Konbini Strategy — Field Notes

Focus on what matters and forget the rest

2026-07-14T00:00:00Z

This is the third of a three-part series on the impact of AI in B2B marketing. Part 1 examines what’s changed in the past year, Part 2 takes a closer look at why, and Part 3 explains why the organizational structures at some companies make it hard to correct for this. I wrote this myself as one should always do, so don’t be fooled by the presence of em dashes. I’ve overused them for the past twenty-five years and don’t plan to stop.

If vendors have misused new AI tools to flood the market with mediocre marketing that all looks and sounds the same—and if people are feeling pressured to impulsively go this route—then it would follow that this is a great time for everyone else to step back, touch some proverbial grass, and figure out how they can do better.

The great news is that there’s never been a better time to stand out and make things really good. Quality and craft are, after all, the only defense against slop—and I think we can all expect to see more slop over the next few years.

Of course getting good is easier said than done. This is especially true because when you open up the hood and look inside some companies, you’ll see that marketing teams are operating with misaligned incentives. The result being that they’re tasked with work that isn’t designed to solve the problems that need solved.

Let’s take a closer look.

Determine what’s needed in the first place

Every company has to be clear about what marketing work they’re saying no to.

The challenge is that there exists, more or less, a certain sense of what an ideal B2B marketing function can and should look like in a perfect world. I’m referring to everything from the organizational structure to the tech stack and the categories of deliverables. People just kind of know what works at this point. Checking all of those boxes doesn’t mean you’ll get award-winning marketing, but you’ll probably get marketing that’s pretty decent.

Of course it’s expensive to do this. On top of that, every company is at a different stage in their journey and may not need a full-blown marketing function.

In the case of some startups, there may not even be the budget to hire a full-time CMO or VP who then turns around and wants to hire a team. And even if they could, there might not be enough work to go around. That’s why it’s problematic when some startups raise more money than they know what to do with and find it easy to start playing house, hiring too many people and generating a lot of busywork.

The reality is that marketing should always be proportional to whatever communication challenges a company is trying to solve. Anything in excess of that risks being a waste of time and resources, and anything insufficient risks underselling your company and limiting its growth.

You have to strike the right balance, and that means saying no to some things that might be nice to have. In a way, you have to try to figure out what activities are likely to be the 20% that deliver 80% of the results. That might actually be something as simple as arming your sales team with the right kinds of case studies, or building the right cadence of the right types of PR. Or in the case of some vendors, maybe it’s creating a series of repeatable reports that start a conversation within your industry. Not everything needs to make a big splash though, and more attention doesn’t always get more contracts signed. But you do need to at least have a vision for what’s needed, and why, and what activities are likely to compound over time and boost your company’s reputation.

That starts with company leadership actually being a part of the discussion.

How marketing gets misaligned within an organization

There’s a particular vendor I’m aware of that’s bleeding customers right now.

I won’t name names or get into specifics, but given what I know about them—and the negative conversations I’ve heard other retailers having about them with their own prospective customers—I’d say they have a massive problem on their hands. It’s something that needs to be addressed right away.

Which is why I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe—just maybe—filling their blog with listicles written for LLMs shouldn’t be a priority.

Call it AEO, GEO, LLMO, or whatever you want to call the process of juicing LLM results the way SEO juiced Google, but these articles clearly aren't written for human consumption. They have that sort of weird, uncanny vibe that’s irritating everyone these days, and they're packed full of the kinds of observations and recommendations that could have come from any of their competitors. Whether this approach ultimately proves worthwhile is a separate conversation. The point is just that they've published nearly twenty of these in the past month.

So you have to ask: why would they spend marketing resources to solve a problem they don’t actually have, while ignoring a massive problem that they absolutely do have?

Most individual marketers aren't trying to make bad decisions. Like everyone else, they’re going to respond to the incentives that result in keeping their jobs. If their bosses want more content, then they’re going to produce more content. If they’re told to generate leads for the sales team, then they’re going to do whatever looks defensible. If someone in company leadership was convinced by a consultant that AEO is going to Change Everything™, then they’re going to work on AEO even if they personally think it shouldn’t be a priority. Marketing managers tend to want to look productive, directors want to show that their team is productive, and VPs and CMOs want to justify their budget. At every level of the organization, people want to demonstrate value to the people above them.

