The Human Algorithm

At the Boston stop on the Spotlight on the Road tour, a room full of B2B marketing and AR leaders discovered that the new rules of influence run straight through the oldest rule of all.

There's a twist at the center of the AI influence story. There’s plenty of valid conversations about answer engines, AEO, prompt engineering, and the mechanics of how LLMs surface brands and make recommendations.

But what doesn’t get as much attention as warranted is the humanity of it all. What AI actually “trusts” most in choosing what answers to surface is earned, human-derived authority. Customer voices. Expert opinions. Community consensus. The analysts who cover a space. The peers who've lived the problem.

The robots, in other words, turn to humans. And the vendors who understand that fact aren't scrambling to reverse-engineer machine logic. They're doing something harder and more durable: earning the trust of people.

That was the animating idea at Spotlight on the Road in Boston. It surfaced in every session, including:

• A framework for building community that outlasts any algorithm.
• A playbook for earned visibility.
• A candid discussion about the future of analysts and research firms. 
• A new lens for why earning trust is harder than it sounds — and what to do about it.

By the end of the morning, the room had worked its way to a conclusion that sounds simple but isn't: Influence is a human endeavor. Always has been. The AI era just raised the stakes.

The data behind the urgency is familiar by now, but worth repeating:

• 94 percent of B2B buyers now leverage generative AI somewhere in their buying journey (Forrester, Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025).
• 80 percent of buyers ultimately choose the vendor they contact first (6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report).

Buyers arrive at your door more informed, more decisive, and more certain than ever before. Or they don't arrive at all. Thus, the new reality of influence means:

• You don't guide the buyer journey anymore. You inherit it. 
• You're winning or losing before the conversation starts. 
• The sources AI trusts are the same sources buyers trust. Earn those.

The speakers assembled for Spotlight on the Road: Boston brought research, candor, and hard-won experience to bear on what earning those sources actually requires.

Four Spheres of Influence

Anjali Yakkundi leads marketing and enablement at Movable Ink, a marketing technology company focused on personalization across email and mobile channels. It's a role that draws on a career arc few can match: years as a Forrester analyst, followed by a rise through senior product marketing and strategy roles at Aprimo, where she ultimately reported directly to the CPO/CTO. By the time she arrived at Movable Ink, she'd been on every side of the influence equation: the analyst deciding which vendors matter, the product marketer building the case for why they do, and now the marketing leader responsible for making it all work in market. That depth gave her session an extra authority.

Her core argument: Influence in B2B has fractured into four distinct spheres, and most organizations are misallocating their attention across them. The spheres are customers and peers, partners, independent voices, and analyst firms; with AI as a synthesizer of the four spheres. AI is pulling from all of those channels simultaneously. Understanding that changes where you invest.

The sphere she spent the most time on, and the one she argued is most underinvested, is community. Not peer reviews, which she acknowledged most organizations know how to approach, but the deeper, harder work of building genuine communities around customer advocates. At Movable Ink, that means three tiers of customer advisory boards: one for hands-on-keyboard users, one for VP-level economic buyers, and one for C-suite executives. Each creates a two-way relationship: the company gets honest, unfiltered input; customers get visibility, access, and the sense of being part of something larger than a vendor relationship.

What makes this visible in the market, she noted, isn't just the community itself — it's the physical and cultural manifestations of it. Movable Ink's brand color is magenta. Customers show up to their events in it. On social media, people post about it. That kind of organic amplification is both hard to manufacture and, increasingly, exactly what AI picks up on.

Her other observations were equally practical: 

• Partners are an underutilized influence channel that most companies treat as a sales relationship rather than a marketing one 
• Independent voices are rising in importance and are far more accessible than most teams realize (message them on LinkedIn — they respond)
• The traditional analyst gatekeeping role has shifted. Buyers are building their shortlists first, then calling analysts to validate. The MQ still matters. But it's a backstop now, not a starting gun.

Earning Your Spot in the Answer

John Bruno is the Global Head of Manufacturing at Creatio, a CRM platform for manufacturers and distributors, and is among the most credentialed people to take the stage at any stop in this tour. A former Forrester analys and five-year VP of Strategy at PROS — where he advanced the company to analyst leadership positions across Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and G2 — Bruno has spent 15 years at the intersection of B2B technology, go-to-market strategy, and influence. He joined Creatio in February with a specific mandate: solve an awareness problem for a company that, by any objective measure, shouldn't have one. His session was about how.

He opened with a quick demonstration of the gap. Despite Creatio being a company of nearly 1,000 people with a $1.2 billion valuation, few in the room had heard of them. That's an awareness problem — and it's exactly the kind of problem AI-era earned media can solve, provided you approach it systematically.

His tactical framework had four elements:

1. Owning a narrative — not just having messaging, but developing a genuine point of view about what's happening in your market and what it means, updated on a regular cadence. 
2. Targeting the right tier-one coverage, with "tier one" defined not as the largest outlets but as the most authoritative sources for your specific buyer. For Creatio's manufacturing and distribution audience, that means publications those buyers actually read — outlets like AVIE and Supply Chain Rank, not the Wall Street Journal. 
3. Activating executive thought leadership: building a bench of voices inside the company who can carry the point of view into interviews, contributed content, and earned media at scale.
4. Optimizing for conversation, not keywords. Answer engines are built around questions. If your content leads with the answer and defines its terms clearly, you're writing for the way AI actually works. If you're burying the lead inside polished narrative, you're writing for a reader who no longer exists.

He closed with something worth holding onto: in February, Creatio wasn't appearing on LLM-generated lists of top CRM vendors for manufacturers. By the time of the Boston event, they were number three. The mechanism was consistent, targeted earned content over a four-month period. That's the timeline. That's the work.

