The one or two shifts worth paying attention to right now.
What working teams are doing this week, not just theory.
Questions and prompts for leadership conversations with your team.
A clear next move you can apply in under a week.
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AI agents are starting to do real marketing work, which means CMOs can no longer treat them as side experiments or invisible helpers. The June Huddle Up question is not whether a bot deserves a title, a manager, or a tiny desk on the ice. The better question is how CMOs make AI-driven work, accountability, governance, cost, and human judgment visible before the work becomes unmanageable. One CMO captured the pushback clearly: "Bots are just workflows, so they do not belong on an org chart." That is a fair warning against org chart theater. But the huddle on the ice surfaced the other side of the issue too: If agents are influencing real outcomes, changing how humans spend time, and accelerating decisions, they need to show up somewhere in the operating model.
May’s Leader Huddles showed a clear shift in the AI conversation across the CMO colony. CMOs are no longer asking whether they should use AI. They are asking how to turn scattered experiments into a better way to run marketing. The sharper conversations are moving beyond productivity wins into measurement, build-versus-buy decisions, agent guardrails, sales enablement, team readiness, and operating model design. The opportunity is not simply to create more content or automate more tasks. It is to get the whole huddle moving with a marketing organization that can use AI repeatedly, responsibly, and measurably.
Demand generation is becoming a real-time discipline. In recent CMO Huddles conversations, B2B marketing leaders made it clear that the old model of static account lists, fixed channel assumptions, and once-a-quarter recalibration is losing power. Buyers are moving, platforms are shifting, and the ice under pipeline can crack fast. The CMOs making progress are not betting everything on one motion. They are building a portfolio of plays: Sharper ABM, more relevant outreach, better timing signals, AI-assisted call analysis, smarter outbound, and highly targeted events. The common thread is adaptability. In Huddle Up terms, the job is no longer to pick the single right strategy for the year. It is to keep enough smart bets in motion that the team can adjust before pipeline stalls.
B2B discovery is shifting again, and the ice is moving under every marketing team. Buyers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI-powered search tools for answers before they ever land on a vendor website. That creates a new visibility challenge for CMOs: If your brand does not show up in AI-generated answers, you may be invisible at a critical moment. The good news for the Huddle Up colony is that AEO does not require a complete reinvention of marketing. The March source material points to practical moves CMOs can make now: Assess current visibility, clarify definitions, add Q&A sections, refresh high-value pages, improve schema, modernize FAQs, strengthen SEO fundamentals, and rethink what should stay gated.
February’s Huddle Up showed that B2B marketing teams are moving past AI curiosity and into practical deployment. Across the CMO colony, Huddlers are building competitive battle cards, executive-aligned GPTs, rapid prototypes, brand hubs, signal-based outbound programs, and new models for entry-level work. The throughline from the huddle is not “use AI everywhere.” It is use AI where it shortens the path from idea to action. The most successful examples shared on the ice were focused, repeatable, and tied to real workflow pain.
Marketing metrics only matter when they map to the company's growth stage, business model, and strategic priorities. In the January Huddle Up, the CMO colony compared how they are moving beyond generic dashboards and toward measures that clarify impact for CEOs, CFOs, boards, sales teams, and customers. The big takeaway from the huddle on the ice: There is no universal top-three metric list for every CMO. That is not necessarily a flaw. As one Huddler put it, “Each company has a different problem to solve. I wouldn’t expect the same metrics year over year, let alone from company to company.” The CMOs making the most progress are translating marketing activity into business language, aligning teams around shared definitions, and choosing metrics that help the organization make better decisions.
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CMOs and senior B2B marketing leaders shaping growth strategy.
Demand generation and marketing ops leaders navigating AI change.
Marketing teams who want clear, practical monthly direction.
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Drew's perspective on current B2B leadership moments.
Insights from private CMO conversations and event rooms.
Short recommended reads and practical actions to apply now.
Huddle Up is CMO Huddles' monthly newsletter focused on practical B2B marketing leadership insights. It curates what matters each week and filters out the noise.
Most editions are written by Drew Neisser with support from the CMO Huddles team and insights from active B2B marketing leaders.
Huddle Up is distributed on a monthly cadence and occasionally includes special editions tied to major events and timely topics.
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