The Early Scale: 95% of B2B Marketers Use AI, But Fewer Than 40% Say It Works

Good morning

Good morning. Spain lifted the World Cup trophy at MetLife Stadium yesterday, and somewhere in the celebration, every enterprise CMO with a sponsorship budget was already running the ROI report. The $13 billion commercial machine behind that tournament is today's first reminder that even the most emotional moments in culture are, at their core, B2B stories. Meanwhile, AI adoption keeps hitting record highs while actual results keep hitting record disappointments. And a $67 billion utility merger just started its regulatory clock. Let's get into it.

The Big Three

95% of B2B Marketers Use AI. Fewer Than 4 in 10 Say It's Working.

CMI's 2026 B2B research drops a number that should stop every marketing leader cold: nearly universal AI adoption, but only 38% of practitioners say it's delivering real performance gains. Buying committees have grown to an average of 11.2 members, meaning the funnel is longer, messier, and harder to influence. AI is everywhere in the workflow, but it's not yet winning deals.

The B2B angle: Audit where AI touches your funnel this week and map each tool to a specific outcome: if you can't name the metric it moves, cut it or fix it before Q4 planning locks the budget.

The $67B NextEra-Dominion Merger Just Started Its 180-Day Clock

NextEra and Dominion filed merger applications this week, kicking off a 180-day regulatory review that, if approved, would create the world's largest regulated utility serving 10 million customers. That kind of consolidation rewrites procurement relationships, long-term power purchase agreements, and grid access priorities for large commercial and industrial buyers across the eastern seaboard and beyond.

The B2B angle: Large power buyers and energy-intensive operators should begin scenario planning now: identify which of your existing utility contracts, rate schedules, or grid interconnection agreements sit inside the combined service territory and model the exposure before approval.

Spain Won the World Cup. The $13B B2B Story Behind It Is Bigger.

Spain took the trophy at MetLife, but the commercial returns from the 2026 FIFA World Cup are spreading across every enterprise brand that built real infrastructure around the tournament. The $13 billion in commercial value flowed through hospitality, media rights, sponsorship activation, and supply chain partnerships, not just jersey sales. The brands that captured the most weren't just sponsors; they were operators who understood how to turn a cultural moment into measurable enterprise pipeline.

The B2B angle: If your brand sat out the World Cup commercially, document exactly what the gap cost you in share of voice and buyer attention, and use that as the anchor for your next major event investment pitch to leadership.

Also worth knowing

B2B growth leaders are three times more likely to double their AI investment, and the differentiator is agentic workflows, not generative text tools. McKinsey and BCG research shows a widening split between companies capturing real value and those just automating existing complexity.

Ferguson's $1.6B acquisition of FloWorks and Fastenal's digital sales gains signal that B2B distribution consolidation is accelerating in Q3 2026, with digital channels taking a larger share of industrial purchasing even as World Cup ad inventory compressed traditional media budgets.

Large B2B brands rank well in traditional search but are nearly invisible in AI-generated answers, according to a NEWMEDIA.COM analysis. That invisibility costs them early-stage buyer consideration before any human contact is made, a problem that compounds as AI-assisted research becomes the default for enterprise procurement.

Smart plays for the week

Run a 30-minute AI audit this week: list every AI tool your marketing team uses, name the specific metric each one is supposed to move, and kill or fix anything that can't pass that test before Q4 budget locks. CMI's research shows 95% of B2B marketers use AI but fewer than 4 in 10 are seeing real gains, which means most teams are carrying dead weight into their most important planning cycle.

Assign someone on your content or SEO team this week to test whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers for your top five buying-stage queries, then treat the gaps as a content brief backlog. The NEWMEDIA.COM analysis found that strong organic search rankings do not translate to AI answer visibility, meaning your funnel is leaking at the very top where buyers now start their research.

If your operations or procurement team buys significant power from Dominion or NextEra territory, pull your current contracts and rate schedules now and schedule a pre-emptive call with your utility account manager before the 180-day review creates queue pressure. The NextEra-Dominion merger filing started its regulatory clock this week, and large commercial buyers who move early will have more leverage on contract terms than those who wait for approval news.

Something to think about

As B2B buyers increasingly ignore passive brand presence, the World Cup's commercial winners demonstrate that showing up as an operator inside a moment, not just a sponsor around it, is the new standard for enterprise brand investment.

Teach me something: Agentic AI Workflow

An agentic AI workflow is a system where AI doesn't just answer a single question but takes a sequence of actions autonomously to complete a multi-step task, like researching a prospect, drafting an outreach sequence, and logging the result in your CRM without a human touching each step. The difference from standard generative AI is autonomy and chaining: the agent decides what to do next based on intermediate results. McKinsey and BCG research finds this is the specific capability separating B2B growth leaders from the pack in 2026. The catch is cost: McKinsey also finds that response refinement alone eats 60% of agentic AI spend, and 93% of enterprise teams go over budget, so deploying agents without a cost governance model is how you get a lot of activity with very little return.