AI is mentioned in 61% of B2B IT marketing cases, but only seven showed measurable effect

'There is no universal recipe for B2B IT marketing: strategy depends on the business model, the product, the sales cycle, and the company's maturity. But the market increasingly expects marketing to do quality work with priority audiences and to contribute to creating sales opportunities. Over a long B2B cycle, this cannot always be reduced to the direct ROMI of a single activity, but marketing and the business can agree in advance on the target audience and quality metrics by which results will be evaluated,' emphasized Dmitry Gindia, head of the marketing group at K2Tech.

How do companies win customer trust?

Applied expertise has become the answer to customer pragmatism. This approach is used in 64% of applications: instead of directly promoting product features, marketers offer the market industry analytics, research, expert columns, analyses of client tasks, and their own data.

Expert content demonstrates to the customer an understanding of industry specifics, implementation risks, and practical scenarios for applying the technology — in other words, it provides grounds for making a choice. Professional communities remain a significant channel: the phrase 'professional community' was the most frequent among recurring phrases in the applications, appearing in 27 cases.

'A professional community is one of the most mature tools. A company arrives at creating one when it has already built broad and targeted communications and is ready to consistently invest in long-term relationships with its audience. This work requires resources, regularity, and sustainability, but that is precisely why it delivers high results: trust is built through constant exchange of experience and substantive dialogue around tasks common to the market,' noted Nadezhda Levashova, founder of the 'Advance IT' community and award.

In the corporate segment, in-person meetings and events retain their role. They make it possible to discuss complex issues with several participants in the procurement process at once and to build trust through direct dialogue.

How is AI changing the customer's path to purchase?

Generative services are already influencing how customers search for and choose corporate solutions. Three study participants presented practices for optimizing brand presence in AI search responses and neural network assistants. As generative services become part of the customer's path to purchase, working with this channel may emerge as a separate area of B2B marketing.

How was the study conducted?

It was based on 105 individual and team cases from 58 IT companies submitted for the 'Advance IT' award and implemented in 2025–2026. The team developed a unified methodology and a set of evaluation criteria. AI processed about 1,200 pages — nearly 2.2 million characters — and identified more than 2,000 criteria. Then analysts and marketers at K2Tech, together with the award organizers, verified the results, identified trends, and correlated companies' practices with the current market situation.