Best of LinkedIn: OMR 2026

00:00:00: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts.

00:00:05: OMR, twenty-twenty six.

00:00:07: Frenness is a B to be market research company helping enterprise marketing teams sharpen their strategies in outreach with customer segmentation ideal customer profiles and deep dives.

00:00:17: customer needs analysis and buying center insights right.

00:00:20: so welcome back to The Deep Dive.

00:00:22: And you know usually when you sit down to map out a B-to-B marketing strategy, there's always been this underlying assumption of gravity.

00:00:30: Yeah

00:00:30: totally like it physics or something

00:00:31: exactly.

00:00:32: You stand at the whiteboard?

00:00:33: You draw this massive funnel and you just assume that if you pour like ten thousand raw leads into the top They're just predictably gonna fall down right

00:00:41: through awareness consideration.

00:00:43: in boom sales team catches The revenue at the bottom.

00:00:46: yep,

00:00:47: and it's a super comforting mental model.

00:00:49: I mean we basically spent the last twenty years optimizing that exact gravity for

00:00:54: you.

00:00:54: Oh, a hundred percent!

00:00:55: We build entire marketing automation platforms just to measure the exact speed of prospect falls from white paper download to demo requests?

00:01:03: Right because we like the binary nature of it.

00:01:05: The clicks are visible and conversions are neat... It all fits into a nice little tiny dashboard.

00:01:10: But I think this is big takeaway here stepping back in looking at landscape.

00:01:14: after the OMR twenty-twenty six festival in Hamburg That gravity has gone.

00:01:20: It has completely evaporated.

00:01:32: Yeah, the actual physics of B to D marketing have been rewritten from scratch.

00:01:36: Exactly!

00:01:37: The classic funnel hasn't just shifted it's collapsed.

00:01:39: yeah we're operating in this completely shattered customer journey now where the old rules of momentum they just don't apply anymore

00:01:46: which forces like a massive reevaluation of what infrastructure even means for our marketing team.

00:01:52: today you can navigate this new reality if your organization is still treating artificial intelligence as uh... Just a shiny new app on your phone

00:02:01: Right, or like a clever little plug-in you use to write email subject lines.

00:02:04: That's the exact trap so many BDB teams are falling into right now.

00:02:08: They just think of AI as software update.

00:02:10: Yeah But looking at insights from Rolf Schumann over at Schwartz Digits The reality is way more foundational than that.

00:02:17: He made that point about AI being world operating system.

00:02:21: Exactly

00:02:22: and what an operating system actually does.

00:02:24: You don't just use Windows or macOS As standalone tool.

00:02:28: No

00:02:28: it's invisible layer.

00:02:30: it dictates how every single piece of hardware and software communicates.

00:02:35: Human's point is that AI is the underlying layer now, and data is new code.

00:02:40: Data IS THE NEW CODE!

00:02:42: I love that.

00:02:43: And you know.

00:02:43: if data is the new code then human role fundamentally shifts from being a programmer to more architecting.

00:02:51: Yes

00:02:52: Robin Hynes for MoreFire ran a master class that hit on this exact nerve, and his conclusion is something I think every marketing professional tuning in needs to digest.

00:03:01: What

00:03:01: was the main takeaway there?

00:03:02: He pointed out that AI won't replace BDB Marketing as a function but it absolutely will replace your current job profile!

00:03:09: Oh

00:03:09: wow so basically The Machine Is Just Eating The Routine

00:03:12: Exactly.

00:03:13: The simple analyses, the repeatable campaign executions... ...the basic A-B testing that's all native machine territory.

00:03:20: now

00:03:20: Right!

00:03:20: The operating system handles the execution.

00:03:23: So what does it actually demand from you?

00:03:25: The human

00:03:26: Entirely different skills.

00:03:28: It requires strategic business modeling.

00:03:30: it requires the ability to look across this highly fragmented customer journey and design an experience that feels cohesive

00:03:39: right even when The touchpoints are scattered across all these different platforms.

00:03:42: in private networks AI is This incredibly powerful amplifier of your strategy, but it possesses no inherent vision of its own.

00:03:51: nope

00:03:51: Without a crystal clear strategy and meticulously clean data, that amplifier is completely blind.

00:03:57: I want to push back on this a little or at least ground it in reality because everyone walking out of OMR was repeating the same mantra like oh AI is standard now

00:04:06: right?

