B2B marketers heard from one of their own when OpenAI’s Head of B2B marketing detailed their professional capabilities in an era where artificial intelligence (AI) makes the impossible achievable.
Dane Vahey’s keynote address at B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) 2026, powered by Advertising Week. Vahey’s You Can Just Build Things presentation addressed how motivated and curious individuals can now construct solutions that once required extensive resources.
“I’ve been privileged to be a B2B marketer my whole career. but I never felt as energized to be able to build and work in B2B marketing as I do today. I really think we are an exciting era for us as we have kind of unlimited potential of what we can accomplish,” said Vahey. “We’re only going to see more people in our profession, because what you can do with these tools and what you can do with technology is truly exceptional.”
Vahey’s Background
Vahey was OpenAI’s first B2B marketer and now leads programs that help companies of all sizes adopt AI at scale. Before that, he built Stripe’s B2B marketing function and helped grow the company from a developer-first product into a global B2B organization and began his career in Salesforce’s product marketing team, launching the company’s first vertical product lines.
Vahey’s keynote comes at a pivotal moment for the industry, as marketing professionals navigate the transition from theoretical AI discussions to practical daily application. His core message focused on a fundamental shift in the marketer’s identity, encouraging professionals to move beyond the role of operators and embrace their potential as builders.
Developing AI User Habits
After providing practical uses cases for B2B marketers to use AI, Vahey detailed seven habits that attendees should incorporate every day into their workplaces to become more proficient.
Setting a Goal. Users should set a goal for use that Vahey offered will lead to new use cases they may not have thought of just through natural exploration. “If you start doing this, you’re going to start kind of introducing or finding new use cases for how to leverage this model you may not have thought of just through the natural exploration,” he said.
Try Something New with AI Weekly. Vahey explained in his weekly meeting with the managers on his team, the first 10 minutes is each participant sharing something new we did with AI in the last week. “This forces us to be experimenting with the models all the time,” he said. “And even more powerfully, we learn so much from each other.”
Scale Your AI Wins. OpenAI created a Slack channel within their marketing organization for AI wins, where everyone posts different opportunities, prompts, short demo videos and examples of how they are leveraging technology. “It’s helped me automate my training,” said Vahey. “Creating some sort of way where you’re documenting, sharing learnings and kind of aspiring across the organization is really powerful.”
Reporting and Accountability. Vahey has a dashboard that looks at his team’s usage in AI every single week. “I can look across the team and say, ‘Okay, we’re spiking here’ …but there’s other areas of the program where we’re not utilizing these features,” he said. “We get feedback from the team, or potentially do a training, or try to find some other use cases.”
Find Champions. Recognize the people that bring a higher level of interest that want to build, making sure to provide them an opportunity and a platform to show different use cases they’re building with AI. “The best orgs I’ve seen have different champions embedded in almost every single team,” explained Vahey. “They’re kind of guiding everyone along in this journey, making sure everyone’s up leveling their skills.”
AI Adoption Should Come from the Top. Leaders should be using AI. Greg Brockman, one at OpenAI co-founders, mandated that anyone that was building and coding had to default to using Codex, using agents first before writing code. “This was really powerful, coming from a leader as Greg was a CTO— he knows exactly what goes into writing code, and he wouldn’t say this unless he believed we’re truly ready,” said Vahey. “The fact that someone that is so close and in the weeds to the actual work is actually saying this is the change I believe in and gave permission to the rest of the engineers to fully adopt Codex for writing code. That was a really big transformative moment.”
Make Time to Use AI. One of the paradoxes with AI is we are so busy that users and teams do not have time to experiment. Vahey’s team gathers for 90 minutes every couple weeks to build together as they share their learnings. “Playing with the technology, it sparks joy,” said Vahey. “We’ll make it fun, lot prizes…I find it incredibly powerful.”
Crossover of B2B Knowledge
Vahey told those gathered that through his demos he showed that B2B marketers don’t need to have a technical background, but to use the taste, intelligence and curiosity they have developed over their career when they are using AI tools.
“You’re going to increase your output, you’re going to increase your impact, leveraging this technology and adopting this builder mindset,” he said. “I’ve lived this. I know you guys pain and your glory as well. I feel really privileged to share a little bit about things on the side, and hopefully this inspired you to go and build some more.”
