Last December, I made 11 predictions about where B2B marketing was headed in 2025. Now it's time to grade myself.
Overall GPA: B. Some I nailed. Others I got half-right. And a few I missed badly.
The pattern that emerged: I was generally right about the direction things are going, but too optimistic about how quickly they would change. Often because I wanted them to change.
Technology moves faster than organizations can absorb it. Understanding moves faster than budgets follow. And the gap between what's possible and what's practical remains stubbornly wide.
What follows is my honest assessment of each prediction — what I got right, where I was premature, and what surprised me along the way.
Companies will slowly break from their “gumball machine” MQL addiction. Grade: B+
MQL criticism reached fever pitch in 2025 (see the #MQLIndustrialComplex), and more marketers discussed Buying Groups and MQAs as better approaches. So on the MQL critique, I'll give myself an A. But this prediction was about more than metrics — it was about the gumball machine mentality itself, understanding marketing as a complex non-linear system, and truly putting customers first. On that broader transformation, the gap between the LinkedIn posts and real-world remains wide. Everyone talks customer-first, but few are restructuring their marketing around it; thus the B+.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: The evolution will continue, albeit slowly. More companies will track genuine hand-raisers instead of MQLs and shift to shared pipeline ownership. Qualified Buying Groups (QBGs) will continue to gain traction as technology improves to operationalize them. I hope we'll see more actual transformation toward true customer-first thinking, but yes, this is a decade-long journey, and we're still in early innings.
CMOs will work to reframe marketing's role in revenue: Grade D
Unfortunately, this was aspirational, not predictive. Revenue marketing shouldn’t be about MQLs and sales support: it should be about shaping market perceptions so you’re the first one buyers contact when ready, crafting positioning so compelling you win more deals faster, and building brand equity that keeps customers loyal. I wanted CMOs to move marketing from tactical execution to strategic market leadership, but the opposite happened. Gartner found that tactical thinking now dominates marketing, with only 14% of CEOs and CFOs viewing their CMO as highly effective at market shaping. Worse, 84% of CMOs report high levels of strategic dysfunction, unable to create bold strategies while being pulled into tactical work. And the Conference Board found 48% of marketing leaders experience high or very high burnout, with 61% struggling to balance strategic and execution work. Even the "Chief Market Officer" title shift I predicted didn't materialize either. Turns out that viewing marketing as tactical sales support is deeply embedded thinking that won't change quickly.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: I hope this trend will reverse, but make no mistake — this is also a years-long transformation, not a one year turnaround. What I can predict is that in 2026, we’ll see more tools, resources, and communities designed to help B2B CMOs navigate this transition.
Marketers will rebalance budgets toward brand. Grade: B-
The conversation shifted exactly as I predicted — brand investment became a key discussion throughout 2025, and the HubSpot State of Marketing Report found 92% of marketers planning to maintain or increase brand awareness spend. But the Brand vs Demand Survey I did with Ray Rike, Carilu Dietrich and Bill Macaitis showed the gap between aspiration and reality: while the median allocation sits at 70% demand / 30% brand, most respondents reported wanting a ratio closer to 60/40. So the rebalancing is yet to really happen, thus the grade. I called the trend accurately, noting it would take years, but in reality this prediction was more of an aspiration with realistic caveats than a true forecast.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: The brand discussion will continue. As more marketers internalize the 95:5 problem and watch competitors with stronger brands win deals before sales gets involved, we'll inch closer to 40%+ brand allocation — but still won’t get all the way there in 2026.
