Inside today’s B2B SaaS teams, AI's main role is amplifying the talent that’s already there. It’s making marketers faster, more consistent, and more scalable. And it’s enabling under-resourced teams to finally punch above their weight (fairly and for the first time ever).

This isn’t some abstract take.

For our What's Working Right Now report, We surveyed 100 Marketing Directors from $50M+ B2B SaaS companies. They told us exactly how they’re using it, and what you can learn from them.

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AI use today

Right now, the dominant use case for AI in B2B marketing is content.

68% of teams use it for content creation and copywriting. Think emails, blog posts, social copy, landing pages, even creative briefs. AI isn’t doing the job start to finish, it’s being used to get unstuck, to move faster, and to give internal teams a head start. The content still goes through humans, but AI is handling the first pass.

One team uploaded dozens of internally written thought leadership pieces to train a custom GPT. They now use it to write everything from executive bios to webinar abstracts.

Another team is saving $80,000 a year, simply by using AI to generate draft content that in-house marketers polish and publish.

These teams are removing friction at the top of the funnel so they can move quicker and scale better. And importantly, they’re still controlling for voice, brand, accuracy, and nuance.

AI isn’t making the content great. It’s just getting you to version one 10x faster.

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Creative and workflow integration

ChatGPT and Claude might be the workhorses, but top teams are building out full AI toolkits. 24% are using creative tools like DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, and Jasper to generate visuals. They’re personalizing images for webinars and pitch decks—a clear upgrade over bland stock art. 

“We wanted to stop looking like every other vendor, now we generate custom visuals for every campaign and deck.”

Meanwhile, 16% are taking advantage of built-in AI tools like in HubSpot, with Asana, or Microsoft Copilot. These embedded features quietly handle automation, draft messaging, email summaries, meeting notes, even to-do prioritization. This is the kind of AI adoption that doesn’t sound flashy or wholly revolutionary, but it saves hours of work every week.

"The AI feature in HubSpot has been really powerful and robust and has allowed us to save time to work on other activities. This expands possibilities for more programs through the opening up of marketing dollars."

AI is also creeping into sales enablement. Teams are using it for lead scoring, meeting summaries, and chatbot scheduling. One team deployed an AI SDR chatbot on their site, and within 15 days it started generating pipeline, just by booking meetings after-hours.

"The AI SDR chatbot I have used has helped fill in some missed leads or gaps in a given quarter. Even if they are small deal sizes sometimes, we are feeling confident that we are getting even more coverage to push our visitors through the sales funnel with gains already being realized."

The biggest win across roles? The time saved on internal work. Some teams are using AI just to prep board decks, summarize Slack threads, or automate repetitive campaign workflows. It’s not glamorous or too revolutionary, but it’s the stuff that saves them upwards of 10 hours a week. 

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Company size = different plays

Smaller teams tend to use AI tactically. They don’t have time for RFPs or compliance reviews, they’re picking tools that solve immediate bottlenecks.

Mid-sized companies, usually with more complex orgs and multiple stakeholders, are starting to build AI into both content and operational workflows.

Large enterprises are in another world entirely. For them, it’s less about speed and more about governance. They’re focused on privacy, data security, and compliance. They’re building custom integrations and ensuring everything they do with AI passes internal risk review. But even there, the strategic direction is clear: AI is being integrated. Carefully, but consistently.

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Why AI works

They’re using it to free up humans for the work only humans can do: strategic thinking, relationship building, brand development.

“AI fills in the gaps. It lets us focus on what machines can’t—thinking strategically, building relationships, and driving brand innovation.”

This quote came up over and over, in different forms. What AI is actually doing on high-performing teams is removing friction. It’s doing the prep work, the first drafts, the heavy lifting that used to burn hours every week.

Take this example from a team using ChatGPT across their marketing ops:

“The first way we use ChatGPT is for copy prompts for brochures, email, social posts, and web pages. While the outputs still require finesse from subject matter experts, the AI helps us save hours of over-thinking. Essentially, it eliminates the need to start from a blank canvas.”

That line "Eliminates the need to start from a blank canvas" is the entire point. AI isn’t replacing expertise. It’s compressing the time it takes to get to version one, so your team can spend less time generating and more time refining.

Another team built a prompt-powered workflow and trained ChatGPT on previously published content to speed up production:

“We use ChatGPT for a lot of our marketing-created content. We have trained the model by uploading pieces previously written by our thought leaders to establish the correct tone and format. We use it to create bios, social posts, emails, webinar abstracts, landing page copy, etc.”

This isn’t “Just let ChatGPT do it.” It’s: feed it the brand voice, then let it scale.

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What not to do

Too many teams still start with the wrong question: “What AI tool should we use?” That’s like asking what saw to buy before you know what you’re building.

The better question is: “Where are we wasting time?”

If you’re slow to get blog posts out the door, start there. If your sales team is spending hours summarizing calls or qualifying leads, solve that. If your design team is buried in ad resizes, automate it. Start with a pain point. Then find the AI solution that plugs that gap. Most of the time, it’s already built into the tools you’re using.

Don’t add tools just to say you’re using AI. Add them to remove bottlenecks that actually matter.

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The takeaway

AI isn’t the thing that’s going to replace your marketing team. It’s the thing that’s going to protect them from burnout, unnecessary costs, and wasted time. Used correctly, it helps them do more of the work that actually matters, messaging, testing, talking to customers, and building a brand that stands out.

So stop asking if AI is ready for B2B. It’s already here. The real question is whether your team is using it to its full potential.

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