Watching the Super Bowl this year, one thing stood out immediately: AI owned the commercial breaks. According to the New York Times, 15 of the 66 ads featured artificial intelligence in some way. The message was impossible to miss.
AI is here, it’s funded, and it’s being pushed into nearly every corner of business.
There is no denying what AI in business has already accomplished. Like the internet and smartphones before it, it is reshaping how work gets done. Teams can move faster. They can analyze more data. They can automate repetitive tasks that used to eat up valuable hours in the day. Entire workflows that once required multiple people can now be supported by software working in seconds.
At Altaworx, especially within our marketing and operations teams, we use AI every day. It helps us format content, accelerate research, build reports, and repurpose information across channels. Used correctly, AI is a force multiplier. It removes friction. It gives talented people their time back. And that time can be reinvested into the work that truly matters.
But this is where many businesses misunderstand the role of AI.
They confuse speed with trust.
AI can draft a message. It can summarize a meeting. It can pull insights from massive amounts of data and present them in a clean, digestible format. It can even recommend what to say next. What it cannot do is build real relationships. It cannot read the room. It cannot understand the subtle history between two organizations or the professional risk someone takes when choosing a new partner.
And in B2B environments, those details are often what determine who wins.
Most of us have felt this shift personally. You read a post online and immediately think, “That was written by AI.” It is polished. It is technically correct...and it is completely forgettable. There is no perspective behind it. No lived experience. No evidence that the person or company truly understands the weight of the challenge being discussed.
The result is content everywhere, but confidence nowhere.
When buyers are making serious decisions, especially ones that affect revenue, operations, or customer experience, they are not simply purchasing a product or a platform. They are choosing who they believe will show up when things get hard. They are choosing who will answer the phone. They are choosing who understands what is at stake.
They are buying confidence.
They are buying reliability.
They are buying a partner.
AI can help communicate those ideas, but it cannot manufacture them.
Across the market, organizations are beginning to recognize this reality. In fact, as access to AI tools becomes more common, authenticity becomes more valuable. When everyone can generate a whitepaper, the advantage goes to the company that has actually lived the story inside it. When anyone can publish a thought leadership article, the winner is the team that has real operators, real engineers, and real customers behind the words.
This is why you are seeing a renewed investment in narrative, customer proof, and subject matter expertise. Businesses understand that technology may open the door, but credibility is what invites someone to walk through it.
AI absolutely has a permanent seat at the table. It should. The efficiency gains are too significant to ignore. Companies that refuse to adopt it will fall behind competitors who can move faster and operate leaner.
But the organization that truly leads will be the ones that know where automation ends and humanity begins.
They will use AI to eliminate manual effort, surface insights, and simplify complexity. At the same time, they will empower their people to build relationships, provide reassurance, and deliver the kind of experience that earns long-term trust.
Because when the decision is big, the timeline is tight, and the pressure is real, buyers still turn to people.
AI may power the process, but people power the decision.