Past the Hype, Into the Work: Why B2B Marketers Need a 60-Year Reality Check on AI
If you’re tired of “AI will change everything” and ready for “AI will change my pipeline this quarter,” this ebook is for you.
The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Surviving the AI Hype is a practical field guide for B2B marketers who want less magic and more measurable outcomes. It traces AI from ELIZA’s keyword tricks to today’s LLMs and shows, plainly, what’s useful, what’s risky, and how to actually put the tech to work in your stack.
Why this piece, and why now?
The AI conversation is loud—and unhelpful. Vendors pitch “digital coworkers,” pilots stall, and teams lose weeks chasing demos that crumble in production. Meanwhile, your job hasn’t changed: build pipeline, reduce CAC, protect the brand.
This guide cuts through the noise with a marketer’s lens:
- History as a cheat code: From rule-based chatbots and Babel Fish to Transformers and LLMs, you’ll see the patterns that predict what will work next (and what won’t).
- Reality over romance: LLMs are power tools, not teammates. Treat them like a CNC machine—brilliant at executing a clear blueprint—and your results (and governance) improve fast.
- A do-it-today framework: Apply AI where it’s naturally strong—Condense, Create, Categorize—to drive outcomes without inviting hallucinations into production.
What you’ll learn (and can immediately apply)
- A marketer’s timeline of AI (ELIZA → SMT → Transformers → LLMs) and why each shift mattered.
- The “intern vs. CNC machine” mental model to set expectations and assign accountability.
- Deterministic vs. probabilistic in real campaigns (send-time, targeting, routing) with simple diagrams.
- The Agent Hype, demystified—why chaining probabilistic steps becomes brittle, and how to keep AI where it shines.
- Templates & prompts for Condense/Create/Categorize that your team can plug into your current tools.