What’s shaping the next era of business-to-business?
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**As part of The Drum’s B2B Month, jurors from The Drum Awards for B2B reveal what the strongest work gets right and where teams need to evolve to meet rising expectations.**

![](https://assets.brentturner.is/the-drum-award-festival-article1-1764242948.avif)

The following are select quotes pulled from [the original piece](https://www.thedrum.com/news/inside-the-b2b-jury-room-what-is-shaping-the-next-era-of-b2b).

The following are select references pulled from [The Drum’s piece on the next era of B2B marketing](https://www.thedrum.com/news/inside-the-b2b-jury-room-what-is-shaping-the-next-era-of-b2b), featuring jurors from The Drum Awards for B2B.

The article looks at a B2B category that is becoming more creative, more emotionally aware, and more willing to challenge the old assumption that business audiences only respond to rational messaging. The larger thread: better B2B will come from the teams that know how to combine AI, brand systems, human craft, and real-world connection without letting the tools flatten the work.

In the section on creative rigor, The Drum references my point about the rise of “artificial fluency” — the way AI can make everything feel fast, polished, and frictionless, but not necessarily more interesting. The piece continues with the idea that [brands should “create friction” as an intentional design choice](https://brentturner.is/posting/designing-for-effort), because in a world shaped by autocomplete, “visible effort carries more weight.”

That connects to a larger shift I see across B2B experiences. As more of the work becomes digitized, automated, and optimized, the value of presence starts to increase. The Drum framed this through my comments on offline experiences becoming a new center of gravity, citing a “mass digital detox” and the rising value of real presence.

Later in the article, The Drum returns to the [tension between scale and intimacy](https://brentturner.is/posting/when-exclusivity-scales). The best B2B work will “use AI to target, score and orchestrate,” but still make room for the smaller environments where trust is built and relationships take root.

That is the real strategic challenge ahead. AI will make more teams more capable. It will accelerate production, personalization, scoring, research, and orchestration. But capability is not the same as distinction. As quoted in the piece: “tools raise the floor; taste raises the ceiling,”

The future of B2B will not be won by being more automated than everyone else. It will be won by knowing where automation helps, where human judgment matters, and where the deliberate, tangible, emotionally resonant thing is still the thing people remember.

Posted November 27, 2025  
by [The Drum](https://www.thedrum.com/news/inside-the-b2b-jury-room-what-is-shaping-the-next-era-of-b2b)

[**Continue reading the full story on The Drum.**](https://www.thedrum.com/news/inside-the-b2b-jury-room-what-is-shaping-the-next-era-of-b2b)