The problem is that these incentives don’t always align with the communication problems the business actually needs to solve. Especially when the function is judged by certain KPIs that may not be directly tied to those problems, forcing marketers to optimize around metrics regardless of the impact on the business.

That’s why leadership can’t treat marketing strategy like it’s beneath them, or blindly hand it off to whoever leads the marketing department. They have to actively participate and define what they want the marketing team to accomplish—and be clear about why that is. If they don’t, people will optimize around whatever’s easiest to defend in their meetings rather than whatever work is actually likely to change how the market perceives their company.

And candidly, I think that’s how you end up burning resources on listicles for LLMs when your customers are out there telling your prospects why they’re leaving.

Let’s make it really good

All of this is to say that I think it’s time for companies to get more intentional with their B2B marketing.

I’ve explained how the old trust signals are breaking, as companies misuse new AI tools and flood the market with low-quality content. I’ve also touched on why some people feel pressured to do this, and why some companies struggle to focus on what even needs their attention in the first place.

Personally, I think this is good news for everyone who wants to do better. The companies that stand out in the coming years will be those who understand what marketing is actually for. Not the companies with the largest marketing departments, not those with the most sophisticated tech stacks, and definitely not whoever generates the most AI content. People who get serious about doing better will run circles around all of them.

That’s why I started Konbini Strategy. This industry has never had—at least to the best of my knowledge—a dedicated B2B marketing and PR firm that helps companies navigate and solve these challenges. Whether it’s fractional work, advisory services, marketing execution, or something else entirely, there’s a big opportunity to step in and help companies stand out.

All you have to do is stop sounding like everyone else and make it really good.

What happens when everyone feels like they have to do something

2026-07-13T00:00:00Z

This is the second post in a three-part series on the impact of AI in B2B marketing. Part 1 examines what’s changed in the past year, Part 2 takes a closer look at why, and Part 3 explains why the organizational structures at some companies make it hard to correct for this. I wrote this myself as one should always do, so don’t be fooled by the presence of em dashes. I’ve overused them for the past twenty-five years and don’t plan to stop.

A lot of people feel like we’ve passed an inflection point with AI as it relates to workplace productivity, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.

The discourse on AI hit a proverbial fork in the road late last year after Opus 4.5 dropped on November 24th—which was coincidentally my 40th birthday, not that that matters. But it was interesting to observe the vibe shift throughout December on platforms like Twitter, where I spend entirely too much time consuming opinions on tech.

This post from January 4th kind of sums it up:

this is it. tomorrow is monday. everyone will return to work. their founder/ceo has been tinkering with claude code over the holidays and had an epiphany after experiencing vibe coding first hand. they will mandate that every employee, engineers and non-engineers, begin…
— 0xDesigner (@0xDesigner) January 4, 2026

The funny part is I actually know people who experienced that exact scenario the next day. And if I’m being honest, there’s a part of me that kind of gets it. I personally think Claude Code is cool as hell. The first time I really dug into it, I had so much fun that I stayed up until almost 4:00 in the morning. It dredged up the kind of joy I used to feel back in high school when I was obsessed with web development.

And while there’s still a lot of junk out there when it comes to AI—and I’m looking at you, everyone who lazily drops a chat box into your SaaS tools—what’s available from the likes of Anthropic and others has moved from “this will be good someday” to “I can do work with this right now,” and, more recently, “this can do work for me.”

So what’s a person to do about that?

Feeling pressured to do something

Nobody ever wants to feel like they’ve Fallen Behind™. Right now, however, there’s intense pressure—both real and perceived—for individuals and companies to performatively signal that they’ve ‘got this’ when it comes to AI. How many times have we all been told that if you don’t do something, your competitors will run laps around you or that someone else using these tools will take your job? It’s all fear tactics, of course, and rarely does anyone saying these things ever follow-up with specifics about how any of that would even happen. But the rhetoric does land, and it does contribute to anxiety about what this technology means for one’s place in the world.

