Three meditations: something to think about, a “how-to” resource, and a marketing deep dive. Ommmmmm.
Something to Think About
Mira Murati is the former CTO of OpenAI who left last month to found AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. She remains one of the leading voices on AI in the world.
“How-To”
2025 B2B SaaS Benchmarks
How do you know how you’re doing?
One of the best ways is to use benchmarks. These are typically surveys from other companies that are similar to you.
- How much do they spend on marketing?
- How much revenue do they generate per FTE?
- How fast are they growing?
- How are they reacting to market conditions?
- Where will current budgets lose to AI budgets?
You’ll find this webinar—hosted by the inimitable Carilu Dietrich along with Jon Miller (co-founder of Adobe Marketo), Bill Macaitis (Slack, Zendesk), and Ray Rike (Benchmarkit)—on B2B SaaS Benchmarks VERY informative.
It’s my favorite “how-to” tutorial of 2025 so far.
A Marketing Deep Dive
My Content Predictions for the Next Age of AI
(Approximately two weeks from now)
The value of content is in decline.
That makes it difficult to understand where content investments make sense and where they don’t.
- How many people still search on Google vs. ChatGPT?
- Should we stick to human creators and focus on quality?
- Should we focus on AI tools to crank out content that is 75% as good as a human?
- Is there a happy medium?
- Is our content audience human readers or AI agents?
We’re seeing AI transform industries and consumer behaviors before our eyes.
This challenges assumptions about the importance of content volume and traditional SEO tactics.
Is there a future-proof content strategy?
The Diminishing Value of Volume
We’re feeling it.
We’re drowning in content right now.
Some good.
Lots bad.
This relentless supply of content far exceeds demand.
The result? We’re seeing a rapid decline in the value and “price” readers place on content.
If content is worth less and less, we have to ask if we should do it at all.
I’m solidly in the Yes camp, and here’s why.
A business with no content is effectively invisible. While the ideal content footprint size may vary, there has to be something for searchers to find. Even if those searchers are increasingly more AI agents and less human, there still needs to be SOMETHING to find.
The buyer journey for increasingly more customers is in the dark funnel, researching their purchase before interacting with the company. If there’s not enough material for them to find, they still won’t choose you.
Optimizing for Agentic Purchasing
Humans are being replaced.
Not just in jobs but as shoppers.
Check out this demonstration of Gibberlink. Here, two AI assistants dropped the human-language pretense once they identified that they were communicating between two AIs and switched to a pure data stream.
I’m not suggesting that there is some type of pure data stream we can post to our websites.
But it raises interesting questions about communicating with AI shoppers like virtual assistants and recommendation engines.
Content must be optimized to appeal directly to these intelligent systems, not just human readers.
This may mean restructuring content to highlight key benefits and ensuring content is easily digestible and interpretable by AI models. The way content is created and formatted will need to evolve to meet the needs of these new gatekeepers.
Businesses that adapt their content strategies to this agentic purchasing landscape will gain a significant advantage.
The Competitive Landscape of AI-Powered Search
And then there’s SEO.
AI-powered search returns a smaller number of results compared with the 10+ list from a SERP that we’re used to from Google.
(Here’s a post from David Kirkdorffer (he/him) about how Stefana Sopco was able to do it.)
Competition for those top positions will heat up.
Content creators who focus on crafting exceptionally valuable, unique content that AI models can easily understand and surface to users should win out here.
But generic, optimized-for-humans-only content will no longer be enough. The ability to create content that AI systems can readily identify, comprehend, and elevate will be a critical skill for businesses to master in the years ahead.
If you could use help future-proofing your content program, the team at CMO Zen is already doing this for others. Reach out if a conversation makes sense.
Namaste.
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