoverability while doing nothing to create the substance worth discovering.

We're measuring corpses

"I may be a marketing qualified lead, but I may only be interested; not intending to actually buy," Roxana Hurducas explained. "So what part of the Excel am I in?"

The conversation exposed something prediction pieces always miss: marketers know measurement by the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) is a failing metric. They know interest and intent are different. They know lead volume is a vanity metric.

They measure it anyway.

Because measurement determines funding. And MQLs fit in budget presentations. Account-level engagement, buying committee orchestration, deal influence - these require nuance. Excel does not do nuance. Neither does the CFO reviewing your quarterly numbers.

Bruce Scheer brought data that should terrify every marketing leader: "70% of B2B buying ends with the customer deciding not to proceed with any of the suppliers they speak to. Buyer indecision. That buying cycle gets extended and then roles change, priorities change, deals die on the vine."

Seven out of ten opportunities leading to no decision? That's not a conversion problem. That's a failure of buyer enablement and building buyer confidence. But most marketing teams will not see it in their dashboards because they stopped tracking after the lead was passed to sales.

The leads that actually matter do not show up in your MQL count. They arrive through channels you cannot measure, influenced by conversations you did not orchestrate, carrying intent you did not manufacture.

Sarah Stahl pushed further: "The most important lead is the one who was referred to you. How do you tell that? It's hard. You can't really tell that. But those are the ones that convert a lot quicker."

The measurement gap is not technical. It's conceptual. Marketing keeps measuring what's easy to track instead of what actually drives revenue.

Events expose the dysfunction

58% of marketers are increasing event budgets. Cost per opportunity and lead quality are the top success metrics.

We asked: who should actually be at the booth?

Roxana Hurducas argued for sales: "You must bring sales in the event booth. If you only keep marketers in your event booth, the event booth is the final stage of their preparation process. But in fact, the event is the starting point for the sales."

Sarah Neely argued the opposite: "Sales folks in the booth can sometimes be the human equivalent of the "buy now" button. They are jumping straight to product features, instead of having a two-way conversation."

I'd say they're BOTH right.

The actual problem: most companies send people to events without booth training, without role clarity, and without any plan for what happens after the conversation. Joeri Billast described creating content with everyone who visited the booth - giving them something to follow up with, something to share, proof that the interaction mattered to the exhibitor.

But here's what struck me most: Bruce Scheer kept nodding as people described wasted time and energy at events. He's been watching this for years. The dysfunction is not new. The investment is increasing anyway.

Why? Because events are the last remaining place where you can have an actual human conversation with buyers. Everything else has been automated, optimised, and made frictionless to the point of meaninglessness.

Events work not because booths are well-designed.

As we showed in our recent exhibitor survey, exhibitions work despite how badly most companies execute them.

That tells you how desperate buyers are for genuine human connection - and how little of it exists anywhere else in the buying journey.

The CFO is your buyer now

Bruce dropped a statistic that should reshape every marketing strategy: "The CFO 20% of the time is the decision maker on six-figure deals. That's really odd."

Not the technical buyer. Not the user. The CFO.

"I used to say the CFO rarely says yes but often says no. Now in this era the CFO has a lot of decision making power."

This changes what marketing needs to prove. ROI calculations matter more than feature comparisons. Financial stability signals matter more than innovation narratives. Evidence of sustained customer relationships matters more than launch momentum.

Bruce runs his entire business on this insight: "Everybody's going to keep their eye on the money ball and see the importance of that."

But most life science marketing is still written for the technical buyer. The spec sheets. The application notes. The webinar about novel capabilities. None of that answers the CFO's question: will this vendor exist in three years, and can I defend this spend in a budget review?

Anna pointed out the structural constraint: "In big enterprise size businesses, there are various silos, and as a marketing team you often don't even see them, you have no visibility into business outcomes. But working with SMEs, I have to link marketing to business outcomes or they will not keep working with me."

Size creates permission for misalignment.

Small companies cannot afford it. Large companies institutionalise it.

What we're really asking

Roxana Hurducas ended her critique of brand investment with a challenge: "I'm curious what is actually going to happen over this year. Let's meet again in January 2027 and see if indeed brand building did happen and how, or whether it was on the 2026 agenda but didn't actually make it to execution."

That's the question underneath all of this.

Will CMOs fund what they say matters? Or will the budget review expose that trust, buyer enablement, and brand building were just vocabulary - not conviction?

Will marketing teams actually implement account-based strategies? Or will they keep reporting MQL volume because that's what fits in the dashboard?

Will companies invest in genuine customer experience? Or will they optimise for LLM visibility and hope buyers do not notice the gap between promise and reality?

The predictions are clear. The research is solid. The strategic imperative is obvious.

But strategic intent and operational reality are not the same thing.

The execution question

I asked Bruce about the bets he's making in his business. His answer: "Lead with your value versus product because product again and again is going to be more rapidly copyable."

That's it. The whole game.

In a world where AI can generate content, where product features can be copied in weeks not years, where technical specifications become commoditised instantly - the only defensible position is how you make buyers feel about choosing you, and they better be confident.

Not what you sell. How they feel about the decision.

Sarah Stahl converted 34% of leads within 18 hours because she built trust before the buyer ever contacted her client. Sarah Neely talked about creating moments worth talking about - doing the unexpected so customers have something genuine to share. Anna described finally seeing brands realise that short-term tactics and long-term brand building are not in conflict.

These are not new ideas.

They're old truths that keep getting rediscovered because most marketing teams optimise for what's measurable instead of what matters.

Your CMO declared branding the top priority. The research backs it up. The practitioners challenged whether it will actually get funded.

2026 will not be defined by which predictions were accurate.

It will be defined by which teams actually did something about them.

Roxana Hurducas' challenge stands: let's meet in January 2027 and see if brand building was actually embedded in strategy, decisions, and execution - or if it was just another trend we talked about while doing something else entirely.

The RISE Predictions conversation was inspired by research from McKinsey, Forrester, Gartner, and IDC showing convergence on six major shifts. The uncomfortable execution gaps are explored in Built to Adapt: The Marketing Teams That Will Thrive in 2026.

Thanks to the RISE community members who contributed: Anna Zgadzaj, Joeri Billast, Roxana Hurducas, Bruce Scheer, Sarah Stahl, Julie Van Ameyde, and Sarah Neely.