McKinsey: What trends do you think will shape B2B marketing in the next two to three years? How will this impact you as a CMO? Richella Odebrecht: AI for sure. Speed is a big challenge, and AI now plays a significant role in addressing this by increasing efficiency and helping with content creation, brand tone, and editorial work. A next frontier will be using AI to pair market and customer intelligence with marketing actions, to broaden how customers interact with the brand. That means moving from mapped journeys to non-linear personalized moments, based on engagement behavior, interactions, and on sensing needs and buying signals. It takes time to train tools and teams, but I can see the shift from intrigue toward mastery. We are discovering every day how to get better results, internally and with our agency partners, and the potential is huge and exciting. The focus now needs to go from which model or tool to use to how to scale adoption and proficiency. Then there is the growing influence of AI and technology on customers’ research, self-education, and pre-qualification. We need to rethink how we support and simplify customers’ decision process. It further amplifies the importance of being a known and trusted brand and of user-generated content (UGC), as several models prioritize these sources. While UGC isn’t as prevalent in B2B, there’s a big opportunity here to engage with communities and encourage advocacy. We also need to evaluate whether traditional websites will still be effective or if they’re too slow and static for today’s needs and evolving user expectations. Beyond gen AI, there is the big demographic shift in the workforce with diverging expectations toward technologies and user experience. We need to find ways to be relevant to and influence multiple generations of users and decision-makers simultaneously, to be attractive across age groups, with our portfolio and our marketing. Richella Odebrecht is the senior vice president of global marketing for industrial automation at Schneider Electric. Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement. 24 Past forward: The modern rethinking of marketing’s core