00:04:06: The ultimate buzz phrase yeah

00:04:08: but telling a complex B-to-B enterprise to just use AI isn't that kind of like walking into a nineteenth century textile mill pointing to esteem powered loom?

00:04:19: That's actually a great analogy.

00:04:21: Right, because if your organization is running on broken manual workflows, departmental silos... A CRM full of decaying data plugging an advanced LLM into that mess doesn't solve your problems.

00:04:33: it just helps you make mistakes at the speed of light.

00:04:35: Yeah exactly.

00:04:36: Scaling chaos is still just pay-offs and Stephanie Polster from Rockin' Stars she brought this exact dynamic to life.

00:04:44: What did she say?

00:04:44: Her insight focused heavily on the actual mechanics of integration.

00:04:49: Like, it's never just about purchasing a license for new AI tool

00:04:52: Right!

00:04:53: The hard part is the unglamorous work Exactly!

00:04:55: Intelligently connecting systems.

00:04:57: If you don't build the internal structure first Define responsibilities Sanitize data pipelines.

00:05:02: Introducing an AI layer actually creates way more friction

00:05:06: Because this system will confidently generate reports based on flawed data

00:05:10: And then your team spends more time untangling the machine's hallucinations than they would have spent just doing the manual work in the first place.

00:05:17: So true, which kind of naturally brings us to the execution layer?

00:05:21: if AI is the new plumbing right foundational infrastructure who was actually turning their wrenches?

00:05:27: We aren't just talking about workflow automation anymore.

00:05:31: at OMR The biggest theoretical buzzword finally materialized into reality agentic marketing.

00:05:37: Yeah, moving from automation where a system follows your rules to autonomy.

00:05:43: Where the system actually defines its own path to achieve your goal.

00:05:48: There was a massive takeaway on this From a master class featuring A bunch of experts Kiberle Cushmears Andreas Ortlieb Serge's Plovs and Christian Hinges.

00:05:58: Right!

00:05:58: The folks from Vianth, Heimer Vision XI and Salesforce

00:06:01: Exactly And they really brought their receipts.

00:06:04: High-performing teams deploying AI agents are currently saving up to eight hours a week, strictly on creative tasks.

00:06:09: Wow!

00:06:10: A full work day?

00:06:11: Yeah...a

00:06:12: full day and they're seeing conversion rates climb at the same time.

00:06:15: but the mechanism behind that success?

00:06:17: it always comes back data Of course.

00:06:19: Breaking down silos is only way of building an agent who can actually think or execute.

00:06:23: It needs cross departmental access

00:06:25: And we're seeing that ROI shift happening at the executive level too.

00:06:29: During the KPMG pre-event, Dr Martin Zerkl and Frank Ulmerich broke down how CMOs are evaluating these tech investments now.

00:06:36: Right because era of basic chatbot is basically over

00:06:40: Dead and gone.

00:06:41: A traditional chatbot requires a human to map out this massive decision tree right?

00:06:45: Like if user clicks A show them B. Yeah

00:06:49: totally rigid.

00:06:50: But an autonomous system doesn't need a map.

00:06:53: It researches the user's intent in real time, it reasons through the available company data and it executes a task independently to actually solve that problem.

00:07:03: I mean B-to-B desperately needs.

00:07:05: look at consumer space see how this behaves in the wild.

00:07:08: Look at OTOs voice assistant The one they built with Google Gemini.

00:07:12: This isn't just.

00:07:12: better.

00:07:12: search bar fundamentally changes user experience from manual filtering into guided conversation.

00:07:18: Yeah instead of checking boxes for blue size ten you tell AI what need

00:07:23: Exactly, and the agent dynamically generates the right qualifying questions in real time to narrow down inventory.

00:07:31: It completely bypasses traditional search-and-click mechanics.

00:07:35: But

00:07:35: wait let me play Devil's Advocate here for a second.

00:07:36: Go for it!

00:07:37: Applying that to a five hundred dollar pair of sneakers is one thing... But if we let these agents act autonomously in a B to B setting, the stakes are astronomically higher.

00:07:46: Oh for sure.

00:07:47: Multi-million dollar software contracts compliance requirements

00:07:50: Exactly!

00:07:52: Deep technical integrations.

