Stop chopping. Start sharpening. 5 takeaways from the B2B Experience Summit

Apr 29, 2026
  • sales, marketing and service

“We’re living through a polycrisis on fast-forward”, said trend researcher Tom Palmaerts at our 2026 B2B Experience Summit. With the pressure growing and AI disrupting the landscape, most B2B teams respond with harder work, more tools, more content and more touchpoints. Yet throughout the summit, one message kept surfacing: the answer isn’t to do more. It’s learning how to cut through the noise. Here are five takeaways.   

1. It's high time to act (and take a red pill)

We opened the Summit with the image of a lumberjack swinging a blunt axe. Too busy chopping to stop and sharpen the axe. That’s where many B2B teams are in 2026. They chop hard, but they don’t get further.  

While they should get sharpening. Urgently. China innovation expert Pascal Coppens made that tension explicit.  He described how China is out-innovating the West by flipping the innovation model. Rather than aiming for perfection before launch, Chinese companies bring products to market early, learn from real customers, and improve continuously. That’s how the future is being written in China. 

His message wasn’t that one model is inherently better, but that speed has become a decisive factor. Referring to The Matrix, he urged Western companies to stop reaching for the blue pill – the comfortable, soothing dream – and take the red pill instead, as China has been doing for decades. Not by choice, but by necessity.

2. Data first, digital second

So when transforming, where to start? Back to good old data. Data has been a recurring theme in B2B for years, but in times of AI, the need for a solid data foundation is more pressing than ever.

Tanya Kanczuzewski, head of global marketing communications at Dura-Line, illustrated this in a candid talk about their digital transformation journey. The marketing team was faced with the challenge of making highly technical product information accessible, digestible and engaging. That became the starting point for a broader, company-wide focus on customer. “We thought we were building a website,” Tanya said. “But we ended up rebuilding how we manage product information. It was a full-scale digital transformation, whose impact is felt way beyond sales and marketing.”  

The real hero of their journey: Product Information Management (PIM). Once that foundation was in place, everything else was easy to develop: configurators, calculators, and a customer portal generating over 1,000 quotes per week.  

The panel of platform vendors – Optimizely, Salesforce and Akeneo – that marketing director Bart Van Kerkhoven had invited on stage all emphasized the same point: data remains one of the key hurdles in B2B transformation. A smart frontend on messy data does not work. Neither do AI agents without proper governance. 

3. It's never the tech's fault

Despite the maturity of today’s platforms, many transformations still fail to deliver the expected value. The numbers are striking. Research by McKinsey shows that 75% of AI projects never move beyond the pilot phase. Boston Consulting Group found that 74% of AI investments fail to deliver tangible value. Data explains a lot. But it doesn't tell the entire story. 

It’s an iceberg pattern, said delaware’s Tallin Van Rie and Jelle Cattrysse in their breakout session on navigating AI transformation. The visible part – demos, proof-of-concepts, pilots – gets all of the attention. The more complex work sits below the surface: data quality, integration, process changes, governance, and user adoption. 

Tanya reflected on this openly. The technical implementation was only one part of Dura-Line’s challenge. Ensuring that people adopt new ways of working, and that processes evolve accordingly, proved to be just as important. The panel reinforced this. Tech adoption should focus more on processes than features. On people too. And it shouldn’t be treated as a project – with a beginning and an end – but as a product, with continuous iterations and versions.  

And before any of that, build a case for change: “Be clear about why. Then start small and accompany people along the way.” As Tom Palmaerts put it: “When elevators were first introduced, nobody trusted them, so buildings hired elevator boys to ride along and help people feel safe.” New technology also needs that human bridge.

4. Content is the currency of interaction

Content remains central to B2B marketing. Yet while the volume of content – and touchpoints – explodes, its impact declines: 94% of content earns zero backlinks. “The content graveyard,” as Laurence Vandelanotte, Digital Lead at delaware, calls it. “Website traffic, as we know it, isn’t coming back. Search behavior is evolving, influenced by AI. That reshapes how information is surfaced and consumed. So without a good strategy and insight into your buyer's needs, your content doesn't stand a chance.” 

The alternative isn’t avoiding AI but increasing your organization’s AI maturity. Not just generating content but orchestrating it: moving from ad-hoc prompting to agent-assisted production to fully orchestrated systems, across creation, validation, localization and distribution.  

delaware’s own Content Factory is an example of what that looks like in practice: an agentic pipeline that combines AI-driven efficiency with human review across briefing, SEO, bulk creation, legal compliance, localization, and publication.  

“The LLMs we’re using today are just the engine,” Laurence explained. “To reach your destination, you need a car. That’s your agent. Plus, human creativity. That’s how you move from content quantity to relevant content that creates true engagement and generates business.

5. Frontrunners are braver

The companies making real progress all share one thing: they rarely wait for ideal conditions.  

Dura-Line didn’t wait for perfect data, but improved data quality along the way. Sonia Kataria, Head of Software at Signify myCreation, explained it took sustained iteration to transform their product configurator into the fully digital myCreation platform they have today, serving 5 million product combinations across dozens of countries.  

What distinguishes winners is not necessarily better technology, but better decision making. They start from concrete business pains rather than features, assess impact realistically, and build momentum through small, focused steps.  

One practical recommendation that emerged was to define a ‘hero use case’: a specific business pain that you couldn’t solve with people alone, yet delivers visible value. That helps demonstrate progress and creates support for further investment.  

And sometimes, even with the best preparation, being brave also means making difficult decisions. In the closing keynote, expedition leader Henk-Jan Geel put it simple: “Prepare thoroughly, but when reality changes, decide – even if the bravest decision is to stop and reassess before pushing forward.”

Are you ready for the future?

Cutting through the noise and boosting customer experiences in B2B is not about expanding activities, it is about changing gears. From broadcasting to having a real conversation with customers. From generic to genuinely personal (that is: really personal, not just personalized) content. From campaigns to continuous experience.  

These shifts require different ways of thinking about data, content and collaboration. AI will play an important role in this evolution, particularly in scaling and automating processes. Still, differentiation will continue to depend on human factors. Human creativity, judgment, and the ability to connect are all key to make sales and marketing efforts truly relevant again.

Are you ready for that future?

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