What Digital Summit Chicago Reveals About the State of B2B Marketing in the AI Era

When I found out I’d be covering the Digital Summit Chicago for MarketingEDGE this year, I was genuinely excited — and not just because it gave me another excuse to spend a few days in one of my favorite cities. What pulls me into conferences like this is the mix of honesty and experimentation: people swapping real stories, trying out new tools, and collectively puzzling through how trends are affecting day-to-day work. 

But as I started my pre‑event due diligence ritual — digging through the agenda, researching speakers and, yes, mapping out nearby ice cream shops — something jumped out at me. I wasn’t overwhelmed. I wasn’t buried under a pile of competing ideas or trend‑of‑the‑week thinking. Instead, I kept encountering the same conversations over and over again. 

Different speakers. Different job titles. Different slide templates. And yet, beneath all of it, the same questions kept surfacing. Not because the agenda was unimaginative, but because the industry is clearly working through a shared set of problems. That repetition isn’t a weakness. It’s a signal. 

It didn’t matter whether a session focused on search, content, storytelling, authority or employee advocacy. The underlying tension was remarkably consistent. Search no longer behaves the way marketers were taught it would — or the way their dashboards still assume it does. AI has made “good enough” content cheap, fast and dangerously interchangeable. Attention, already the most over‑subscribed resource in marketing, is now harder to earn, harder to defend, and harder to justify once you have it.  

What emerges from the Digital Summit Chicago program isn’t a grab bag of shiny new ideas — it’s a narrowing of focus. B2B marketers appear less interested in chasing every new tool and more focused on grounding themselves in a few core truths about the AI era. Discovery now runs through machines. Authority matters more than volume ever did. And storytelling has moved out of the “nice creative touch” category and into something closer to essential infrastructure, precisely because it’s harder for AI to fake well. 

Those three ideas show up again and again throughout this year’s agenda. And taken together, they offer a telling snapshot of where B2B marketing thinking stands right now — not in theory, not on a vision slide, but in practice: pragmatic, clear‑eyed and playing out very publicly. 

Trend 1: Visibility Is No Longer About Rankings — It’s About Presence 

Across the Digital Summit Chicago agenda, visibility is framed less as a traffic goal and more as a discovery challenge. These sessions focus on how search, social platforms, video and AI answers now shape whether brands show up, often before a click ever happens. The emphasis is on understanding how modern discovery works when algorithms increasingly mediate visibility. Check out these sessions if you’re rethinking how your brand gets found when search is no longer the sole entry point. 

Session: Building a Visibility Strategy: How Search, Social, and AI Answers Shape Modern Discovery 

Speaker: Tyler Lane — Session Interactive 

Takeaways: 

• How modern discovery is shaped by the combined influence of search, social platforms and AI answers
• What “visibility strategy” looks like when users encounter brands outside traditional search results
• Why discovery must be considered across multiple environments, not a single channel 

Session: Beyond Rankings: Building Resilient SEO Strategies in an AI‑Governed Web 

Speaker: Sahirah Johnson — Meta 

Takeaways: 

• How SEO strategy must evolve when the web is increasingly governed by AI systems
• Why rankings alone are no longer sufficient to define search performance
• What makes an SEO strategy “resilient” in an AI‑influenced environment 

Session: AI Doesn’t Care About Your Brand: Building Brands That Algorithms Can Understand and Audiences Can Trust 

Speaker: John Triplett — IDX

Takeaways: 

• How AI systems affect brand visibility by interpreting content and structure
• What it means to make a brand understandable to algorithms
• Why algorithmic understanding and audience trust are now linked 

Session: Video That Moves Pipeline: How to Drive Revenue Impact with LinkedIn Video Across the Full Funnel 

Speaker: Purna Virji — LinkedIn 

Takeaways: 

• How video contributes to visibility across different stages of the funnel
• Why pipeline impact is a more relevant measure of video effectiveness than views alone
• How visibility efforts should account for the full buying journey 

Trend 2: Authority Is Replacing Scale as the Primary B2B Advantage 

These authority sessions focus on what happens after visibility: trust. The agenda positions expertise, credibility and employee voice as strategic advantages in an AI era where content is plentiful but confidence is scarce. Authority is treated as something built intentionally over time, not automatically earned through reach. Explore these sessions if you’re focused on building credibility that actually carries weight in B2B decision‑making. 

Session: Turning Expertise into Influence: How B2B Organizations Build Authority and Trust in the AI Era 

Speaker: Samantha Kermode — Juristat 

Takeaways: 

• How expertise can be translated into influence in B2B marketing
• What building authority looks like in the AI era
• Why trust remains central to B2B relationships even as AI scales content creation 

Session: The Experience Multiplier: Delivering Effective Employee Advocacy that Impacts Your Bottom Line 

Speaker: Dana Schmidt — Slice Communications 

Takeaways: 

• How employee advocacy can influence business outcomes
• What makes an employee advocacy program effective rather than ad hoc
• Why employee experience plays a role in building brand authority 

Trend 3: Storytelling Is Being Recast as Strategic Infrastructure 

Storytelling appears throughout the agenda as a way to create connection and coherence in an AI‑saturated content environment. These sessions frame story‑first thinking as a strategic tool, one that helps brands stand out, stay recognizable and earn repeat attention over time. Spend time in these sessions if you’re interested in using story to move beyond output and toward lasting engagement. 

Session: Igniting the Fire: Human Storytelling in a World of Artificial Intelligence Noise 

Speaker: Tyler Farnsworth — Campfire 

Takeaways:  

• Why human storytelling still matters in environments saturated with AI‑generated content
• How storytelling helps brands cut through noise created by automation
• What differentiates human storytelling from AI‑generated output 

Session: The Story‑First Strategy: Transforming Content into Connection 

Speaker: Derek Hubbard — Independent (formerly Southwest Airlines) 

Takeaways: 

• How a story‑first approach changes how content connects with audiences
• Why connection is positioned as the goal of content strategy
• How storytelling can unify different content formats and channels 

Session: Using Episodic Storytelling to Build Cultural Movements that Drive Lasting Loyalty 

Speaker: Kim Stricker — Social Motto 

Takeaways: 

• How episodic storytelling encourages ongoing audience engagement
• Why cultural movements are framed as a goal of storytelling
• How loyalty and engagement can be tied to serialized content experiences