00:07:54: letting an autonomous AI agent negotiate or guide and enterprise buyer.

00:07:58: it kind of feels like handing the keys To a twenty two year old junior intern on their first day And saying go close The biggest account We have.

00:08:06: Yeah

00:08:06: that is terrifying.

00:08:07: Right, if that agent misrepresents a security protocol or hallucinates a pricing tier the brand damage is catastrophic.

00:08:14: And...that's exactly the ceiling on Agent and Commerce right now.

00:08:18: Corolla Wall highlighted this tension perfectly in her insights.

00:08:22: The entire concept of agentic scaling rests one single fragile pillar.

00:08:27: Absolute trust!

00:08:29: If a B-to-B buyer senses for even a moment that the agent is unreliable, or if procurement team doesn't trust compliance output, adoption drops to zero instantly.

00:08:39: They will simply refuse to engage.

00:08:41: The

00:08:41: technology's completely capable of doing work but human buyers must trust brand enough to accept machines' outputs

00:08:48: Which leads into huge question!

00:08:50: If these agents are increasingly doing heavy lifting and research comparing features making buying decisions How do B-to-B brands even get found in the first place?

00:08:59: Right.

00:09:00: If I'm a buyer and just tell my AI assistant, hey find three best CRM tools for midsize logistics company...I am not looking at your website!

00:09:08: I am NOT downloading your gated white

00:09:09: paper.".

00:09:10: No

00:09:10: you're absolutely not.

00:09:11: And this is The Collapse of Funnel right back to where we started.

00:09:14: Corinne Immenroth from Media Plus refers as the

00:09:18: Mosaic Effect.

00:09:19: Yeah…the

00:09:19: old model assumed a linear path But today, algorithms dictate what appears in our feeds and are fragmented.

00:09:27: digital identities dictate what we actually pay attention to.

00:09:30: So the visibility that marketing teams pays so much money for?

00:09:33: It rarely aligns with the exact private moments where a complex B-to-B decision is being evaluated.

00:09:40: The journey happens in private Slack channels closed communities And direct interactions with AI assistants.

00:09:47: Christian Mueller pointed this out during a Kraschky tour at the event.

00:09:51: It's a terrifying reality for demand-gen teams.

00:09:54: The click is dying!

00:09:56: Yeah,

00:09:58: if an LLM answers the buyer question directly right there in the interface... There's literally no reason to them to click through your blog.

00:10:05: Visibility is increasingly happening completely detached from website traffic.

00:10:10: So selling without you own platform Is the new reality?

00:10:13: Basically yeah.

00:10:14: B-to-B brands have to figure out how to sell and build authority without relying on bringing people into their own proprietary platforms.

00:10:21: Which requires an entirely new framework for discoverability, and Malta Landware's Deep Dive on Generative Engine Optimization or GEO is pretty much the blueprint of this.

00:10:31: Let us get in to GEO because for twenty years marketers optimized for classic search engines by obsessing over keyword density and backlink profiles.

00:10:40: Right but... Large language models, they just don't evaluate information that way.

00:10:45: And LLM isn't trying to rank a list of ten blue links.

00:10:49: it is calculating probabilities to generate one single definitive answer.

00:10:54: I like using analogy for this because the mechanism is crucial.

00:10:57: in The Old World Optimizing For Google was Like Putting Up The Biggest Brightest Most Expensive Billboard On A Super Busy Highway Just

00:11:05: Trying To Catch The Driver's Eye Exactly.

00:11:08: But In The World Of GEO That highway is completely empty.

00:11:11: Instead, you have to convince this incredibly well-read highly opinionated librarian the LOM To personally recommend your software to the buyer.

00:11:20: And You can't bribe The Librarian with keywords!

00:11:22: You really cant.

00:11:23: So how do we prove our authority?

00:11:25: Well...you HAVE TO FEED THEM THE EXACT FORMAT OF INFORMATION THEY PREFER TO DIGEST.

00:11:30: Landware pointed out that to win in GEO YOU MUST STRUCTURE YOUR CONTENT WITH ABSOLUTE CLARITY.

00:11:34: So summary's up front.

00:11:36: Yes The AI wants direct, objective comparisons.

00:11:40: Clear dense summaries right at the beginning.

00:11:43: it doesn't want marketing fluff.

