Is your B2B marketing team ready for AI? The case for equitable skills training
For B2B marketing leaders, artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from a line item in the budget to an essential part of the toolkit. It promises to help us personalise account-based marketing (ABM) at scale, analyse complex buyer journeys, and arm our sales colleagues with better-qualified leads. But the success of these tools doesn’t depend on the software—it depends on our people.
A new report from The Adaptavist Group, Digital Etiquette: Unlocking the AI gates, reveals a critical divide in who gets access to AI training and tools. This presents a serious risk for B2B organisations: you could be creating a skills gap right inside your marketing team, limiting your ability to compete and drive revenue.
This article outlines a path forward, using key insights from the report to help you build a more effective and equitable B2B marketing function by embracing AI for everyone.
The link between AI training and B2B marketing performance
In B2B, efficiency is paramount. We face long sales cycles and the constant pressure to prove ROI. This is where comprehensive AI training becomes a strategic investment, not just a perk.
The Adaptavist Group's research makes a compelling business case. It found that employees with extensive AI training were able to save a remarkable amount of time each week—often more than a full working day. Imagine your content team producing technical case studies faster, your demand generation specialists optimising campaigns with deeper insights, or your marketing operations team streamlining lead scoring processes. This is the real-world impact of effective AI enablement.
The report quantifies just how significant these productivity gains are, making it clear that failing to train is failing to unlock performance.
Are you creating a two-tier B2B marketing team?
While the benefits are clear, many organisations have unintentionally created an environment where access to AI is unequal. The report highlights several critical divides that may be holding your marketing team back, with specific data showing fault lines drawn by income, seniority, gender, and even age.
The seniority gap: The report shows that senior B2B marketers and higher earners receive substantially more AI training. This often leaves junior team members—the ones executing keyword research, managing social channels, and cleaning data—without the tools to innovate and grow.
The gender divide: This disparity also extends across gender lines. The research uncovers a clear gap in the training opportunities offered to men and women, particularly in leadership roles, which can stifle diverse strategic thinking.
The generational confidence gap: The data shows that younger employees are significantly more concerned about AI replacing their jobs and feel less able to use the technology openly. For B2B, where retaining and developing new talent is crucial, this is a culture risk that can't be ignored.
If these issues aren't addressed, you risk limiting the capabilities of your entire team. The detailed statistics in the full report paint a compelling picture of just how wide these gaps are.
A framework for equitable AI adoption in your B2B team
To build a truly AI-powered marketing engine, you need a deliberate strategy that goes beyond simply procuring new technology.
Here are three steps to get started:
Democratise access to training and tools: Your AI training programme shouldn't be reserved for the Head of Demand Gen or your senior strategists. Roll it out for everyone. The report strongly recommends providing broad access to ensure your entire team—from marketing assistants to the CMO—can contribute to their full potential.
Foster a culture of psychological safety: Your team needs to know it’s safe to experiment with AI to find better ways of working. The report reveals a surprisingly high number of employees want more AI training but are afraid to ask. B2B leaders must be proactive: champion AI use in campaign planning, openly discuss its role in hitting MQL targets, and create clear policies that empower everyone to ask for help.
Standardise how you measure B2B value: The report notes that senior employees are far more comfortable proving the ROI of AI. Empower your whole team by creating standardised ways to measure its value in a B2B context. This could be time saved on competitor analysis, improved lead quality scores, or a demonstrable impact on sales pipeline velocity.
Building a future-ready B2B marketing engine
Integrating AI is one of the most significant opportunities for B2B marketing teams today. Its success hinges on an inclusive, team-wide approach. By closing the internal skills gap, you can do more than just improve efficiency—you can build a more innovative and data-driven marketing function that is ready for the future.
To see the specific data behind these divides and explore the full recommendations, the complete report from The Adaptavist Group is an essential read.