When it comes to AI, the pace of innovation is staggering. It’s already triggered a huge change in most – if not all – industries. But this is especially true for B2B tech companies, where marketing and commercial roles are essentially evolving by the minute.
And that pace might be frightening to some. Tasks that an AI couldn’t handle even a half a year ago – like creating videos, images, or nuanced content writing – can now be done with ease.
I’ll put it bluntly: Any company denying the impact of AI is going to fall behind.
Even more importantly, if you’re hiring a team, agency, or a partner who doesn’t know how to leverage artificial intelligence, you’re either missing out or paying too much for what you get.
But – and this is a big “but” – AI is not the solution to everything.
At The Growth Syndicate, we’re trying to be expressly intentional about how we deploy AI – going against the wave of companies choosing hype over the human touch.
Let me tell you how we’re thinking about it…
Used well, AI increases productivity, deepens research, accelerates results, and improves our understanding of markets.
But in cases where it doesn’t tangibly improve outcomes, we don’t deploy it.
We’ve also found that AI is reshaping the entire marketing workforce. Junior, high-touch, repetitive tasks are already being automated away. We’re seeing fewer internships and fewer graduate roles in marketing — and that trend will only accelerate.
Meanwhile, AI is elevating the baseline quality of work. People who once produced mediocre designs or copy can now generate something passable — a five or six out of ten, maybe even a seven. But that’s often where AI hits a ceiling (at least for now).
From our side, here’s what AI is unable to provide:
These remain profoundly human capabilities.
In fact, they are fundamental marketing capabilities. Marketing still demands humans who can empathize, make creative leaps, and bring originality and strategic judgment to the table.
AI outputs are often too safe, too rigid, and designed to pull from consensus and the world’s collective knowledge. Put simply, AI has a very limited imagination.
The result is an increased need for two kinds of marketers:
Even though many tasks can be automated or streamlined using AI and agentic workflows, the fundamental parts of marketing will need to remain human-led.
If we leverage AI to accelerate and improve our work, we can deliver more value to our clients in less time. But we’re not going to do it just to say that we’re doing it.
At The Growth Syndicate, we’re always in the driver’s seat.
We clearly see AI as a supporting function. A powerful tool that helps us go deeper, faster, and challenge our own thinking. Fundamentally, though, AI is a tool – so it’s never the leader.
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When we compare ourselves to other agencies or traditional service providers, the difference is simple: We embed ourselves into complex industries and dive deep into the nuances of:
We bring strategic clarity, foster alignment, and help clients navigate real-world complexities. That level of depth and strategic judgment can’t be outsourced to an AI.
While we embrace AI, we know that it can’t replace the role of our experienced fractional CMOs and a specialized team.
Instead, it plays a supporting role in helping us accelerate results and deliver more value to our clients. Most importantly, we stay firmly in control of everything.
We can boil this down further into six core principles:
Our team dictates the strategy, goals, priorities, and guardrails for every project. We bring creativity, strategic thinking, empathy, and authenticity — “taste,” as many might call it.
Whether it’s complex research, synthesizing mountains of data, building projections, or running calculations, AI operates at a speed and scale no human can match.
We can now build far more flexible and intelligent automations, freeing our team to focus on high-impact work. Workflows and systems let us scale our efforts without drowning in admin.
AI can be great at channeling creativity.. It can generate variations and alternative takes on ideas we provide. For example, we’d never hand over headline writing to an AI from scratch. But if we write a headline ourselves, we’ll often ask an AI to produce 20 different riffs on it. It’s a way to spark inspiration, test angles, and challenge our initial thinking.
Especially in content work, AI tools are invaluable for creating first drafts. AI handles the heavy lifting of drafting or summarizing; and then a human steps back in to refine, deepen, and elevate the work to the high quality standards we expect.
Client confidentiality and data protection are non-negotiable for us. We take NDAs seriously. We never feed private or sensitive data into AI tools and always take extreme caution. Whenever necessary, we anonymize data and redact sensitive information. And crucially, we do not use AI where it’s not helpful or necessary.
We have found that AI is at its best when it’s an accelerator woven into our daily work.
From research and ideation, to content creation and data synthesis, it’s become an essential tool that helps us deliver results faster and smarter for our clients.
Every tool and workflow we adopt is rooted in our strategic understanding of each client’s context. We’re always in control — and we’re strict about choosing the right tools.
Broadly, we’ve seen the best results from embedding AI into six areas of our work:
We use AI to process and distill large volumes of qualitative and quantitative data — including:
AI dramatically accelerates how we gather market and competitor intel:
We often feed our custom-built agents with sanitized internal data — product demos, positioning docs, and sales decks — to tailor outputs to each client’s context. AI acts as a second brain that helps us pressure-test and expand our strategic thinking with:
Great creative work still starts with human ideas but AI supercharges our ability to execute. This lets us move from idea to tangible assets at speed — without any sacrifices:
AI lets us build sophisticated operational flows that once required heavy manual effort. We call this GTM Engineering — the art of wiring together data, tools, and logic to execute sophisticated growth motions with minimal human toil:
We also use AI to speed up the production of high-value marketing assets and lead magnets. This helps us create more substantial customer touchpoints for our clients:
We don’t believe SEO is dead. But it’s definitely evolving fast.
We approach AI-driven SEO with caution, integrating Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tactics where appropriate:
Given the current volatility surrounding SEO, we rarely make it the cornerstone of a strategy. It’s a lever to pull where opportunity exists — not a reliable silver bullet.
Throughout all these areas, our guiding principle remains the same: AI must improve outcomes, not just look impressive on a slide. That’s why:
AI helps us work faster, dig deeper, and scale smarter —but the strategy, creativity, and taste that make great marketing? Those stay firmly in our (human) hands.
Marketing is smack dab in the middle of the AI transformation. The impact on B2B tech companies, marketing leaders, and commercial teams will be profound.
That’s why we’re staying on top of the latest developments and flagging how these emerging technologies can genuinely drive better outcomes.
Not more noise, but higher quality at superhuman speeds.
For us, AI is neither a magic bullet nor something to fear. It’s a powerful tool and one that needs to be deployed carefully, strategically, and in service of creating genuine impact for our clients.
