B2B CMO report elevates AI visibility to core leadership priority

The B2B CMO Project put AI visibility in the same conversation as brand equity, board language and business strategy when it announced its B2B CMO 100 on April 28. Paired with the report The B2B CMO Imperative: The New Rules for B2B Marketing Leadership, the list recast discoverability in AI answers as a leadership issue, not a narrow search task.

The report was built from recorded interviews with more than 50 B2B CMOs, conducted with G2’s AI Voice interview solution. It identifies five imperatives for modern marketing leadership: become a business executive first, prove marketing’s value in the language of the board, invest in brand as a strategic economic asset, lead marketing through AI disruption, and build the organization and capabilities for the next decade. That framing matters because it treats AI visibility as part of market positioning and executive credibility, not just traffic generation.

The B2B CMO Project was founded by Jon Miller, the co-founder of Marketo and Engagio and now CEO of Phave, along with Sydney Sloan, former CMO of Salesloft and G2. Their manifesto says marketing leadership is in crisis, arguing that too many CMOs have been stuck on MQLs and attribution while markets, brands and buying behavior keep changing around them. The 2026 list honored marketing leaders from Databricks, Canva, DataDog, Samsara, ServiceNow and Snowflake, while the research itself drew on interviews with CMOs at Zoom, Salesforce, Nutanix, Snowflake, PagerDuty and Sprout Social.

The practical message for B2B teams is hard to miss. If AI tools are now shaping how buyers research vendors, then visibility in those systems has to be coordinated across content, PR, product marketing and executive messaging. The report also says it includes concrete action steps for the next 30, 60 and 90 days, a sign that the project is pushing beyond theory and into operating discipline.

That urgency lines up with the broader buying landscape. G2’s April 2026 Answer Economy report found that 51% of B2B software buyers start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, 69% chose a different vendor than they originally planned after AI chatbot guidance, and review-site citations were the top signal that made buyers trust an AI recommendation. A separate March 2026 analysis found that 73% of B2B buyers use AI tools in purchase research, with AI search traffic converting at 14.2% versus 2.8% for Google organic.

The B2B CMO Project is treating the shift as ongoing, not episodic. Its San Francisco event on June 3 is set to focus on leadership, influence, executive impact and guiding teams and boards through the AI shift, underscoring how quickly AI visibility has moved into the center of the marketing agenda.