A Peek Into the Future of B2B Marketing: Rishi Dave on Buyability, AI and Human Creativity

I had the great fortune to work with Rishi Dave when he was Executive Director, Digital Marketing at Dell and again when he was CMO at Dun & Bradstreet through our agency here at TopRank Marketing. Rishi is incredibly smart, insightful and passionate about marketing.

Since those early days, Rishi’s career has taken him to additional CMO roles at Vonage and MongoDB. Today, his is in a Partner role at Bain & Company where as part of their Commercial Excellence practice, he partners with CMOs and management teams to drive marketing transformations and build modern marketing capabilities, including the implementation and scaling of GenAI.

In this episode of the Beyond B2B Marketing podcast, Rishi and I talked about how B2B marketing is shifting from disconnected campaigns to scalable, always-on growth systems powered by AI. And at the same time, why the real differentiators are still human insight, original research, and creative storytelling.

We also talked about the concept of buyability, how hidden buyers, peer validation, and the Day-One List now shape B2B decisions and why building category fame matters more than brand familiarity alone. These concepts actually align quite well with TopRank’s Best Answer Marketing framework. Rishi talked about how leading organizations are rethinking their content operations, redesigning processes, and implementing AI to accelerate their time-to-marke. We also covered the growing importance of strong product marketers, how to keep creativity and emotion at the center of AI-enabled content, and what AI-native B2B marketing will look like in the next few years.

Listen to the full conversation with Rishi here:

As a preview, here are 10 questions about the transformation of B2B marketing answered during our interview:

How can B2B marketing teams transition from disconnected campaigns to scalable, always-on growth systems powered by AI?
What does it take to successfully implement AI across a marketing organization-not just for micro-productivity gains, but for enterprise-level impact?
How should B2B companies rethink their content creation process in the age of AI to reduce time-to-market and increase personalization?
Why is high-quality original research essential for training AI models and differentiating B2B messaging?
What is ‘Buyability,’ and how can marketers increase their chances of making the Day-One List for B2B buying groups?
How can B2B brands build “category fame” and ensure they’re known for the category they want to win-especially against fast-moving startups?
How should marketing, sales, and customer success teams coordinate go-to-market motions using AI, data, and automation?
How do you maintain human creativity, emotion, and storytelling in an AI-heavy marketing environment?
What skills and roles are becoming most critical in AI-enabled B2B marketing organizations?
How will AI-native B2B marketing evolve over the next 2-3 years-and what should teams do now to prepare?

Watch the full interview with Rishi Dave here:

If you’d prefer a text summary of our discussion about the increasing importance of buyability, brand fame and AI transformation in B2B marketing, here you go:

“Buyability gives B2B marketers a playbook and messaging strategies to maximize the probability that they’ll win over the buying group that they’re targeting.”

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Source:: Top Rank Blog