The marketing technology landscape is undergoing a massive transformation, driven by the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced automation. This surge is not about playing catch-up; rather, it represents a strategic move to leverage AI for greater scale, enhanced personalization, and substantial efficiency gains. B2B marketing teams are aggressively optimizing their existing toolsets to ensure they remain relevant and fully capable of delivering measurable business impact.
As AI tools empower teams to systematize and scale their content creation engines, organizations are actively moving away from outsourcing standard asset production, choosing instead to build strong in-house capabilities. To successfully navigate this evolution, marketing professionals must prioritize ongoing training and targeted upskilling—mastering agentic AI tools, managing hybrid AI-human research workflows, and optimizing content for emerging search paradigms are now essential competencies.
Rachel Meranus, Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer at Stensul, unpacked the critical trends and explored what they mean for the future of the industry. from their 2026 MarTech Outlook report. In this conversation, Meranus shares her insights on maximizing MarTech investments, overcoming collaboration bottlenecks, and positioning marketing as a definitive driver of strategic growth.
Demand Gen Report (DGR): Rachel, thanks for taking time out to join us. The report’s data shows B2B is 64% more likely to invest in marketing automation. Does this mean B2B is behind the curve on adoption, or is this a renewed focus on optimizing existing systems for greater pipeline impact?
Rachel Meranus, Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer, Stensul: Thanks for having me. Our interpretation is that B2B is not necessarily ‘behind the curve’ but rather leaning into market automation because it’s interwoven with AI scale and the ability to deliver more personalized messages and find efficiency gains. That does often mean doubling down on existing toolsets, which AI is enhancing.
We also see this as an example of risk mitigation— being a laggard regarding marketing automation threatens a team’s relevance and ability to deliver business impact. So we’re not surprised by the increased investment here.
DGR: With 57% of companies planning to reskill teams for AI, what specific skills do you believe are most critical for marketing teams to develop to maximize their AI investments?
Meranus: There are various factors that would influence reskilling for AI adoption, such as top-down mandates and regulatory environments. But what we’re hearing from our early adopting marketing leaders and practitioners is:
- Balancing a high-quality and high-output AI-powered creation engine. Now that baseline fluency with agentic AI tools is table stakes, and AI-powered content engines proliferate, what matters most are the nuances. Content engines must not only be trained for voice, tone and audience; but also fed deep context and given nuanced instructions to create differentiated content, consistently meet brand, legal, regulatory compliance standards, and reach an increasingly fatigued audience.
- Managing AI-human hybrid research workflows. The days of “pulling” market research are over. We’re seeing smart marketing teams fully automate research gathering about their competitive set, market players, industry trends, and more. This often leverages a connector platform like n8n with an AI system for an ongoing, consistent output. Add human review on top, and you get a well-oiled, mostly automated research workflow.
- Getting smart on GEO. The way we search is changing rapidly, and AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are starting to be referenced for answers more than Google. Being cited by authoritative and credible AI tools is now critical, and the companies that create content specifically designed for these platforms are the ones being featured on them.
The Trend of Staying In-House
DGR: The report highlights that large enterprises prioritize collaboration workflows. In your view, is this challenge a symptom of overly complex toolchains, or is it a deeper organizational issue that technology alone cannot solve?
Meranus: It is absolutely both. In large enterprises, the range of stakeholders and reviewers that touch marketing materials sit in different functional areas of the business. Siloes are inevitable, and that is both a tooling challenge as well as a human problem.
There is an irony to the fact that AI tools intended to increase velocity are actually generating more chaos on the level of process and collaboration. Solving for better collaboration and more seamless processes, both on the human management level and on the tech level will unlock greater gains from AI.
DGR: The report indicates a major shift from outsourcing to in-house enablement. Do you see this as a course correction away from agency dependency, or is it more like building an internal foundation that will change how companies use agencies for more specialized, strategic work in the future?
Meranus: With AI comes the ability to systematize and scale marketing activities in a way that has not been possible in the past. And with that transition comes an opportunity to think about agency investment in a new light that moves away from creating one-off assets or campaigns to focusing on strategic activities for which it’s impractical to reallocate internal resources. These activities will likely be things that exist outside of standard processes and activities; things that aren’t necessarily replicable. Events and brand activations are an example of a typical agency engagement that won’t move in-house; whereas individual assets like video production are more likely to be seen as a less strategic use of agency budget.
