Marketing Needs to Get in the Room

If the future of AI in business tech is a product that comes to you, that surfaces insights and kicks off workflows before anyone has to ask, then the story around that product has to be built the same way. Built alongside the product, from the beginning, in the same way the product itself is being built.

Because here’s what happens when it isn’t.

A product team spends 12 to 18 months building something genuinely good. Real AI capability, a real use case, a problem that actually matters to the buyers they’re selling to. And then, somewhere around six weeks before launch, someone sends marketing a brief and asks for messaging. Marketing works hard with what they have, but they’re working backward from a finished product instead of forward from the problem it solves, and the story that comes out of that process is almost always softer than it should be.

This cycle is inefficient in any market, but in the current AI feature race, it’s become a competitive liability.

In today’s AI feature race, the company with the clearest story wins more often than the technically superior product. Here’s why that gap is a strategy problem, not a marketing problem.

Every major platform is adding AI capabilities right now, and most are adding similar ones. The underlying technology, data approaches, and feature sets are blurring together, making it hard for buyers to meaningfully differentiate. When products look this similar to the user, the company with the clearest, most credible story wins more often than the technically superior solution. We’ve seen this play out many times.

Marketing can build a story in six weeks, especially now. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the best material for that story, the real conversations about positioning, the early customer reactions, the objections that surface before the product is finalized, all of that exists early in the development process. By the time marketing gets the brief, most of it is gone or baked in. You end up with a story built without those inputs, and when two products look essentially the same to a buyer, they’ll go with the name they already know.

When marketing is in the room from the start, the product marketing function gets involved during discovery, not just during launch prep. The messaging framework gets drafted and tested while the product is still being built, so you find out what doesn’t work before you’ve committed to it publicly. Customer conversations about positioning happen in parallel with engineering, which means by the time you go to market, you’ve heard the hard questions and figured out how to answer them. And when the product team wants to name something that makes complete internal sense but will confuse every buyer who sees it, marketing is there early enough to change it rather than just document it.

B2B buyers have been burned by AI hype. The brands that earn their trust are specific and honest about what their product actually does—and that starts with getting marketing in the room early.

The practical case for getting ahead of this is pretty clear. Your competitors are also building and improving AI features, and some of them will go to market before or at the same time you do. The company that enters with a clear, well-tested story has a real advantage over the company still figuring out its positioning. You know what they say about first impressions!

Business tech buyers have been through enough AI hype that they’re skeptical. Not skeptical that AI can help, but that your AI will actually fit into how they work. The companies that cut through that are specific and honest about what the product does and doesn’t do.

None of that happens when marketing gets the brief six weeks before launch. All of it becomes possible when marketing is in the room from the beginning, not to slow down the build, but to make sure the story is as strong as the product by the time it reaches the market.

We’d love to help you craft that story! Reach out to us here