In an era where artificial intelligence can generate content in milliseconds, one critical element remains impossible to automate: trust. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly crowded with AI-generated noise, connecting with the humans behind the screen has never been more vital for business success.
Ashley Faus, a renowned marketer, writer, and speaker, is centering her keynote speech for B2BMX 2026 on this very subject. Currently driving strategy at collaboration software giant Atlassian, Ashley has spent years honing frameworks that help brands navigate the complex intersection of technology and genuine human connection. Her work has been featured in major publications like TIME and Forbes, cementing her status as a leading voice in modern marketing strategy.
Faus’ upcoming keynote draws from her book, Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI, which offers an antidote to traditional, rigid marketing playbooks. She argues that the old “funnel” model is dead, advocating instead for a “playground” approach where audiences chart their own journeys through engagement and discovery. At Atlassian, she has successfully pressure-tested these concepts at an enterprise scale, proving that whether you are in product marketing or demand generation, the core mission remains the same: helping real people solve real problems.
In this exclusive Q&A, Faus previews the insights she will share on the B2BMX stage including how to leverage AI as a helpful tool rather than a crutch, and discover why the future of B2B marketing belongs to those who prioritize community, authenticity, and human connection above all else.
Demand Gen Report (DGR): Ashley, thanks for taking time with us before you keynote speech at B2BMX 2026. What motivated you to write your book, Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI?
Ashley Faus: Thanks and I am really looking forward it. I wrote the book to bring together and expand on the frameworks that I’ve shared over the years at conferences and on LinkedIn. I found that the traditional playbooks were no longer working for me as a marketer, and I needed to explain why we needed to change to my peers and leadership.
Over the years, I honed my answers, strategy, and tactics into repeatable frameworks to help other marketers. Once the AI hype hit, the realization that marketing must change accelerated, so the timing was perfect to share my frameworks more broadly.
DGR: How has your experience at Atlassian shaped your perspective on human-centered marketing?
Faus: Atlassian is all about teamwork and helping people collaborate to move work forward. I started talking about my playground framework before working at Atlassian, and I was wrestling with questions around thought leadership before I joined as well. But, I’ve spent almost half of my career at Atlassian, and so the ability to continue to test my concepts, at scale, across different types of marketing teams, has been beneficial.
I worked in Content and Brand, Product Marketing, and now Lifecycle/Demand-Gen teams as Atlassian has grown into an Enterprise company, so it’s a nice complement to my experience at SMBs and start-ups early in my career.
It’s a pressure-test of the frameworks at scale, and I’m fortunate that Atlassian has such a strong focus on the customers.
Building Trust
DGR: How do you see AI reshaping the way brands build trust with their audiences?
Faus: Trust has been declining for years, but that breakdown is accelerating in the age of AI. AI tools can churn out massive quantities of content and media, but the source and quality is quite variable, and often, poor. It’s easier than ever to fake a video or pump out thousands of words, but more difficult to know what’s real and what’s true. Because of this, connecting with humans, and the human ideas and procedural rigor to test those ideas, becomes the basis of trust.
The Edelman Trust Barometer repeatedly shows that people trust people like themselves, more than they trust traditional markers of authority. And the report shows that people buy from people they trust.
In a world where it’s quick and easy to generate a lot of misinformation or disinformation, humans become the trusted source. So brands need to show the humans behind the products, services, and ideas.
DGR: What role does storytelling play in building trust, and how can marketers improve their storytelling skills?
Faus: Stories are fundamentally about shaping and sharing the human experience. The core story structure of an ordinary person, the inciting incident, the struggle to overcome challenges on the way to achieving the mission or vision, the helpers along the way, and finally, resolution, help bring order to the chaos we all experience.
As marketers, our job is to connect problems with solutions for people.
Stories help us build that rapport and show that we know our audience, and that we are the helpers along their journey. Our brand is NOT the hero of the story. We’re a helper to aid the hero to overcome the challenge as they seek to achieve the goal.
In the world of fiction, sometimes the hero resists the help or doesn’t understand how to use a tool or a piece of advice. The same is true in business. Simply hounding the hero with facts that the tool is useful, the advice is sound, and they must just pick up the tool and use it according to the directions, generally results in the audience tuning you out. Instead, we use stories to connect to their problems, use their language, and help them see that the tools we offer will, in fact, help them achieve their goal.
Marketers can improve their storytelling skills by studying stories. It sounds counter-intuitive and a bit simple to say, but we are often so focused on our spreadsheets and quarterly business reviews that we forget about the people behind the screen. So, study stories. Study the audience. Study their language and their customs. Think about the underlying motivations for your audience. What’s the inciting incident that finally prompted them to look for a new solution? What challenges do they face along the way? We need to study storytelling with the same rigor as data analytics. Both are skills that we can learn.
Using AI as a Tool
DGR: How do you personally stay ahead of trends in AI and marketing to ensure your strategies remain relevant?
Faus: I try to test AI tools in my workflows, and I give my team time to explore and report on their use of AI as well. Too many managers are trying to force AI to solve every problem, without realizing that some work should remain human. Sometimes we need to test and fail to understand which work should remain human, and we need permission to do that.
I think that anything that’s usually 1:1 to engage in conversation or ask for help should have a human element. For example, posting and commenting on LinkedIn. It’s one thing to use an LLM to clean up your grammar, but you should not outsource your entire LinkedIn presence to AI. It’s meant to be a place for humans to share and converse, so the humans need to be the ones showing up to share and converse!
