If my AI talks to your AI, can I call it a sales lead? 🤖

Imagine this scenario playing out right now across the country:

A B2B marketer sits down on Monday morning. They use a voice-to-text prompt to tell an AI engine: "Give me a 1,200-word deep dive on enterprise cloud migration." The AI spits out a perfectly structured, totally flawless, slightly soulless blog post. The marketer hits publish.

With traditional search engines shrinking, a prospective enterprise buyer across town doesn't have time to browse websites. They open their AI assistant and say: "Summarize the top three articles on cloud migration that dropped this week."

The buyer's AI reads the marketer's AI. It filters out 1,100 words of automated marketing slop and condenses it back down into two bullet points for the buyer.

Which begs the ultimate question: If my selling AI is talking exclusively to your buying AI... can I really call it a sales lead?

Welcome to Schrödinger’s Pipeline—a rather terrifying state of affairs where your B2B deals are simultaneously alive and dead because machines are having a fantastic conversation with each other, completely bypassing the humans.

As the old quote goes: "Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." The gift was efficiency. The stab in the back is that we’ve accidentally automated human connection right out of the room.

How to Break the Algorithmic Loop

According to 2026 data from 6sense, 94% of B2B buyers are now using generative AI tools to do their research before ever talking to a human sales rep. Buyers are talking rather than typing—but they are talking to their screens.

If you try to beat the machines at their own game by pumping out more optimised, formulaic text, your content will just become invisible noise in the AI forest.

To win today, your content has to achieve two things: it must be unique enough for the Buyer's AI to pull it, and emotionally resonant enough for the Human Buyer to care.

Here is how you structure your marketing to break the loop:

1. Feed the AI "Information Gain" (The Modern PR Hook)

Think about how traditional PR works. A journalist will never publish a press release that simply says, "We are a cloud migration company and businesses benefit from using us." They want a story. They want unique data—like a proprietary study revealing exactly how many companies saved money, or how much more efficient they became.

AI search engines act exactly like those time-starved journalists. They ignore generic summaries because they already have millions of them.

• The Action: Give the machine Information Gain. Publish original data, internal benchmarks, or specific cost-saving figures. When the buyer's AI scans the web, it will skip the generic blogs and pull your article because you have the unique dataset it needs to cite. You get the algorithmic accreditation.

2. Introduce "Friction" (The Bravery Premium)

Off-the-shelf AI likes neat, tidy, generic conclusions where everything goes perfectly. To stand out, brands need a little bravery. You need to lean into the messy reality of business by sharing what you learned when things didn't go to plan.

• The Action: Don't just publish flawless success stories. Talk about the hidden roadblocks in a project, the unexpected hurdles your team faced, or the counter-intuitive lessons learned along the way. When the buyer's AI summarises your piece, it won't just say "Here are 5 standard tips." It will say: "Company X suggests a different approach based on real-world lessons learned during [X] project." That friction forces the human buyer to click through.

3. Shift from "Typing" to "Talking" (The Subject Matter Expert Unlock)

We’ve all been there: you ask a brilliant, highly technical product engineer or sales engineer to write a blog post. They stare at a blank sheet of paper, get writer's block, and write nothing. In the past, marketers would try to write it for them, only for the engineer to say, "Well, that's rubbish and factually wrong." But here is the secret: the moment they tell you why it's wrong, their true insight comes out.

• The Action: Stop asking them to type. Book a 15-minute Teams or Zoom call and just ask them questions. Let Microsoft Co-pilot or an AI note-taker record and transcribe the conversation. Take that raw transcription, feed it into a sophisticated LLM like Claude or Gemini, and ask it to research and draft the article based only on that transcript. Send it back to the engineer to refine.

By using AI as an assisted intelligence tool to capture the spoken word, your content naturally carries a human cadence, genuine passion, and real expertise.

The Bottom Line

If we spend all our time marketing to the machine, we are just paying software subscriptions to let our computers network with each other.

Use AI to handle the administrative heavy lifting—the transcription, the formatting, the initial drafting. But keep your true, messy, opinionated human voice at the forefront. That is the only way to ensure that when the buyer's AI looks at your content, it tells the human: "You actually need to stop talking to me, and go talk to this person."

What do you think? Have you caught your team marketing to the machines lately? Hit reply and let me know.

I am a Fractional CMO with 40 years of marketing experience, though I like to think I’m still learning and experimenting. My career has spanned the transition from analogue to digital, and I’ve seen enough "next big things" to know that the best tools are the ones that actually work on a Monday morning.

For the average B2B SME I don’t believe the focus should be on monolithic, esoteric AI projects. I believe in utilising existing AI tools for marginal gains.

I help B2B businesses exploit the AI tools that are already sitting on their desktops—like GA4, Gemini, and so many more - to deliver better marketing with the same resources.

I’m here to help you stop fighting the data and start using it.

Want to talk about your marketing? Find me at linkedin.com/davidlong