The news
Dan Earle of Arketi Group argues in Demand Gen Report that AI adoption in B2B marketing has outpaced buyer trust — citing the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer finding that only 32% of U.S. respondents trust AI. His case: efficiency-first AI implementations are creating more touchpoints without building more credibility, and the fix is human-led marketing with AI in a supporting role.
Our take
The data point is real. The framing misses the actual problem.
When dAIs audits a GTM team's AI stack, the trust gap almost never comes from buyers who know they're being touched by AI. It comes from buyers who sense that no one is home — that the personalization is generic, the follow-up is formulaic, and the sequence couldn't pass a basic sniff test for relevance. That's not an AI problem. That's a workflow design problem.
Most teams that "use AI in demand gen" have done one of two things: turned on HubSpot's AI content tools, or bolted an AI enrichment layer onto a sequence that was already mediocre. They haven't asked the harder question: what does this buyer actually need to trust us, and where in our workflow does that get built or broken?
Human-led marketing with AI as a collaborator is a fine principle. But it's operationally meaningless unless you've mapped where human judgment needs to be in the loop — and where you've accidentally automated it out. Fully AI-generated nurture tracks can perform better than human-written ones — not because AI is more trustworthy, but because the AI was given better context about the buyer's actual situation.
Trust isn't built by having a human write the email. It's built by the email being relevant, timely, and useful. AI can do that. Lazy AI implementation can't.
So now what?
- Audit one active sequence this week. Read every touchpoint from the buyer's perspective and ask: does this feel like someone understands my problem, or does it feel like I'm in a queue?
- Document where human judgment actually lives. Before you automate a step, decide whether it needs a human review gate — and make that decision deliberately, not by default.
- Treat relevance as the trust signal, not medium. Buyers don't distrust AI. They distrust irrelevance. Fix the context going into your AI tools before you blame the output.
The teams that will win aren't the ones who use less AI — they're the ones who use it with more intentionality about what actually moves a buyer forward.