B2B marketing and AI deployment share the front as energy holds

Multiple reads this week confirm that large B2B companies appear in traditional search results but are not featured in AI-generated answers. One piece found that 87% of B2B brands are absent from AI answers despite first-page rankings. Early-stage buyers are using AI answers to form shortlists before any human contact occurs.

A leader whose company ranks well in Google but has not checked its AI answer presence is flying blind on the top of the funnel. The shortlist is being built before the sales team knows a buyer exists.

This week, test your company name and your top three product categories in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview. Note what comes up and what does not. That gap is your starting point.

95% of B2B marketers use AI tools. Fewer than 40% report meaningful performance gains. Buying committees have grown to an average of 11.2 members. More tools plus more stakeholders is not producing better outcomes.

A marketing leader who is reporting AI adoption as a win is measuring the wrong thing. The question is not whether the team uses AI. It is whether win rates, pipeline velocity, or committee coverage have improved.

Pull your last six months of pipeline data and check whether time-to-close or stakeholder engagement rates have changed since AI tools were introduced. If they have not, the tools are not solving the real problem.

Microsoft is deploying 6,000 engineers inside enterprise clients. Anthropic and Blackstone's Ode venture is doing the same at the $1.5 billion scale. Both are positioned for companies large enough to absorb that kind of engagement. Research shows 93% of enterprise AI teams are over budget and only 11% of S&P 500 firms have deeply integrated AI.

Mid-market companies cannot buy the embedded model. They are stuck between self-serve tools that do not close the implementation gap and enterprise programs they cannot afford. That is a real market.

If you serve mid-market clients, map the specific implementation steps where they get stuck after buying an AI tool. That map is the basis for a packaged service that fills the gap the large players are not serving.

Mega-deals now account for 56% of industrial manufacturing deal value. Total M&A in the sector reached $173 billion in H1 2026, up 28%. Capital is not spreading across many mid-size deals. It is concentrating in large transactions driven by AI infrastructure and grid modernization.

A mid-size manufacturer that has not considered its strategic position is at risk of being acquired on someone else's timeline or being left behind as the sector consolidates around larger, more integrated players.

This month, have a board-level conversation about where your company sits in the consolidation map: acquirer, acquisition target, or independent operator with a defensible niche. All three are valid strategies, but each requires a different next move.

The merger has triggered a 180-day regulatory clock. A senator has formally asked FERC to block it. The outcome will reshape power procurement across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Large buyers are already watching. Mid-market companies in the footprint often lack the advisory resources to track it.

Any company with significant energy costs in the affected states should not wait for the outcome to make procurement decisions. The uncertainty itself has value: contracts signed during the review window may look very different from those signed after a ruling.

If you operate in the four affected states, contact your energy broker or counsel this week and ask specifically what the NextEra-Dominion outcome scenarios mean for your current and upcoming contracts.