The last annual prediction article we wrote was at the end of 2019. We offered up a multitude of well thought-out ideas on what might be coming next in the world of B2B revenue generation for 2020. …And we all know what happened next! Everything we thought we knew changed and everyone’s speculations about what was to come got turned on their head. (Although, strangely enough, our predictions did mention the possible use of masks in the future, albeit for very different reasons.) After that experience, we were a little hesitant as a team to offer up our industry predictions for the coming year once more. But 2025 is the year when we’ve decided to get back at it and give you our annual predictions again!

The world of B2B has changed immensely in recent years, but even with the speed that B2B sales and marketing have evolved, the pace of change is set to accelerate even more over the next decade. In a discussion about how B2B companies can differentiate themselves, John Hall explains,

“The B2B sales and marketing landscape has seen more disruption in the past five years than it has experienced in nearly a century. First, the pandemic brought unprecedented challenges for customer engagement. Now, rapid technological advances like artificial intelligence have permanently shifted how B2B buyers interact with vendors and how complex sales occur.”

AI is a driving force behind the lightning-fast change that we’re seeing as everything from personalized recommendations and automated customer service to predictive analytics and data enrichment has begun sweeping B2B organizations en masse. And yet, the widely hailed “Father of AI” Sam Altman has been quoted as saying that, “Today’s AI models are the stupidest they’ll ever be,” which indicates that there’s much more on the horizon than many of us could ever even imagine.

With all the buzz right now around integrating AI and automation solutions into organizational strategy, it is worth taking the time to understand what kind of benefits marketing automation can offer and how to best utilize it to drive organizational success.

Let’s look at which kinds of activities are included in marketing automation, where it is best utilized to drive value, what its limitations are, the ethical considerations to keep in mind along the way, and what is coming next.