In the pod’s latest episode Joerg engages with Balazs Fejes, CEO & President of the global software engineering player EPAM Systems, for a tight 32-minute conversation on why AI is forcing organisations to fundamentally rethink leadership, operations, workforce design, and enterprise transformation.

One of Balazs’ strongest messages: AI is not transforming IT. It is transforming the business itself.

According to Balazs, AI initiatives stall when they remain isolated inside technology teams.

Successful transformation requires active involvement from CEOs, CFOs, and business leaders because AI changes how organizations operate—not just the tools they use.

Key Balazs insights from Balazs:

• AI transformation must be owned by the business, not just IT
• Leadership engagement determines whether AI scales or stalls
• Organizational culture remains the biggest barrier to adoption
• AI requires redesigning business processes, not automating existing ones
• Companies must move beyond pilots and begin enterprise-wide implementation
• Talent development is the foundation of successful AI transformation
• Change management matters just as much as technology

As CEO of EPAM Systems, Balazs’ has led one of the world’s largest engineering organizations through enterprise AI transformation while helping global companies redesign how they build, operate, and scale in the AI era.

If you’re navigating the AI transformation landscape (who is not in some form?), follow Joerg on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Digital Storm podcast and newsletter.

Key Highlights from Forrester’s 2026 Predictions

Forrester outlines five pivotal trends that will shape B2B operations this year, all centered on “The Race to Trust and Value.” Here’s a what they mean for marketing, sales, and product teams:

• Governed AI for Smarter Outcomes: While ungoverned generative AI could lead to significant costs, proactive governance opens doors to efficiency. With 75% of sales reps already using AI tools, empowering your team with AI literacy can prevent pitfalls and value through better decision-making.
• Human Expertise as a Competitive Edge: Buyers are craving deeper validation beyond AI—30% viewed genAI as meaningful in 2025, but human interactions with product experts top the list for trust. This shift highlights the power of upskilling your teams to deliver personalized insights, fostering stronger buyer relationships from early stages to post-sale success.
• Influencer Relations as Growth Levers: A huge 75% of B2B enterprises plan to boost budgets here. As buying networks expand, influencers like analysts and experts become key to building trust. Integrating them into your go-to-market (GTM) strategy—via social amplification and endorsements—can elevate proof-of-success over brand reputation, driving measurable impact.
• AI Agents Revolutionizing Payments: Expect AI agents in one-third of B2B payments, streamlining complex workflows like invoicing and trade credit. Vendors like Basware and Coupa are leading the charge, promising higher automation and efficiency—perfect for Australian firms dealing with diverse supply chains.
• Agent-Led Negotiations for Dynamic Deals: 20% of sellers will engage AI buyer agents in quotes, turning negotiations into data-driven, compliant opportunities. This evolution from static pricing to agile interfaces means suppliers with strong AI partners can protect margins while adapting to buyer demands.

These predictions underscore a market where clarity, accountability, and human-AI synergy win big. In volatile times, they’re your roadmap to turning rapid change into sustainable advantage.

Activation guidance

Ready to put Forrester’s insights into action? Here’s practical advice for B2B leaders in Tasmania and beyond:

1. Build AI Governance from the Ground Up: Democratize AI education—train teams to spot bad outputs and integrate governance into commercial apps. Start small: Audit your current tools and invest in “AI intelligence quotient” workshops to boost confidence and reduce risks.
2. Elevate Human Touchpoints: Prioritize product experts and customer success teams early in the buyer journey. Upskill them to handle complex queries, ensuring your offerings meet real needs. This not only validates AI insights but builds lasting trust.
3. Strategize Influencer Engagement: Shift from tactical PR to integrated GTM. Expand your signals to include influencer activity—track commentary and endorsements. Align budgets with performance metrics to see ROI in buyer discovery and conversions.
4. Embrace AI Agents in Workflows: For payments and negotiations, partner with agentic AI vendors. Assess your invoicing and procurement processes for automation potential, starting with pilot programs to scale efficiencies without disrupting operations.
5. Prepare for Buyer Evolution: Equip sales teams with AI agents for counteroffers, focusing on margin protection and compliance. Collaborate with in-house engineers or trusted partners to stay agile in a market where 61% of buyers use genAI for purchasing.

By prioritizing trust and value—as Forrester advises—you’ll position your business for growth in a buyer-empowered world.

For more on how digital marketing can amplify these strategies, from AI-optimized content to influencer campaigns, let’s chat. Connect via mitchellmackey.com.au/contact. Here’s to a prosperous, high-impact 2026!

Mitchell Mackey | Digital Marketing Strategist | Hobart, Tasmania Driving B2B Success in the AI Era

The YouTube channel Connecting the Dots reports that CARIAD was intended to future-proof the VW Group, but, so far, it has been an expensive disaster handicapped by institutional resistance.

