Only 6% of senior B2B marketers trust AI with positioning, according to a survey of 277 senior B2B marketers in the UK and Ireland. They've handed AI the execution and kept the strategy (that's only good news if someone actually owns it).
AI can produce on-brand content at speed, but it can't decide what's true about your company. That decision belongs to leadership, and if no one makes it, AI just distributes your vague positioning to the market faster.
Why isn't more content making us more influential?
Volume without a point of view is noise. In AIM B2B's study of 152 business leaders in Japan and Asia-Pacific, half of those who said most B2B content fails blamed a lack of distinctiveness. 64% measure content by the leads it produces. Only 22% measure whether it changed what customers think.
When nobody can state your position in one sentence, everyone kind of just rolls with their own. Product talks about features, marketing has a hard time streamlining the message, and sales says whatever they need to say to close the deal.
Is this a content problem or a positioning problem?
It usually sounds like this: "We publish more than ever. Why does none of it sound like us?" That isn't a marketing problem. It's a positioning problem showing up in every message you send out to the world.
Three signs your positioning isn't doing its job:
Product: every launch needs its own new story.
Sales: you win more often on price, not on what makes you different.
Marketing: feels like they’re constantly making new one-off tools for sales.
People: new hires can't say why customers choose you.
If any of these hit home, more content won't fix it.
What should leadership own?
One position that every team, agency and AI tool works from. We call it the Brand Truth, and with it in place, speed builds your brand instead of blurring it. See how The Offset Method finds it.
FAQ
Can AI write our brand positioning?
AI can do a lot. It can summarize research, help you weigh options and make marketing more efficient. It also takes great meeting nots. What it can't do is understand your customers, weigh trade-offs and implications, decide what you'll stop saying, or get your leadership team aligned. Those decisions are what positioning is and they should be made by human people.
How do I know if positioning is the problem?
Ask five leaders to finish the sentence "Customers choose us because…" Five different answers (or the answer “because we’re better”) means the problem is positioning, not content volume.
What is a Brand Truth and how does it show up in positioning?
It's one clear, defensible statement of what's true about your company that competitors can't claim. It’s a strategic output, derived from market signals that are offset to distill your optimal competitive value. Messaging, hiring and product decisions all get checked against it. Read more about how Offset identifies your Brand Truth.
Sources: Forbes, Oct 14, 2026 (Move Forward Strategies survey, n=277); AIM B2B, "From Content to Influence" (n=152, July–Sept 2026), via Special Times.