AI agents will gain early traction in the enterprise. Grade: A-
Agent adoption certainly moved beyond proof-of-concept in 2025: 23% of organizations are scaling agentic AI somewhere in their enterprises (McKinsey) and agent usage surged 233% in six months (Slack Workforce Index). But perhaps I underestimated the challenges of broad enterprise adoption — integrating with legacy systems, implementing guardrails, risk and compliance concerns, unpredictability of probabilistic workflows. Most organizations have scaled agents in just 1-2 functions, and only 8% of Salesforce's customer base have adopted Agentforce. The buzz is off the charts and there’s a ton of experimentation, but broad adoption isn’t here yet; "early traction" was the perfect hedge, making this prediction an A-.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: We will move beyond mostly isolated pilots to more repeatable revenue workflows, though human‑in‑the‑loop will remain essential and usage will skew towards early adopters and early majority. Deloitte predicts 50% of GenAI-using enterprises will deploy agents by 2027.
MOps teams will use AI to trade tactical tasks for strategic impact. Grade: B
Multiple marketing automation platforms added AI agents, and you can now create simple campaigns from a prompt, either directly in modern MAPs or via third-party tools working with legacy platforms. Other agentic use cases include automated audience building and segmentation, data cleansing and enrichment, A/B test creation, troubleshooting, and analysis of campaigns and accounts. But this gets a B+ because it’s far from mainstream adoption. And the bigger organizational shift I predicted hasn't happened yet: marketing operations (MOps) teams aren’t yet free to spend less time building campaigns and more on data and strategic oversight. I was directionally correct, but aspirational and early.
Follow-on Prediction for 2025: We'll continue to see a ton of innovation here, with early adopters experimenting with their own AI tools, agents from existing vendors getting better, and new vendors entering the market. As this happens, field marketers will be able to build their own campaigns without ‘messing things up’, reducing the tactical burden on MOPs.
AI will start to replace junior sales roles but augment strategic sellers.
Companies will adopt AI SDR agents — but automated cold prospecting will fall flat. Grade: A-
Let’s tackle these two predictions together. The junior sales role displacement is happening, and for good reason. AI agents cost $1,000 per month versus $55K+ for human SDRs, operate 24/7 with up-to-date product knowledge, and can process 1,000 leads per hour. For companies under pressure to do more with less, that’s an exponential growth capability. As a result, Pave found that SDR positions dropped from 1.98% of the workforce in January 2023 to 1.45% by August 2025, and employees aged 21-25 at large tech companies fell from 15% to 6.8%.
But I can't give myself full credit here. While displacement is real, we’re seeing SDR augmentation more than wholesale replacement. For now, AI is enabling fewer junior reps to do more, rather than eliminating the roles entirely, and hybrid teams pairing agents with human judgement outperform both pure‑AI and traditional SDR models.
On the strategic sales side, Forrester reports that 75% of sales reps use AI tools at work — that’s significantly higher than my prediction, which said 25% would deploy AI solutions to prepare briefings before calls, track and log activities, draft follow-up notes, etc.
Meanwhile, the backlash against cold prospecting prediction was spot on. By April 2025, 51% of spam emails were AI-generated (Barracuda Networks). Cold email reply rates collapsed to 1-5%, down 50% in two years (multiple industry sources). And industry insiders called AI SDRs "spam cannons that burn through your TAM."
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: AI SDRs with human support will hit mainstream adoption at mid-market companies for inbound and warm outbound use cases, driving continued investment in real-time buying signals. The bigger question: how can companies develop senior salespeople without the traditional SDR training ground? Companies will expect new hires to be "AI-fluent" from day one, and the ladder into sales will shift toward internships and rotational programs that develop strategic thinking early. Perhaps AI-powered sales enablement will help train human sellers?
Seat-based pricing will give way to value-based models. Grade: A-
This is happening even faster than predicted. Maxio's 2025 report shows 67% of SaaS companies now use consumption-based pricing, up from 52% in 2022, while Metronome found 85% of companies either have or are implementing usage-based pricing. Hybrid models are dominating, though, because they balance vendor needs with buyer preferences — the base subscription provides revenue predictability while usage charges align with value creation. The only knock is that I was too conservative, citing Forrester saying 10% of enterprise software will adopt true consumption-based pricing.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: Expect compensation structures to begin to shift from paying on bookings to paying on customer outcomes — with metrics like Consumption Run Rate (CRR), Net Revenue Retention, and product adoption replacing traditional quota attainment.