The reality is that the needs and use cases for AI will vary from one person and profession to the next. It makes sense why my developer friends rave about AI, because software development aligns remarkably well with AI’s strengths. But not every problem is a software problem. For other professions, the opportunities may not be as obvious. Forcing people to use these tools without training or well-defined use cases may even risk ‘innovation theater’ at best or counterproductive outcomes at worst.

But even if you’re just using Claude to review some contracts or analyze a few spreadsheets, you can’t exactly take that to LinkedIn and flex. It’s not 2024 anymore, and the discourse has moved far beyond that. If you’re a business leader listening to your peers vagueposting about how AI has transformed their operations, how they’re “AI-native” without sharing specifics about what that means, or you’re sitting through a session at a conference where a consultant serves up buzzword soup and tells you that Everything Has Changed™—well, you might feel pressured to do something if for no reason other than to feel better about yourself and signal to others that you are, in fact, actually doing something.

That’s why when I when I read things like this fantastic piece from Rachel Karten—describing how a lot of marketers are frustrated with leaders who’ve outsourced their judgement to Claude and ChatGippity—part of me wonders if maybe that’s to some degree a story of people who are so desperate to do something that they’re looking at AI like it like it's a hammer and everything else is a nail.

Which might explain why I recently sat through a presentation at a conference that was clearly written by AI. Just straight-up slop, word-for-word, totally indistinguishable from the LinkedIn posts that we all privately complain about. The sad part is I actually like and respect the person who gave that presentation. But when you scrub away your voice and replace it with Claude’s or ChatGippity’s, you’re selling yourself short and undermining everything that qualified you to be on that stage in the first place. And it’s disrespectful to the audience, since you’re asking them to sit through something that you didn’t even write.

Personally, I stopped listening and opened up the app formerly known as Twitter to find something else to get upset about. The whole thing was weird and awkward, but I was sitting up front near the stage and couldn’t walk out without being seen.

Poisoning the well

Obviously much has been written lately about how companies are forcing employees to use AI tools, or even monitoring token usage to make sure they’re using them. And yes, I think most rational people—including those of us who do enjoy using AI tools—can agree that it’s generally stupid to do these things outside of certain circumstances. I’m obviously not talking about development teams that revamp their workflows.

But a lesser-discussed issue is what happens inside an organization when the boss becomes a human GPT wrapper. I’ve spoken with several people who’ve expressed frustration about business leaders who can’t make decisions anymore without first consulting Claude like it’s some sort of oracle. On one hand, this is difficult since folks generally want to trust that the ship’s being steered by people with good instincts. But on the other hand, this can create anxiety and uncertainty about what’s even expected from individuals and their teams.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been hired to do a job, you’ve developed a workflow that works, and you’re getting great results. But then all of a sudden, your boss gets a bit euphoric, speaks prophetically about AI in every company meeting, and doesn’t seem to be interested in talking about anything else. What do you think is more likely: that your boss will respect your decision to keep doing what is already working, or that they’d be happier if you built a new workflow around Claude? Most people are going to follow whatever incentives result in keeping their jobs, and they might interpret the incentives as having changed even if there has been no communication about any new or different expectations.

That’s why at a certain level, I’m not surprised to see some companies suddenly filtering all of their marketing and creative through these tools. I hesitate to use contrastive framing since it’s all over that kind of content; but it’s not just that marketers are doing this because they think it’s the right thing, many are doing it because they think it’s what’s expected of them. And in some cases, they are being told that it’s exactly what’s expected of them.

The risk here, of course—beyond the effects of bad marketing—is that someone who previously took pride in their job may decide to just ride it out and stop putting in the extra effort. Or they might throw in the towel and start looking elsewhere.

It's time to get good

It bears repeating that I enjoy using AI tools. I just use them for some things and not others. You’ll hear me say this a lot, but: AI is a great tool, it’s just not the right tool for everything.