The Research Firms in the Room

The analyst panel in Boston — Bob Parker of IDC, Dan O'Brien of Futurum, and Brian Partridge of 451 Research/S&P Global — was candid in a way that panels rarely are. Three senior leaders from major research firms, in a room full of their clients and potential clients, talking honestly about what's changing in their own industry.

Dan O'Brien framed the survival question directly: the firms that make it will be the ones that reorganize around two things:

• Proprietary data 
• Engaged audience

The rest of the panel built on that foundation from their own vantage points. The era of the gated PDF as the primary unit of value is ending. Several in the panel said their firms are actively moving more content to the free side of the paywall, not reluctantly but strategically, because ungated content is what AI can read and surface. Influence lives in the places AI can reach.

What's replacing the PDF model, they argued, is something more continuous and more embedded. Clients increasingly want research delivered not as a document but as a data pipeline — living intelligence that updates as market conditions change, accessible through MCP integrations and AI tools, surfaced in the flow of work rather than downloaded and shelved. The ROI study that used to be a deliverable is becoming a model that updates with every new data point.

On the question of what the analyst role actually is now, the panel converged around a word that's come up in Boston and at previous stops on this tour: validator. Buyers are building their shortlists from other sources first — peer reviews, community consensus, AI-generated rankings — and then turning to analysts to verify their thinking. The gatekeeper role is largely gone. The trusted expert role isn't. If anything, it's more important, because it operates later in a buying journey where the stakes of getting it wrong are higher.

The most forward-looking exchange came around what the analyst of 2030 looks like. Less time generating content, more time in front of clients. Less PDF writing, more tailored, real-time output on demand. More practitioner backgrounds. And a personal brand — the panel agreed that encouraging analysts to build their own visible expertise in public is now a strategic asset, not a risk.

The Problem Isn't Logic. It's Emotion.

Megan Burns closed the program, and she saved the most important idea for last. A customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and former Forrester analyst, Megan has spent twenty years trying to understand why smart people with good arguments so often fail to move skeptics. Her answer, refined into a framework she calls Compassionate Clarity, is that most of us are solving the wrong problem.

When we encounter resistance, the instinct is to bring more data. Build a stronger argument. Add more slides. But skepticism, she argued, isn't primarily a logical phenomenon, it's an emotional one. Skeptics aren't trying to be difficult. They're trying to be careful. Doubt is a defense mechanism, and when it gets triggered, the emotional response actively shapes what the person can even hear. More logic, in that state, doesn't help. It often makes things worse.

The emotional triggers she named will be familiar to anyone who has tried to change minds in a large organization: the fear of being manipulated, the fear of being embarrassed, and what she described as the fear of being "unworked" — the unsettling sense that the principles and strategies you've relied on have stopped working and you're not sure what replaces them. When any of those get triggered, the brain narrows its focus to the perceived threat and stops processing the rest of the argument.

Her four-part checklist — curious, constructive, candid, consistent — is a framework for designing messages and conversations that reduce the likelihood of triggering those responses in the first place. Being curious means mapping the full human and organizational context of the person you're trying to reach before you walk in the room. Being constructive means framing the conversation around a shared situation rather than an indictment of what the other person has done. Being candid means acknowledging limitations and risks proactively, which paradoxically increases credibility rather than undermining it. And being consistent means following up, giving people time to absorb, and building trust through repetition rather than expecting a single conversation to move the needle.

The application to AR and influence work was direct: the room was full of people who regularly need to convince skeptical executives, shift entrenched budgets, and bring internal stakeholders along on strategies that don't have clean ROI formulas yet. Compassionate Clarity isn't a soft skill. It's the mechanism through which earned trust actually earns something.

Closing Thoughts

Every stop on this tour has added something to the argument. San Francisco named the gap. New York sharpened the measurement imperative. Seattle showed what integrated, outcome-driven programs look like in practice. Boston arrived at the why underneath all of it. The reason earned trust is harder to build than it should be, even when everyone in the room agrees it matters, is that humans are involved. Humans who are skeptical by design, triggered by perceived threat, and more likely to hear your argument clearly when they feel safe than when they feel challenged.

The robots trust what humans trust. Earning human trust requires understanding humans. That's the whole game, and Megan named it cleanly.

Each speaker built toward that conclusion from a different direction:

• Anjali mapped the five spheres of influence and showed why community — the most human of them — is the most underinvested, and what a serious community program actually looks like in practice.
• John Bruno demonstrated that earned visibility isn't mysterious — it's a system of narrative ownership, niche publication strategy, and content built for the questions buyers are actually asking.
• Bob, Dan, and Brian showed the analyst firms in an unusually candid moment of self-reckoning: adapting their models toward proprietary data, ungated content, and the validator role that the AI era has handed them.
• Megan made the case that none of the above works without understanding the emotional architecture of skepticism — and gave the room a practical framework for navigating it.

My challenge to the room at the start of the day was to think about how to be more than a result. How to be the answer. The brands that win in this era won't just appear in AI-generated responses. They'll be the ones those responses are built around, because analysts cover them, customers trust them, communities reference them, and the market has decided they're worth knowing. That kind of influence isn't manufactured. It's earned. And it runs straight through the humans who grant it.

Spotlight on the Road 2026

San Francisco: April 1 — recap here

New York City: May 6 — recap here 

Seattle: May 13 — recap here 

Boston: June 3 

Chicago: June 24 – register here 

Austin: June 26 – register here

Spotlight Summit 2026

Influence + Advocacy + Visibility = Trust 

September 14–16 | Kansas City, Missouri 

Registration is open!