Agents will begin to transform how we buy — and how we go-to-market. Grade: A-
In 2025, AI tools dramatically changed how buyers research: 90% of B2B buyers now use tools like ChatGPT for research, and 72% encounter Google AI Overviews during vendor evaluation (TrustRadius 2025 report).
But true autonomous buying agents, e.g., the “0th member” of buying committees making independent purchase decisions, didn’t yet materialize. As 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report found, human buyers still averaged 16 interactions per person with the winning vendor, unchanged from 2024. High-stakes purchases still require direct human validation. Sure, AI can compress research time and help synthesize information, but buyers themselves made the decisions.
Finally, we saw glimmers of people beginning to transform their go-to-market. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) emerged as a critical new discipline and the number one topic at CMO dinners, and Perplexity rolled out sponsored follow-up questions, Google has integrated ads into AI Overviews, Grok is experimenting with ads in responses, and OpenAI has plans to monetize free users with ads during 2026.
What we saw in 2025 was serious preparation and early experimentation, with companies learning to optimize their content for AI discovery and consumption, but not a complete transformation.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: The big story will be marketing to agents, not just people. Every AI platform will have some form of paid advertising.
Experiences, relationships, and original content will win as AI filters out traditional marketing. Grade: B+
This prediction centered on a question: when buyers use AI agents to filter and summarize marketing content, what breaks through? Experiences that can't be summarized (you have to be there); relationships that provide trust and accountability (when content is abundant, trusted sources matter more); and original insights that demonstrate effort and craftsmanship.
I get an A on the first two. B2B companies allocated $38 billion to experiential (11% year-over-year growth), and 51% of companies plan to increase their experiential marketing investment from 2024 through 2026 (G2). Partner ecosystems are more important than ever: Wynter found 69% of B2B SaaS senior leaders are planning to increase their partnership investment in 2026, and Forrester reports two-thirds of companies expect partner-influenced revenue to be 30+% greater than the previous year.
B2B influencer marketing was also hot. Forrester also predicts 75% of enterprise B2B companies will increase their budgets for influencer relations and Gartner predicts 80% of enterprise marketers will integrate influencer marketing by 2027.
Where I was too optimistic: original research. While 97% of B2B marketers say thought leadership is critical, I haven't seen widespread budget shifts toward funding original research. Companies recognize the value, but aren't yet putting real dollars behind it.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: Founder-led influence will grow as executives build personal brands to establish credibility.
Marketing automation platforms will be reimagined for the AI era. Grade: C+
This prediction was premature. While the limitations of legacy MAPs remain painfully real — rigid rules, email-centricity, complexity bottlenecks, rising costs — 2025 didn't deliver the ground-up reimagining I anticipated. Instead, we got incremental AI features bolted onto legacy platforms. HubSpot launched Breeze AI with specialized agents, Marketo added email creation from an image, and Salesforce released Account Engagement+. These are helpful additions, the platforms are still fundamentally rule-based systems with LLM wrappers for content generation, not AI-native platforms that orchestrate entire buyer journeys autonomously.
A few early signs emerged. Inflection launched Model Context Protocol integration, and Conversion.ai announced their Series A. But this represents the beginning of a shift, not the wave of new entrants I predicted.
The core problems I identified haven't gone away. Legacy MAPs still struggle with buying groups, still create fragmented journeys across channels, still require specialized expertise to operate. The market needs platforms reimagined for AI from the ground up. That transformation just didn't happen in 2025.
Follow-on Prediction for 2026: The reimagining is coming. New AI-native platforms will (finally) emerge in 2026 that fundamentally rethink marketing automation from first principles — not legacy systems with AI features added on, but platforms designed for AI orchestration, unified customer data, and buying group intelligence from day one.