Unlike most folks who vaguespeak about use cases, I’m happy to share a few specifics. I’m working with one company where Claude has made it so much easier to get data directly from the client success team. I was able to do something about a week ago that a decade ago would have meant emailing a data scientist, waiting a full week, and then having to go back and forth with additional requests. Instead, the client success manager gave me what I needed and even refined it a bit over the course of a 30-minute video call.

I’ve also seen examples of how AI tools have enabled people with unique domain expertise to translate it into something like a vibecoded mockup of a dashboard—making it significantly easier to give direction to the engineering team and arrive at something that’s tailored to a specific type of user. I’m working with a stealth startup right now that’s saved a lot of time doing this.

Or in my case, I built this website in Claude Code. I was actually on the fence about doing that and debated just building it in Framer or Webflow—or paying someone to build it for me. But I wanted to move quickly, and it honestly sounded like a lot of fun. Especially since I learned about a few new things like Eleventy and Netlify, and was able to treat the whole thing as an educational experience by giving Claude a detailed history of what I’d done years ago when I was actively involved in web development. I think I ended up with a good stack involving Eleventy, Netlify, GitHub, and a headless CMS that I’ve made a few modifications to.

So again, I’m not anti-AI by any means. It’s just that we’re in a situation where a lot of companies are using these tools incorrectly—and undermining their marketing and communications. Fortunately for everyone else, this is an opportunity to get better and stand out even more. The only defense against slop, after all, is craft and quality.

But let’s move on to Part 3 and examine why, for some companies, the organizational structure can make it hard to adjust to this reality and focus on what actually makes a difference. You can also click here to get caught up if you missed Part 1.

There’s a crisis of trust in B2B marketing

2026-07-12T00:00:00Z

This is the first of a three-part series on the impact of AI in B2B marketing. Part 1 examines what’s changed in the past year, Part 2 takes a closer look at why, and Part 3 explains why the organizational structures at some companies make it hard to correct for this. I wrote this myself as one should always do, so don’t be fooled by the presence of em dashes. I’ve overused them for the past twenty-five years and don’t plan to stop.

A few years ago, I visited a company’s booth at a trade show and realized that I didn’t believe anything they were saying.

The problem was that I’d spent time in the autonomous checkout industry and knew how costly and difficult it was to build that kind of technology. So when this company told me that they had similar computer vision capabilities—things that were really only possible if their platform was sophisticated enough to do autonomous checkout—I was immediately skeptical.

One of the main issues was their claim that they could use retailers’ existing cameras. The problem is those cameras are typically too few in number and sometimes too low in resolution. They’re also placed for use cases like loss prevention and lack the coverage required to accurately track the movement of products and people throughout the store. And on top of that, this vendor had only raised about 1% - 5% of the funding raised by similar companies.

Was it possible that they just cracked the code and figured out what everyone else had missed? I suppose so, but I didn’t think that was probable.

The challenge in these situations is that nobody can independently verify every claim a company makes about its capabilities. For buyers, it may be impossible to know until you’re several months into a pilot project. So at a certain point, you just have to decide: Can I trust these people?

That's where marketers come in.

How it used to be

People tend to think of B2B marketing as a lead-generation function, and for some companies that can certainly be true. Especially if you sell into several verticals at once and can’t possibly know all the players. But when you serve a niche industry like fuel and convenience, getting a retailer’s contact information is easy. Any salesperson with a ZoomInfo subscription, the CSP 202 list, and a Saturday afternoon can figure out who’s out there and how to contact them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’ll pick up the phone or reply to their emails.

Marketers help solve this by shaping how a company is perceived. Every press release, case study, blog post, social post, conference presentation, and other touchpoint works together to help answer a basic question: Do I trust these people enough to give them 30 minutes of my time?

Beyond that, good marketers also anticipate which additional barriers will be in the way even once a company is viewed as credible and trustworthy. Sometimes the switching costs are high, and sometimes buyers are just apathetic or focused on other priorities. Maybe there’s a few established competitors who themselves have strong reputations. Whatever the situation is, marketers tailor the company’s communications accordingly. Their goal isn’t to fill a CRM and call it a day, but rather to do whatever it takes to make it easier for their colleagues on the sales team to get contracts signed.