Additionally, I keep an open mind about adapting and expanding my frameworks as I try new projects, channels, and tactics. A framework is not a rulebook, and as new tools and tactics become available, I try to test into those and incorporate whatever I learn into the frameworks.
DGR: Can you elaborate on the concept of the “playground” replacing the traditional marketing funnel?
Faus: My quippy phrase is, “The funnel is dead, use a playground instead.” This is because the funnel never really matched an actual audience journey. It’s more of a retrospective measurement tool from the company perspective, instead of a forward-looking strategy tool from the audience perspective.
We need to treat the buyer’s journey like a playground, allowing people to go up, down, and sideways, enter and exit as they please, and use content the “wrong” way. I’ve seen some analogies to replace the funnel that include a messy, squiggly line, or a pinball machine, with the audience bouncing around with no control.
I prefer the playground, because it acknowledges that the audience charts the path in a way that makes sense for their needs, and our job as marketers is to build the playground into a seamless, helpful, and impactful journey, no matter which path the audience takes. They’re not meandering around aimlessly, and they’re not pinging around with no control. Instead, they go where it makes sense, with options for many different types of equipment (assets and channels, in the marketing mix) and clear instructions (explicit CTAs in the marketing mix).
Instead of implicit intent, we use explicit intent, based on the next action for the audience, to give them clear markers of what options are available in the playground, and the audience chooses where, when, and how they want to engage.
DGR: What are some common mistakes brands make when trying to build trust in an AI-driven world?
Faus: The two most common mistakes: assuming that brand-forward content and channels are the most effective, and bait-and-switch once someone engages.
For the first, we see many brands focus on putting out company-related reports, boosting company-related social channels, and constantly talking about the company. If they have spokespeople, those folks are primarily talking about the company and its offerings, instead of talking about the problems and solutions their audience needs more broadly. If they participate in conversations online, it’s only when someone comments on a company page or post, or at-mentions the brand handle. They’re so focused on driving the conversation and being at the center of every conversation, that they never actually listen to the audience or converse with the audience.
For the second, brands are often so focused on capturing a lead, chasing a prospect, and locking down a deal, that they break trust at every step the journey with a bait-and-switch on the content. A classic example: the pricing page that has no pricing information, and instead, requires the visitor to fill out a form to speak to sales. Or the “Learn More” CTA that requires the visitor to fill out a form to download an asset, only to receive a sales pitch in their inbox the next day. This cycle of forcing the audience to give out lots of information and consent to ongoing communication before they can review basic information that the brand says will help them breaks the trust repeatedly, until eventually, the audience is so skeptical of any brand, that they do their best to ask questions, assess information, and find solutions in secret.
Ironically, queries and research in AI are increasing, precisely because it’s more difficult for brands to infiltrate and influence the results, or track the people asking the questions.
Finding a Balance
DGR: How do you balance automation with maintaining a human touch in marketing?
Faus: The first step is realizing that not everything needs to be automated. I think we get so focused on efficiency and streamlining every step, that we forget that some steps should be human! Areas where humans should handle the bulk of the work: ideation, discovery, testing, validation, determining priorities and goals.
Automation only works if you are already clear on what outcome you are trying to achieve, and how you’ll measure that outcome. Innovation should start with humans as well. We’re the ones with the lived experience to see and understand problems, so we’re the ones who set the priorities for how to solve those problems. And we’re also the ones who need to use the solution.
So, in the early stages of discovery and testing, the humans should be the ones to do the steps and validate the results. Then they can determine which steps can be fully or partially automated.
DGR: How can brands effectively measure trust and its impact on their marketing efforts?
Faus: I recommend a mix of leading and lagging indicators, and many of these metrics overlap with metrics used in other disciplines, like Customer Service or Experience, Product, etc.
Leading indicators often include:
- Shares of an asset on social media
- Views or impressions
- Consumption rate, average watch time, view-through or retention rate
- Press coverage (for example when releasing a report or original research)
- Lagging indicators often include:
- References, citations, and backlinks
- Tags of an employee or at-mentions of the company
- Inbound invitations to publish or speak
- Increase in prestige of outlets (such as an invitation to present the keynote speech versus a breakout session at a conference, or the ability to publish in a high-profile industry publication)
You can also do longitudinal studies about brand perception over time, and use qualitative feedback to understand whether you’re seen as a “trusted partner or advisor”, whether your customers “believe you”, and other comments about how trustworthy you are as a brand.
B2BMX Preview
DGR: What are the “new rules of social media” that marketers should prioritize today?
Faus: The biggest shift is moving away from using social media as a one-way broadcast channel. Many brands have figured out that they can’t just shout their message online, but they’re stuck in conversations that focus on brand-related and product-related topics.
Instead, brands need to prioritize community, where they’re a participant, not the focus. This means shining the spotlight on customers, partners, and industry experts, not just focusing on employee spokespeople who amplify the company message.
This also means that brands need to think more long-term and omni-channel about all of their marketing efforts. It’s not just about converting a follower or viewer into a lead as quick as possible, it’s about engaging with people where they already spend time, delighting and supporting them when you see a way to help, and building the relationship over time.
DGR: What do you hope the audience takes away from your keynote at B2BMX?
Faus: I hope the audience leaves with the reminder that while the tools have changed, and the journey has changed, the people remain the same. We need to get back to the fundamentals of matching problems with solutions for people. Yes, the tools are helpful, and we need to understand the latest tactics and channels. But at the end of the day, the focus needs to be on the audience to win and re-win their hearts, minds, and wallets.
