Yesterday, senior leaders from across the globe joined us for our latest E-Networking and Learn session, and the message from the afternoon was hard to miss: the way buyers find, shortlist and choose vendors has changed, and marketing has to change with it.
Our founder and CEO, Payal Raina, opened with a simple brief for the day: five "power-bite" sessions, each focused on how AI is shifting buyer behaviour and how brands can keep engaging, converting and, above all, building trust in an increasingly automated environment. Six organisations took us through it in about 15 minutes each. If you missed it, or want a refresher, here is what you need to know.
Farhad Divecha, Accuracast: Creator by Accuracast, AI-powered employee advocacy
Farhad opened with a number every marketer will recognise: content shared by employees reaches around 10x more people and earns about twice the click-through rate of the same content on a corporate page (citing LinkedIn's own research). The hard part has always been persuading busy people, especially senior executives, to create and share content.
Creator tackles that friction. A marketer picks a topic, the AI drafts personalised posts in each team member's own voice and tone, and each person reviews and approves in about two minutes. Every post keeps full human editorial control, and approval workflows for compliance and brand are built in, which matters a great deal in regulated financial services. His message: your company page is not your best marketing channel. Your experts are.
Riyad Emeran and Flannan Hassett, The Paypers: How B2B buyers actually buy in 2027
The numbers from The Paypers made for sobering listening:
The AI comparison moment is a zero-click environment: nobody visits your website at this stage, so you have no visibility into it. Their conclusion was that brand has never mattered more. Be in buyers' minds on day one, build credibility on trusted sources that AI cites, and make sure you are there when buyers validate their shortlist.
Solange Deschatres and Cori Gordon, Energize Marketing: Your buyer has an AI copilot. Does your go-to-market?
Solange and Cori reframed the challenge around three jobs for your content: be discoverable when buyers research, credible when they check the evidence, and persuasive when they have to make the internal case. They shared that 72% of surveyed marketers see research reports and executive insights as top performers for qualified pipeline, and showed how a research-led programme for FIS joined content and sales around one modernisation story.
Their practical takeaway was a four-week experiment: pick one buyer question in week one, strengthen the answer in week two, distribute it and agree the sales response in week three, and review the journey in week four. And the question to take back to your team: what would a well-informed buyer still need to verify before choosing us?
Sheila Mitham, Evara: Smart AI lead gen
Sheila's advice was refreshingly blunt: the days of buying lists and "spray and pray" are over. Evara's Smart Lead Gen approach is, in her words, sophisticated account-based marketing with AI, combining SEO and AEO (answer engine optimisation) with buyer-intent signals and a unified CRM. Her top tip: don't send one message to one ideal customer profile. Segment your outreach.
She also shared a simple, effective trigger: when a target contact changes jobs, that is often the moment they want a new website, brand or CRM. Evara reported meaningful gains from this approach across its client work, including higher MQL qualification and stronger attribution accuracy.
Tim Focas, Aspectus: PR in an LLM-driven world
For years the first question a CEO asked their PR team was "did we get into the FT?" Tim argued there is now a second question: how are we shaping the answers our buyers trust? Citing one study of nearly half a million AI citations, he noted that the vast majority of earned-media citations came from specialist and trade publications rather than the big-name titles, a reminder that niche, credible coverage can punch well above its readership.
His five moves for marketers: own a few distinctive problems rather than trying to be famous for everything, publish specific and verifiable expertise, earn independent editorial coverage, make your website easy to understand (and drop the vague "innovative and disruptive" language), and regularly test what AI tools actually say about you.
Jonny Cartwright, Silver: How to win the battle for fintech influence
Jonny closed the session with data from Silver's Sylvie intelligence platform, which has analysed over 43,000 companies and more than 115,000 pages of content across fintech and financial services. A few findings stood out:
Silver is offering free access to its fintech and financial services influence map so you can see where you and your competitors rank.
Across six very different sessions, the same themes kept returning:
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