This of course requires creating a lot of content, and that can get expensive. A simple blog post might, at minimum, touch the hands of a few marketers and someone on a creative services team. And on top of that, companies in industries like this one have to hire marketers who understand enough about the industry to use the right language when discussing it.

Historically, this had the effect of creating a correlation between content volume and credibility. If a company had a few hundred blog posts, dozens of case studies, and active social channels, then you just assumed they’re probably established. Conversely, you might be skeptical of a company that hasn't posted on their blog or social channels for the past year—or has only posted about a funding round or a partnership or two, with no mention of actual customers. The aforementioned computer vision company hasn’t posted anything on LinkedIn in about a year, so I’m actually wondering if they’ve gone out of business.

Now I don't mean to suggest that every company was creating award-winning content just because it was expensive to produce. I've seen enough mediocre blogs, white papers, and case studies to last a lifetime. But most marketers and designers do take a lot of pride in their work, and they’re generally aware that the work they produce today can be leveraged into a better job tomorrow. So even when companies had low standards or didn’t value their contributions, they benefitted from the standards of those professionals and sometimes ended up with better marketing than they deserved.

For a long time, anyway, that’s just how things worked.

What's changed today

Fast forward to the present moment, and what’s happened over the past few years—particularly the past seven months—is that companies now have the option to produce content for the cost of a $20 subscription. That doesn't mean they're going to get good content, but they'll still get content nonetheless.

The result has been a flattening of discourse where everyone who goes this route converges towards a sort of mediocre, undifferentiated middle. One in which they all look and sound the same.

This is frustrating for buyers since it’s become harder to know who they can trust.

On one extreme end of the spectrum, slop shop vendors can now imitate mature organizations much more easily. In addition to being able to mimic elements of competitors’ products, like vibecoding similar dashboards or product features, they can quickly spin up a facsimile of a mature marketing function within days. The result is that even if the content is a bit uncanny and barely passable—and the website is covered in slop images—buyers still see a full blog, several case studies, and an active social feed. Are they credible, or is there a bit of trickery involved here? That’s what’s hard to figure out.

And on the other end of the spectrum, some established companies have begun using the same tools to produce similar content. They’re viewing AI as a cheat code to do marketing more easily and cheaply, or just as a way to offload it entirely. The irony, of course, is that they think this makes them more modern and efficient. What it’s really doing is undermining the very outcomes they’re hoping to achieve through their marketing.

This can also be frustrating for buyers, because AI has been very revealing for companies’ standards. And when a company suddenly displays low standards in public-facing marketing and communications, it’s logical to wonder if they also tolerate low standards in other aspects of the business—like software engineering. Even if that’s not actually the case, the point is that buyers now have reasons to be skeptical and wonder about that.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against using AI in B2B marketing. Far from it. Personally, I think some of the new AI tools are fantastic and have opened up several new and exciting ways to work. Things that a decade ago required me to go to a data scientist and wait a week can now be accomplished with Claude in a matter of minutes. It’s just that AI is a tool; and like any tool, it’s the right one for some jobs and the wrong one for others.

That’s why it’s frustrating when you look around LinkedIn, or visit the websites of different vendors, only to see that they’re all using the same uncanny, AI voice and writing style. The case studies sound the same, the blogs sound the same, and you don’t have to look far to find the same contrastive framing, pacing, and weird little mic drop moments and metaphors jammed into everything—not to mention the same overcontrasted AI images. Swap a few logos and change a few colors here and there, and you might not even be able to tell the difference from one vendor to the next. That’s because they’ve literally replaced their brand voice with Claude’s or ChatGippity’s.

Fortunately, this sea of sameness is good news for vendors who actually do care about good marketing and actually do want to have a distinctive brand voice. It’s just easier than ever to stand out if you’re more thoughtful about what needs to be said in the first place.

For now, let’s move on to Part 2 and take a closer look at why some people and companies are feeling pressured to use these tools incorrectly.