Given the focus on reskilling internally, there will be an expectation of more transparency around how AI is being leveraged by agencies. We’ll see agencies anticipating that and having a really strong point of view to justify the value they provide in an AI era.
DGR: Given the emphasis on reducing agency spend, how should marketing leaders re-evaluate their agency partnerships to align with a future where in-house teams handle more day-to-day execution?
Meranus: The questions that marketing leaders can ask themselves when evaluating agency investment:
- Are you familiar with AI model training and can you allocate resources toward it? If you’re considering moving asset production in-house, you should factor in allocating resources to train the model to deliver high-quality outputs.
- Can your approvals cycle keep pace with accelerated outputs? Speed is one obvious advantage of AI-powered creation for marketing campaigns. But if your internal review processes cannot evolve, you won’t be able to take advantage of that speed.
The topics that agencies can expect to hear from marketing leaders may include:
- Transparency about asset production: How are deliverables produced and what tools are being used? What deliverables are AI-generated and where are the human touchpoints?
- Pricing rationale: How does pricing reflect the new processes involved in agency deliverables such as asset creation and campaign work? AI scales outputs and fewer hours are worked; and yet, there are hard costs associated with AI that could also impact pricing. All of this must be addressed.
Training and Upskilling
DGR: With nearly 80% of organizations increasing their MarTech budgets, are companies finally treating marketing as a strategic growth driver rather than a cost center? What’s the key mindset shift that needs to happen to ensure these investments deliver real business impact?
Meranus: It’s certainly a positive signal to see an increase specifically in MarTech budgets, as this indicates a bigger emphasis on marketing as a strategic business imperative.
MarTech tools will help leaders demonstrate the impact of marketing activities with new clarity and granularity. But whether marketing will be truly seen as a strategic growth partner is a moving target because what driving business impact means, and how business impact is measured, are currently in flux. AI is changing how organizations forecast, measure business impact, and set goals. It’s changing profitability and pricing models, and fundamentally shifting every aspect of how business performance is measured. In order for marketing to demonstrate its capacity to be a strategic growth driver, teams must be nimble and adaptive as organizations evolve how business impact is measured at the organizational level.
DGR: While AI tools are the top investment, “training and upskilling” is also high on the list. In your analysis, is the budget for training sufficient to match the investment in tools, or is there a potential for a “skills gap” to emerge?
Meranus: It’s unclear from the survey itself whether organizations will treat budget for training and upskilling as something ongoing vs. a one-off exercise: as in, will this investment continue into the future? Ongoing investments to continuously train teams are expensive. So, right now we see meaningful budget increases, and a prioritization on training. But what we can’t say yet is how this evolves heading into 2027: will training and reskilling have been seen as a one-time investment? If so, there will absolutely be a risk of a skills gap emerging. Technology is changing rapidly and reskilling should be an ongoing exercise.
DGR: How does the trend of in-house enablement and AI adoption change the career path for a marketing professional over the next five years? What should they be learning now to stay relevant?
Meranus: We believe that adapting to the cycles of transformation that AI brings will itself be an enormous factor in how marketing professionals are able to remain relevant in the future with technology rapidly advancing and capacity of tools ever-expanding.
For someone in their early career, think, “How can I use AI to make myself 10X more productive? How am I continuously learning about the latest advancements and staying sharp on the tools?”
For senior leadership, it’s about, “How do I reskill my team, and become an advocate for transformative technology on an ongoing basis?” This is not easy. And it will be asked of all business functions, not just marketing.
DGR: Looking beyond 2026, what emerging trend do you believe will be the “next AI”—the next transformative force that marketing leaders should begin thinking about today?
Meranus: AI is inescapable. We foresee any emerging trends will either be related to AI capabilities, or be in reaction to AI capabilities. As agentic AI fulfills its promise of completing entire workflows end-to-end, we will see an emphasis on applying creativity, strategy and novelty to the marketing practice. The human ability to strategize and think outside the box will drive experimentation and novelty. It’s a future we’re looking forward to.
