Kevin's Take

If You Can't Build, You Can't Lead.

Here's the thing: in 2026, being a CMO who "gets AI at a high level" isn't enough anymore. You need to be in the tools. Building things. Breaking things. Understanding what happens between the prompt and the output.

The Signal

Gartner Down 71%. Forrester Worth Less Than a Series B Startup. — SaaStr

Gartner's stock is down 71% from its peak. Forrester's entire market cap is $105 million — less than most venture-backed startups raise. Both companies just reported Q4 2025 earnings, and the message is clear: B2B spending is getting crushed. These aren't narrative signals or vibes. These are the two companies that literally exist by selling into marketing and IT budgets.

Why it matters: If the companies that sell research about buying decisions can't get anyone to buy research, your buyers aren't spending either. This isn't about cutting trade show booths or pausing campaigns. This is about rethinking what you're selling and how you're selling it. If you're presenting the same GTM plan you ran last year, you're already behind.

B2B Purchases Now Involve 22 People Across 3+ Departments — Forrester

Forrester's 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey found that the average B2B purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external advisors. 73% of purchases cross three or more departments. The idea of selling to a "buyer" is dead. You're selling to a network.

Why it matters: Your account-based strategy is probably targeting the wrong people. If you're building content for a single persona or measuring engagement at the contact level, you're optimizing for a buying process that doesn't exist anymore. This data should change how you structure campaigns, what you measure, and who you're trying to reach. If your sales enablement still assumes a champion can close a deal alone, fix that first.

On Our Radar

Canto's fourth-annual State of Digital Content report quantifies what every CMO feels: fragmented tools are killing content velocity. If you're managing creative teams across disconnected platforms, this has the data you need to justify consolidation.

OpenAI just partnered with four major consulting firms to push enterprise adoption of its Frontier AI agent platform. This data is a major GTM signal. If your competitors are deploying AI agents with Big Four help and you're still evaluating tools, the gap is widening.

Momentum ITSMA's 2026 Voice of the Market research report is out. If you're building positioning based on assumptions instead of buyer data, this mayb be the annual gut-check your strategy team needs.

FROM THE TRENCHES

How Teams Actually Mature Past the AI Hype

We're seeing a pattern with our clients right now. The best-performing marketing teams aren't the ones that bought the most tools. They're the ones that got uncomfortable.

Here's what that looks like:

Many teams start the same way. They see ideas involving agents, APIs, vector databases. Leadership nods along. Maybe they approve budgets for more tools. But they don't actually understand what they're building or why. So nothing fundamentally changes.

The teams that break through? They pick a problem. Something that's eating time. A reporting process that's a mess. A content workflow that's fragmented across five platforms. A competitive intel process that requires manual digging. And they decide to actually solve it, not by buying another tool, but by building a system.

They use Claude. They write some Python. They set up AI workflows. They fail. They iterate. They fail again. Eventually, something works.

The Result Isn't a Finished Product. It's a Transformed Team.

Once a team has built one system end-to-end, everything changes. They understand what's actually possible versus what's vaporware. They know why one approach costs $500 and another costs $50,000. They can have real conversations with their vendors instead of just saying yes.

More importantly: they understand the constraints, the tradeoffs, the possibilities. They're no longer managing a function they don't understand.

That's maturity. That's the CMO who can actually lead.

This Is Why We Started Our CMO as Builders Series

We work with teams going through exactly this transition. They come to us knowing AI is critical but uncertain about what to build first, how to structure it, or how to staff it.

We help them design AI-fueled growth systems that work... not theoretical ones, but production systems their teams can actually operate and iterate on.

It's not about making you a developer.

It's about making you dangerous enough to lead.


Read our Substack Series: CMOs As Builders: How a career marketer learned to code AI systems in 90 days.