00:11:45: It wants structured data that can easily parse and verify

00:11:49: And that verification piece is where off page strategy just completely changes.

00:11:54: Brita Barron's from Claneo noted that off-page SEO Is actually more critical now than ever before

00:11:59: Really?

00:12:00: How so

00:12:02: Well?

00:12:02: to get the librarian to trust you They need to see your name mentioned in all the prestigious books they already respect.

00:12:08: That means you brand needs to be cited by authoritative nodes.

00:12:11: Oh, like Wikipedia?

00:12:13: Exactly!

00:12:14: If your company isn't mentioned on Wikipedia or heavily referenced in tier one industry publications The LLM simply won't calculate your brand as a highly probable authoritative answer.

00:12:24: Your mentions...your digital PR Your authority that dictates how AI perceives You

00:12:29: And penalty for failing to adapt.

00:12:31: this is severe.

00:12:32: Nils Rasmussen from NDR shared a case study at OMR.

00:12:34: that should be massive wake-up call for everyone.

00:12:36: What happened there?

00:12:37: They

00:12:37: watched their health related search traffic plummet by twenty to thirty percent.

00:12:41: Thirty

00:12:41: percent, that's brutal!

00:12:43: Yeah and the traffic didn't go into competitor.

00:12:46: it just vanished because AI overviews were answering users medical questions directly on the search results page.

00:12:53: The click was dead.

00:12:54: But they didn't just accept the loss, right?

00:12:56: The mechanics of their pivot are fascinating.

00:12:58: No!

00:12:58: They didn't.

00:12:59: what did they

00:12:59: do?!

00:12:59: They realized that if they couldn't rely on a search algorithm to send them passive traffic... ...they had to own the relationship directly.

00:13:07: So they aggressively built a WhatsApp channel.

00:13:10: Yeah And it now commands one point four million subscribers.

00:13:14: Oh!

00:13:15: Yeah..They bypassed the middleman completely.

00:13:17: They stopped trying to win the search result and instead moved right into the user's private Trusted inbox.

00:13:23: Yeah, they essentially traded algorithmic dependency for direct owned engagement

00:13:29: and that pivot highlights the most critical shift We're seeing right now when the internet is just flooded with infinitely scalable AI generated content And opaque algorithms are dictating visibility.

00:13:39: what's

00:13:39: left?

00:13:40: The only

00:13:40: differentiator Leftist trust which brings us to the core of what we're calling the credibility economy.

00:13:46: I mean Ann Ketrin-Schmitz dropped a statistic during her keynote that perfectly illustrates the scale of this problem.

00:13:53: She noted that fifty percent of posts you see on LinkedIn are now written with AI.

00:13:57: Half of the entire feed,

00:13:59: half of the professional feed is synthetic.

00:14:01: when anyone can just use chat GPT to generate a perfectly structured grammatically flawless highly professional thought leadership post in like four seconds perfection becomes a commodity.

00:14:13: absolutely The polished corporate veneer has lost all of its value because it's completely interchangeable.

00:14:19: So true In an environment where perfection is cheap, authenticity becomes the premium.

00:14:25: David Roder from LinkedIn anchored this concept by stating that reputation fundamentally beats reach.

00:14:30: Reputation overreach.

00:14:32: Yes Your competitive advantage no longer just how many eyeballs you can buy It is one inside the LLM itself.

00:14:39: These systems are designed to analyze historical credibility.

00:14:42: so overtime The AI is going to surface the brands that have consistently demonstrated reliable, trustworthy behavior.

00:14:49: Exactly rather than the brand that simply spiked its ad spend last quarter.

00:14:53: But we also cannot ignore the darker implications of this much reliance on AI.

00:14:59: Meredith Whitaker from Signal delivered some incredibly intense warnings about privacy at the event.

00:15:05: It's a critical perspective especially for enterprise leaders managing sensitive data.

00:15:10: Agentic AI isn't just you know helpful little assistant sitting on your desktop to function autonomously, these models require deep integration into the operating system.

00:15:21: They need access to your accounts, your historical data, your private communications... Which

00:15:26: Whitaker frames as a massive surveillance model?

00:15:29: Exactly!

00:15:30: When B-to-B brands deploy these agents they are taking an enormous responsibility.

00:15:35: you have to navigate privacy implications with absolute transparency because single breach of trust at that foundational level we'll destroy the relationship permanently.

