AI is raising the B2B creative floor, but human brands will win the ceiling

The reality of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and LLMs is shifting the B2B landscape. Walking the floor at MADFest, the conversation was dominated by a single obsession: scaling output through AI while ensuring brands remain human. Most brands are optimising for a version of the internet that no longer exists, churning out automated content that fundamentally regresses to the mean.

At Babel, we believe you can’t engineer creative value. You have to push past safe ideas to win your market. But how do you stand out in the AI era without losing your human edge?

Does algorithmic availability improve performance?

Algorithmic availability fundamentally improves commercial performance in B2B marketing. Industry data reveals that AI-referred visitors are 8.3 times more likely to convert, navigate 62% faster, and generate 7 times more revenue than traditional search traffic. At MAD//Fest, Kantar showed data that highlighted the conversion rate of AI-driven traffic has grown exponentially and is now overtaking standard search, which is flat. However, optimising exclusively for LLMs with generic content actively diminishes long-term brand trust.

B2B buyers are saturated. According to 2026 Gartner research, 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, while 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant, automated outreach. We are seeing a rise in perfectly formatted content that lacks any creative flair or opinionated narrative. As AI creates more content for AI, businesses converge on a boring mean. This homogenisation guarantees your brand is no longer distinctive and won't achieve the LLM discoverability you built it for.

Brand fame won’t save you either. Like our research, Kantar also found that brand fame does not equal brand LLM visibility. In fact, they quite bluntly pointed out that “AI gives less of a shit about your brand than humans.”

Again, like our research, its data suggested that small brands do well because they are more niche, more focused, and clearer on their messaging. 

So, what can brands do to win without regressing to the boring mean?

At Babel, we talk about AI through three lenses:

• Clarity: Your message needs to be clear and easy to understand by humans and machines. Generic or broad brush messaging gets penalised by LLMs - they hate marketing fluff
• Consistency: You can’t be everything to everyone; you must have a clear focus and be consistent with your communications and messaging. Pick a target. Own it. Then we can target the next domino.
• Connection: You can’t win AI on your own. You have to be connected to your community and users. LLMs love user-generated content, whether that’s reviews, Reddit threads, or LinkedIn posts. You have to activate your people and users. 

Why human creativity is a defensible B2B moat

Human creativity acts as a defensible moat in the B2B sector because it provides unreplicable differentiation. As rapid globalization and generative AI lower production barriers, human-led assets - such as cultural relevance, brave design, and emotional resonance - protect market share against the homogenisation of automated marketing outputs.

Differentiation today requires serious grit. The homogenisation of B2B marketing is accelerating as marketers use AI as a shortcut for creative decision-making. You end up with an entire category of companies looking exactly the same. You cannot engineer a feeling or a cultural challenge.

Sir Martin Sorrell, Executive Chairman of S4 Capital, pointedly addressed this economic reset. "Agencies charge on time and materials. The problem with AI from that point of view is it reduces the time taken and it reduces the material," Sorrell explained, noting that the traditional model is a "busted flush." The true differentiator moving forward is human creativity, which remains critical in cutting through the noise of a crowded digital ecosystem.

This makes human creativity an enormous defensible moat, something that was talked about at length at the conference. From distinctive assets to cultural relevance to the customer experience. You can’t engineer creative value. It needs to be felt, imagined, and challenged.

AI acts as an excellent co-pilot for eliminating guesswork and speeding up data insights. But authentic opinion and brave execution are what make a brand stand out. At Babel, we call this AI-enabled, human-powered. It is the strategy we bring to every client.

The human touch was a hugely positive note, one that made us all feel a little bit less replaceable. Even if human creativity is the differentiator for the “short to mid-term”, according to Sir Martin Sorrell. 

The commercial necessity of brave creative investments

Investing in brave, fat-tailed creative marketing strategies drives disproportionate commercial returns. Rather than optimising for minimal incremental gains, brands that allocate budget toward high-risk, high-reward creative outliers generate non-linear revenue growth and establish distinctive market leadership that algorithms cannot replicate.

That’s according to Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, who eloquently framed the reason brands should invest in brave creativity, identifying brand as a fat-tailed value driver. Sutherland argued, "10% of what you do delivers 130% of the value, but you don't know what the 10% is in advance."

A fat tail distribution in marketing means that a small fraction of your efforts, campaigns, or customers drive a disproportionately massive share of your total results. Unlike a predictable bell curve, marketing operates on extreme outliers - like a single viral campaign or a top 1% of super customers - that generate the vast majority of long-term value.

His big lesson for marketers - the hunt for certainty is killing creativity. 

The problem is, the way we measure, report and justify our spend to finance incentivises incremental improvements rather than creative moonshots.

Let me explain. Traditional attribution metrics, like Click-Through Rates or bottom-of-funnel increments, force marketers to optimise for tiny 2% gains instead of hunting for the 10x breakthrough wins. Finance departments fear uncertainty and making decisions that are probabilistic. As such, they want to see measurable ROI on spend, making it difficult to justify making multiple small creative bets, accepting that most will fail while one might succeed spectacularly.

Essentially, we’ve created an environment where every cost has to lead to incremental value. And because we’ve all followed this pursuit and created the same benchmarks for success, you see businesses converge to the average. There are no outliers or creativity. Just optimisation, which misses the massive upside of rare outlier campaigns.

Rory goes on to say that to create distinctiveness in the market, it’s about doing something brilliantly that no one else is doing. It’s about looking at different metrics and benchmarks that align to your business goals. It’s about taking a different perspective and having the bravery to work in uncertainty.

So the next time you’re pulling together your strategic plan and budget, make sure you leave space for multiple experiments. Start small and cap the budget to show the CFO you are reducing the risk while investing in fat-tailed bets that drive non-linear revenue breakthroughs. And, clearly articulate the risk of safe marketing, where spreading budget across safe channels guarantees average, linear growth and guarantees you’ll never achieve a breakout valuation.

For the metrics - well, fat-tailed experiments are notoriously hard to track, because it just isn’t linear. Blended CAC is your friend here and can show how your core, optimised budget can subsidise your experimentation budget. Then it’s about looking for leading indicators, like Share of Voice and unbranded search, pipeline velocity changes and self-attribution lead source.

Reclaiming the creative high ground in B2B marketing

For B2B brands looking to capture market share, prioritising human creativity and bravery is the ultimate premium in an increasingly automated landscape. Success requires maintaining core strategic frameworks while aggressively investing in distinct, unreplicable creative bets that elevate the brand above AI-generated benchmarks.

Reflecting on the shifts in our industry, one truth remains absolute: human creativity is the differentiator. Navigating this environment does not mean abandoning current strategies; it means ensuring you sufficiently invest in the creative bets that machines cannot hallucinate. We provide the backing you need to take the lead. Push past safe ideas. Win your market.

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