The Content Marketing Institute’s 2026 B2B report surveyed just over a thousand marketers and asked where the money is going. Sixty-one percent plan to raise overall spend. The top three priorities came back as AI-powered marketing tools at 45%, events and experiential at 33%, and owned media at 32%. Read those first two together. The same budget, in the same year, from the same people, is buying industrial content generation and buying rooms with chairs in them.

I had to buy a camera lens recently. Not through an AI. Through Amazon. I opened a browser, navigated to amazon.com, logged in, went to my order history, scrolled until I found the last lens I bought to confirm the mount type, went back to search, typed a query, filtered by prime shipping, read four product pages with conflicting spec tables, checked a compatibility thread on a photography forum, went back to Amazon, added the item to cart, entered my address for the fifth time this year, and confirmed the order.