The June 2026 OneIMS Executive Roundtable brought B2B marketing and revenue leaders to one table to compare notes on where they actually stand against the AI search shift. The headline finding: the gap between "we're aware" and "we have a strategy" is wider than anyone wants to admit out loud. Most rooms are 67% improvising and 33% executing.
Below are the patterns that came out of the room, what's missing, where the money is leaking, and the moves the executives who do have a strategy are making this quarter. We've kept the framing honest: this is a peer roundtable, not a market study. The point is the consistency of the gaps, not the projectability of the percentages.
About this data. Findings are from the OneIMS June 2026 Executive Roundtable, run via the AI Visibility Assessment scorecard. Sample is small and self-selected, these are qualitative peer signals from B2B revenue leaders, not a market study. Treat the percentages as the shape of the conversation, not a national benchmark.
Every executive at the table knew AI search was reshaping demand generation. None of them disagreed on the diagnosis. What separated the room was whether anyone had actually written a plan. 67% are experimenting without a strategy. Only 33% described themselves as executing dual-engine AEO, running classic SEO and AI Search Optimization as one coordinated motion. The middle, "we know we should, but we haven't yet", is where most B2B brands are losing the next 18 months.
"Every leader in this room knows AI search is the front door now. Almost none of them have actually rebuilt the house."
Solomon Thimothy, CEO OneIMS · June 2026 RoundtableThe Forrester data says B2B purchase decisions involve 22 stakeholders. The roundtable revealed nobody at the table actually maps how those 22 people search. 67% are guessing based on personas. 67% rely on traditional SEO keyword tools to gather buyer questions, keyword tools were not designed for natural-language AI prompts. And 67% said their content "somewhat" addresses Jobs-to-be-Done but is missing the specifics each role actually evaluates on.
The persona document is not the search intent. A persona describes who the buyer is. Search intent describes what they type into ChatGPT at 9pm on a Tuesday. Most B2B content is written for the persona and indexed against the wrong intent, which is why your top-of-funnel feels busy but your shortlist doesn't grow.
The single most under-discussed finding in the roundtable: 67% said their internal subject-matter experts and engineers are completely offline, no podcast appearances, no LinkedIn presence beyond a job title, no third-party citations in trade publications. Only 33% described their SMEs as highly vocal external authorities. AI assistants prioritize consensus across trusted sources. If your top engineer's name doesn't appear anywhere outside your careers page, the LLM has nothing to weigh you with.
Here's the chain of moves the 33% who are leading actually run:
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity what they say about your brand and category. 67% of the room had either never checked or checked once and stopped tracking. You cannot improve a citation rate you have not measured.
Get your top 3 SMEs cited in 5–10 trusted industry publications, podcasts, or analyst briefings. Named-author authority is now a load-bearing AI retrieval signal, more durable than backlinks.
67% of the roundtable runs vague differentiators, "best-in-class methodology", on their comparison pages. AI assistants need concrete, side-by-side spec tables to cite you when buyers ask "who's better than X for Y?" Comparison pages are the new SEO.
33% of the room reported zero technical maintenance on AI-readable data, no schema, no scheduled freshness pass. Organization, Product, FAQ, and How-To schema map directly to retrieval signals. This is a one-quarter fix, not a multi-year program.
67% are completely blind to revenue lost when AI shortlists exclude them. You will not move budget toward what you cannot count. Tag AI-referred sessions in HubSpot as a distinct source so the next QBR has a number, not a feeling.
Take the same AI Visibility Assessment the June roundtable took. See where you sit on the maturity curve, what the leading 33% are doing differently, and the 90-day moves to close the gap.
Toward the end of the session, we asked: do you know how much revenue you are losing by not being on the "Invisible Shortlist" when buyers ask AI for vendor recommendations? The answer was uniform. 67% said completely blind to losses. 33% said they were currently trying to measure. Zero said they had it instrumented. Same pattern on success measurement: 67% are tracking lead volume from unknown sources, and 33% described themselves as flying completely blind.
The leading 33% in the room shared one thing in common, they had a number, even a rough one, for AI-referred pipeline. Once you can count it, you can defend the budget. Until you can count it, the budget moves elsewhere.
The upside compounds. Brands that earn AI citations now establish authority that gets reinforced every time the LLM is asked. First-mover advantage in citation is real and durable, the leading 33% in the room are extending the gap every week the other 67% wait for "next quarter."
Boiling the roundtable down to a single quarter's worth of moves, these are the highest-leverage actions for any B2B revenue team that wants to be on the AI shortlist before the leading 33% lock in their positions.
The leading 33% are pulling away. The roundtable made one thing clear, the executives already executing dual-engine AEO are not waiting for the rest of the market to catch up. Every quarter you postpone is a quarter their citation authority compounds against you.
A peer-to-peer session with B2B marketing and revenue leaders, run via the OneIMS AI Visibility Assessment scorecard. The format is structured: every participant takes the same scorecard, then we surface the patterns across the room. The point is shared diagnosis, not a competitive benchmark.
Is this a statistically projectable industry study?No, and we don't pretend otherwise. The sample is small and self-selected, these are qualitative signals from a peer roundtable. The percentages describe the shape of the conversation in the room. Treat them as a directional pattern, not a national benchmark.
Why does "AI sentiment" matter if my brand isn't being asked about?Your brand is being asked about, by buyers researching your category. 67% of the roundtable had never tracked AI sentiment about their brand. If ChatGPT confidently says something wrong about you, that becomes the consensus answer. Auditing AI sentiment is the cheapest move with the highest correction value.
My SMEs don't want to be public. What do we do?Start with one. Pick the most articulate engineer or analyst and run them through three structured 30-minute interviews, one becomes a podcast pitch, one becomes a guest post on a trade publication, one becomes a LinkedIn series. The roundtable's leading 33% all started with a single named voice, not a company-wide program.
How do I instrument AI-referred attribution if Google removed the click-source data?Create a custom source in HubSpot called "AI-referred" and tag any session where the buyer self-reports finding you through an AI assistant, on the form, in a follow-up email, in sales-call discovery. It's an imperfect proxy but a useful one. The point is to start counting, not to count perfectly.
What's the fastest single move from this roundtable?Audit your AI sentiment. It takes a day, costs nothing, and gives you the baseline you need to decide what to fix next. Most of the leading 33% in the room started there.
Take the same AI Visibility Assessment the June executives took. 8 minutes for your score, your gaps, and a 90-day roadmap from the MAPS framework.
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