00:15:44: Right, and John Gabriel Duvaux from Get Your Guide connected this back to how businesses actually partner with each other.

00:15:49: like if you run a B-to-B agency or provide a service executing simple transactional tasks AI is going to consume your business model.

00:15:57: So How Do You Survive?

00:15:58: Partners have to offer extreme depth Radical transparency.

00:16:03: A willingness to learn and adapt alongside the client.

00:16:07: AI doesn't mask a company's strategic weaknesses.

00:16:10: It puts a giant magnifying glass right over

00:16:13: them.

00:16:13: Let me challenge this whole idea of the credibility economy for a moment though.

00:16:17: Particularly, this push for like raw authentic content Mm-hmm.

00:16:22: it makes

00:16:22: total sense if you are a direct consumer brand selling energy drinks to Gen Z on TikTok.

00:16:27: Right They love messy behind-the-scenes marketing.

00:16:31: Okay,

00:16:31: yeah But we are targeting enterprise B to be buyers here the procurement manager at a fortune five hundred company making a five million dollar software decision.

00:16:40: they don't want messy.

00:16:41: they Want risk mitigation?

00:16:42: They want assurance.

00:16:43: they want a polished professional guarantee that they won't get fired for buying your product.

00:16:48: Do enterprise buyers really want imperfect and raw?

00:16:51: That is a really crucial distinction to make because in the context of Enterprise B to beat Messy does not mean unprofessional or chaotic.

00:16:58: Okay, what does it mean then?

00:16:59: Messy just means dropping the corporate facade.

00:17:02: It means transparency.

00:17:04: A procurement manager knows that a perfectly formatted twenty page white paper full of synergized Bez words can be generated by machine in ten seconds.

00:17:12: It carries zero inherent proof of competence anymore.

00:17:15: right

00:17:15: because anyone can fake it.

00:17:16: now

00:17:17: exactly so What proves competence?

00:17:19: owning the reality at work?

00:17:22: B-to-B authenticity means having the confidence to publicly dissect a deployment that failed, explaining exactly why it failed and detailing the engineering steps your team took.

00:17:32: I see!

00:17:33: It means putting your actual lead engineers in product managers on camera totally unscripted... To talk about the nuanced limitations of your software.

00:17:42: Buyers don't want this synthetic perfection of an AI sales pitch.

00:17:45: They want the undeniable flawed deeply experienced human insight That a machine just cannot synthesize.

00:17:51: Wow, that really reframes everything we've discussed today.

00:17:54: I mean, we started by looking at AI as the invisible operating system of The Modern Enterprise?

00:17:59: Yeah We explored how agentic commerce is shifting the workload from automation to true autonomy saving teams hours of manual execution

00:18:07: Right, and we broke down the mechanics of generative engine optimization.

00:18:10: Yes!

00:18:10: And why?

00:18:11: convincing the LLM Librarian with off-page authority is pretty much the only way to survive The Death Of A Click?

00:18:17: And finally... We landed on this sheer unscalable power of human credibility

00:18:21: Because technology is advancing at a blinding speed To handle logic, execution & synthesis.

00:18:29: But strategic vision, ethical guardrails and the vital task of earning another human's trust that remains entirely our responsibility.

00:18:38: Which leaves you with a final, somewhat provocative thought to mull over as you plan your next quarter.

00:18:43: We have spent this entire deep dive analyzing digital infrastructure algorithmic shifts And autonomous agents.

00:18:50: Yeah But if AI is inevitably going to handle all the logical evaluations All the dense feature comparisons in all the transactional research on behalf Perhaps the future of high end B to be marketing isn't digital at all.

00:19:03: Wait, really?

00:19:03: Yeah think about it.

00:19:04: in an ocean flooded with infinite perfectly synthetic content The ultimate premium channel might just be highly curated face-to-face real world human experiences The kind of messy beautiful undeniable connection that a machine simply cannot replicate.

00:19:19: That is so true.

00:19:20: and landscape defined by artificial generation The most disruptive thing a brand can be is tangibly real.

00:19:26: if you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:19:29: Also check out our other editions on account based marketing, field marketing channel and partner marketing AI in B to be more tech go-to market and social selling.

00:19:37: Thank you so much for joining us And we will catch you on the next deep dive.