LinkedIn's Steve Kearns on AI, Brand, and the B2B Marketer’s Moment

AI has taken the marketing world by storm, a force reshaping every stage of the marketing funnel. From automating campaign workflows to delivering hyper-personalized content, AI tools are enabling brands to scale with unprecedented speed. 

Yet, as digital noise grows, the human elements of brand, trust, and relationship-building remain the ultimate differentiators. This year at Cannes Lions, I sat down with Steve Kearns, Global Head of Content at LinkedIn Ads, to talk about:

• Why over 90% of CMOs now prioritize AI skill-building and what that means for organizational change
• How relationship-centric skills are surging alongside AI literacy in shaping marketing’s future
• The emotional power of brand in complex B2B buying committees 

Here’s a preview of my conversation with Steve.

LinkedIn has a lot of data on how AI is evolving the marketer’s role. What is it telling us about how B2B marketing roles are changing?

Steve: Every year LinkedIn publishes a Workforce Confidence Report that includes the LinkedIn Economic Graph, which is a digital manifestation of the global economy. Every customer action—job changes, profile updates, content interactions, etc.—becomes a data point LinkedIn can use to analyze what’s happening across the workforce in areas like jobs and skills, hiring, and content engagement and consumption.

This past year, we surveyed CMOs and 90% said AI skill building was one of their top priorities for their organization. We also found that over the last six years, marketers have been adding AI skills to their profiles at 7X the rate they were prior.

This tells us that the marketing function is really becoming a vanguard for organizations in driving AI transformation. And in many cases, the C-suite is directly asking marketing leaders to lead the transformation.

We’re also seeing a rise in focus on human-centric skills. As routine work becomes automated by AI, companies are now expecting employees to enhance their skills in areas where machines can’t replicate humans, like building relationships, problem-solving, and innovating.

It’s been interesting to see that as AI continues to become more prevalent in business, it’s not replacing human skills but making them more important and more valued.

Why do you think brand is becoming so much more important in the B2B space?

Steve: There’s a common thought that B2B buying is hyperrational, and that things like product and price are the most key differentiators. But for years LinkedIn research has shown that B2B purchase decisions are just as emotional, if not more emotional, than consumer decisions. The burden of proof is higher, the risk is higher, and people’s jobs are sometimes even on the line.

B2B marketing often fails to take into account these emotional drivers that are behind getting a buying committee to agree and feel ready to say yes and cut a check. When we think about brand in B2B, it’s really what allows you to make the emotional connections with your audience that you need to build trust and tip their decisions.

In B2B we’re constantly hearing how sales cycles are longer and involve more stakeholders than ever. With AI, the stakes are even higher. Can you talk about what actually builds trust in this kind of environment?

Steve: What builds trust are human relationships. Take, for example, the utility of an event like Cannes. We have a lot of marketing leaders who come into the business from different sectors and haven’t advertised to marketers before. They see the line items for Cannes and want to know what justifies the investment.

But when I think about the relationships I’ve built that have resulted in business for LinkedIn or business for a vendor we work with, it’s been at an event like this one. And honestly, I think we’ve overindexed on digital. People are looking for human connection. Connection is what’s going to drive people forward to want to take action in business settings.

Think about a 20-person buying group. There’s not a sole decision maker. People have different agendas, budgets, perspectives. They all at some point have to agree. What actually gets them to agree? It’s relational dynamics that get people to a decision.

When you think about AI’s ability to do things like create really personalized content at scale, the primary benefit there is that the folks on your team can actually go out into the field and interact with your audiences, connecting with other people, and that’s what really differentiates brands in B2B spaces.

If you could train an AI model on your own marketing instincts and leadership style, what would be its killer use case?

Steve: I think it would be an AI tool that understands the emotional drivers that get someone to make a decision. Right now, that's the human advantage people bring to the table. They have a strategic lens to apply to what AI creates in order to move work forward and make it effective. 

I think maybe there's a world in the future where there's some kind of data synthesis that goes on where AI sees behavioral trends and can actually help us understand why people make the decisions that they do. We’re getting there with agentic AI.

Inevitably, this leads to the question of if AI will replace human marketers. But I actually don't think so. I think it's going to make marketers a lot more efficient. Of course there’s some anxiety around the types of workforce disruption we see as AI drives this transformational shift. It’s changing the way people work. It’s going to be up to us to upskill, educate ourselves, and be at the forefront of how to leverage AI technology to stay current and relevant.

This is just a preview of my interview with LinkedIn Ad’s Steve Kearns on AI, Brand, and the B2B Marketer’s Moment. Watch the video on-demand for more insight on how AI is transforming the B2B marketing world.

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