Five AI marketing pillars. One of them isn't optional.

Anthropic recently published how one of their business development reps covers around a hundred accounts using scheduled AI skills instead of a bigger team: an overnight routine that researches each account and hands back a brief, a score, and a suggested next move. It either removes the need for a data person, or gives you back a huge amount of time to focus on the right people with the right message.

My own process is different though - focused more on driving inbound enquiries through content and community instead of outbound - with one system watching what’s resonating and where, and the other identifying gaps that need filling.

Your buyers have already changed. 6sense found 94% of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in their purchase process, and 85% have prior exposure to a vendor before they ever make contact - the highest rate 6sense has recorded. A machine is reading your content before a person does, and telling the buyer what it found.

McKinsey’s answer for marketing is different: a five-pillar system - continuous insights, scaled creativity (content produced at volume for both humans and AI), hyperpersonalization (a different experience for every buyer, in real time), marketing to AI agents, and always-on orchestration.

Each of these can spread across multiple people and become more specialised as the company grows. The constraint is no longer headcount. One rep running scheduled AI skills across a hundred accounts, like the Anthropic example above, is a rough version of two of McKinsey’s five pillars - continuous insights and always-on orchestration - run by one person with off-the-shelf tools.

The one pillar that is always a priority today, and the one to start with regardless of how many of the others you can reach, is marketing to AI agents - not the personalisation engine, not the content factory, the trust layer. You have to be visible in AI, otherwise you are missing a growing audience.

Adopting the five-pillar system is a journey, not a single leap. What matters right now is to stop sounding like everyone else. Being unmistakably specific about who you’re for was always good marketing. It’s just become the difference between being described accurately by a machine, and not being described at all.

Why ChatGPT Isn't Killing Your B2B Demand Gen - Yet from 6sense follows up on the buyer data above, making the case that demand generation isn't dying, just changing shape.

Ask ChatGPT or Claude to compare your business against two real competitors on the specific thing you do best. If it can’t give a clear answer, that’s not the model’s problem - it means your site doesn’t say anything specific enough to be told apart. Fix that before you spend a penny on the other four pillars.