WATCH: Can your marketing be trusted? We asked five senior marketers & here's what they said

Trust isn't a new concept in marketing. But the conversation around it has shifted significantly in the last twelve months, & not in a direction most marketers were expecting.

At FutureForum's latest panel discussion, our very own Daniel Swepson chaired a conversation with four senior marketing & AI practitioners to tackle the question head-on: in the AI era, can B2B marketing really be trusted?

The short answer from the panel was yes. The longer answer was considerably more nuanced.

The pressure is real & it's coming from multiple directions

The discussion surfaced something most in-house marketers will recognise immediately: the pressure to implement AI isn't coming from one place. It's top-down from boards who've read about AI efficiencies but haven't provided a clear brief. It's from an industry that's spent years hyping every new development. It's the internal pressure marketers put on themselves just to stay ahead of the curve.

The panel broadly agreed that implementing AI to do more, faster, at lower cost is the wrong starting point. The more interesting question & the one that kept resurfacing is whether you're using it to make the work genuinely better, or just to make it cheaper to produce?

The last mile still belongs to humans

One of the strongest threads in the conversation was around automation & outreach. AI consultant James Pierechod made the case that the real opportunity lies in using AI for research, insight, & data analysis, & then keeping the final touch, that last mile to a real customer, firmly human. It's a principle that applies as much to content as it does to sales outreach.

Crisis comms specialist Katie Eborall added a perspective that stuck: the best campaigns are grounded in really strong data & really strong emotion. AI is brilliant for the former. It can't replace the latter.

What marketers should actually do differently

The panel closed with each member answering the same question: what's the one thing you'd advise a marketing leader to do differently? Daniel's answer was characteristically direct.

The full conversation covers AI implementation pressure, data ownership, the regulatory landscape, crisis planning for AI misuse, & what genuine brand trust looks like when a business gets it right.

Watch the full panel discussion at futureforum.