Your buyers are being filtered by agents, your PR hits are landing on the wrong eyeballs, and your outreach is overdue for a rebuild.
This week's edition covers:
- Kevin's Take: why AI adoption stalls on how your team actually feels, not the tools you roll out
- The Signal: Signal: how agentic AI is rewriting the ad value chain, plus why audience affinity beats traffic in earned media
- Tools & Tactics: an agent playbook for cold outreach at scale, and the loop patterns to copy if you're building internal AI agents
- Quick Links: what B2B teams actually think about AI, when to use Skills vs Projects vs GPTs vs Agents, zero-click search rates split across Europe
Kevin's Take
AI adoption isn't a tools problem. It's a feelings problem.
I think the most underrated trend in B2B marketing right now is how people on your team actually feel about AI, and most leaders are still treating sentiment like it's a soft variable that will sort itself out once the rollout is done.
The new SmarterX 2026 State of AI for Business report points at this directly. There's a real gap between AI enthusiasm at the top and what's actually happening day-to-day, and that gap isn't because the tools aren't ready, it's because the humans haven't been brought along. I heard this last week in the Builder's Table dinner I hosted in Santa Clara among tech execs attending. But I've also seen this on our own team at Mighty and True (and with clients we work with), where you can roll out Claude or n8n or a custom skill in GitHub and have the workflow be technically beautiful, and it just doesn't get used, because someone is nervous about what it means for their role, or they tried it once, it hallucinated, and now they've written off the whole category.
One thing we've found useful is to treat your AI rollout like a change management project, which sounds boring but is actually what works. We have conversations as a team about what we're using AI for, what we're explicitly not using it for, and what becomes possible for each person once they're not doing the grunt work anymore, because that's the opportunity side of this, not the efficiency side.
When people can see that the tokens we're spending are buying them time to do more interesting work, the way they feel about it changes pretty fast. When they think the tokens are buying their replacement, of course they're going to drag their feet, and no amount of enablement training is going to fix that.
If you're a CMO looking at your AI roadmap for next year and the plan is mostly tools, licenses, and use cases, I'd go back and add a column for how each person on the team actually feels about the changing business dynamic, and what you're doing to address that directly. That's the part that decides whether any of this pays off.
That's it for this week. Talk soon.
— Kevin Kerner, CEO, Mighty & True
The Signal
How agentic AI rewrites the advertising value chain (1 min read)
McKinsey argues AI agents are reshaping advertising from attention-based models to action-based ones, where value accrues to players who influence what agents see, select, and purchase. The shift demands new measurement, creative, and distribution strategies built for machine buyers.
Why it matters: If your demand gen still optimizes for human eyeballs, you're about to lose budget influence to whoever figures out how to get your product picked by an agent.
Why audience affinity beats traffic in earned media (1 min read)
Kelsey Libert argues earned media strategies built around domain authority and traffic miss the mark because top sites rarely concentrate your actual buyers. High-affinity media — smaller outlets that over-index with your target audience — drive better downstream pipeline than reach plays.
Why it matters: If your PR team is still chasing TechCrunch hits, you're optimizing for impressions your buyers will never see.
Tools & Tactics
An AI agent playbook for cold outreach at scale (1 min read)
Marketing AI Institute walks through how they used an AI agent to run a cold outreach campaign against a targeted list of business leaders. The piece details the workflow for replacing manual prospecting with agent-driven execution at scale.
Why it matters: If your team is still hand-building cold outreach sequences, this is the kind of agent workflow you should be testing in your stack this quarter.
How to architect AI agent loops in Claude Code and Codex (1 min read)
Lenny walks through how to architect AI agent loops — heartbeats, crons, goals, and subagents — using Claude Code and Codex, with two live autonomous builds. The piece is aimed at PMs and builders designing agents that run without manual babysitting.
Why it matters: If your team is building internal AI agents to run marketing ops or content workflows, these loop patterns are the architecture you'll want to copy.
Quick Links
News & Trends
- What B2B teams actually think about AI now — SmarterX's 2026 State of AI for Business report surveys B2B professionals on where they are in their AI adoption journey and their sentiment toward it (via Cathy McPhillips)
- 9 new LinkedIn features rolling out in 2026 — Diandra Escobar breaks down LinkedIn's 2026 updates, from plain-English search and vertical video to paid advice sessions and AI-content penalties, with what to do about each (via Diandra Escobar)
- Zero-click search rates split sharply across Europe — SparkToro and Similarweb data show zero-click search rates vary widely by country, with the UK highest and Germany lowest, while France's searchers click through most efficiently (via Rand Fishkin)
Strategy
- When to use Skills, Projects, GPTs, or Agents — The Neuron breaks down the differences between Skills, Projects, Custom GPTs, Agents, and Plugins across AI platforms, explaining when each one is the right tool (via Corey Noles)
Work with us — Growth Marketing
Need pipeline this quarter, not next year? Mighty and True Growth Marketing builds full-funnel campaigns for B2B tech companies. Demand gen that actually compounds, not decks that look good.
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