In 2020 former CEO Herbert Diess established CARIAD with a significant budget, army of coders and a mandate to make VW Germany’s biggest tech company after SAP, with the software engineering smarts to digitize the core vehicle business and catch up to Tesla and the leading Chinese auto firms.

On October 14 2021 Diess even had Elon Musk appear as a “surprise guest” in an attempt to energise 200 of his most senior executives at a VW conference in Austria.

However, VW’s rigid culture and myriad internal divisions resulted in disappointing progress, duplicative efforts, financial losses, delayed vehicle launches and corporate embarrassment.

In large part because of CARIAD’s failures, Diess was exited by the VW Board in August 2022 . Porsche CEO Oliver Blume then had his remit extended to the entire group.

Blume claims to be committed to turning around CARIAD’s fortunes, refactoring the organisation’s objectives with fewer people and resources. Progress has reportedly been made, but the technical and financial challenges remain imposing.

In the Connecting the Dots YouTube video, a standout comment, from my personal perspective, is the remark by an anonymous CARIAD staffer that work-life balance was an excellent and that “weekends start at 11am on Fridays”.

However, it was also acknowledged that this is “not how you win” against Tesla and the Chinese competitors.

This was also my experience of German corporate culture during four years at Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz HQ in Stuttgart. The quickest way to make oneself unpopular was to schedule a Friday afternoon meeting.

The Marketoonist Tom Fishburne highlights this assertion. Fishburne, in his commentary on the cartoon, quotes the B2B Institute’s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo as saying the 95-5 rule means your marketing must ensure that your product or service is remembered when a buyer does activate.

Fishburne says, you can’t push B2B buyers down a funnel, but you can, to quote Dawes’ colleague Jenni Romaniuk, “catch buyers as they fall”.

Great marketing hinges on storytelling. It’s about connecting with your audience on an emotional level, weaving a tale that resonates with their aspirations and values. A product might catch the eye, but a compelling story captures the heart. Whether it’s the legacy of a sports icon or the journey of your brand, the story you tell transforms a simple sale into a memorable experience.

So, regardless of welling you are selling a physical product, a service or your mission for the team, ask yourself: what story am I telling? It’s the narrative that drives loyalty and leaves a lasting impression

For marketers, Agentforce offers significant capability enhancements beyond what can be achieved with separate Large Language Models such as ChatGTP and Grok.

Even if you don’t run Salesforce, all marketers should be understanding and embracing autonomous AI agents, digital workers, to streamline processes, enhance personalization, and drive efficiency.

AI agents, from Salesforce and other Martech companies, are now delivering real business benefits to marketers.

Campaign automation and optimization: Agentforce automates the full campaign lifecycle, from generating briefs and audience segments to creating content and end-to-end customer journeys. The promised payoff is faster campaign execution and higher ROI.

Genuine (finally) personalized engagement: by integrating with the Salesforce Customer 360 and Data Cloud products (for those who have their data act somewhat together, if not altogether), Agentforce agents access real-time data to deliver focused communications across email, SMS, web, and mobile channels. If executed effectively, this moves marketers closer to our long-sought after goal of genuinely personalised content that boosts engagement, conversion rates and loyalty.

24/7 customer interaction: Agentforce enables two-way, conversational marketing by embedding agents in channels like email, SMS, and web, transforming “do-not-reply” messages into dynamic interactions. Again, if the execution is superior, these agents operate around the clock, enhancing satisfaction and reducing churn.

Data insights: leveraging the Salesforce tools Data Cloud and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Agentforce agents pull insights from structured and unstructured data (e.g., PDFs, videos, CRM data) to inform marketing strategies. They analyze historical and real-time data to identify trends, predict customer behavior, and suggest actionable recommendations, such as targeting at-risk customers to increase loyalty. These capabilities have long been promised by the industry’s Martech vendors and now we are closer than ever before to realising them.

Cross functional collaboration: Agentforce integrates with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Slack, aligning marketing with sales and service teams. For instance, marketing agents can share campaign insights with sales teams to support upselling or cross-selling, ensuring a cohesive customer journey and maximizing revenue opportunities.

Time and cost savings: by automating repetitive tasks like content creation, segmentation, and performance monitoring, Agentforce frees marketers to focus on strategic initiatives. Salesforce claims Agentforce’s efficiency reduces operational costs while scaling marketing efforts.

Scalability and customization: Salesforce says its low-code Agent Builder allows marketers to customize prebuilt agents or create new ones tailored to specific goals, industries, or use cases using tools like Flows and Prompt Builder. This flexibility ensures Agentforce scales with business needs, from small teams to large companies

Enhanced security and compliance: Salesforce’s Einstein Trust Layer ensures data privacy with features like zero data retention, toxicity detection, and audit trails, allowing marketers to deploy AI confidently while adhering to security and regulatory policies.

Improved content performance: Agentforce agents can A/B test content to recommend the most effective versions and optimize marketing materials for better search rankings and engagement.

Event and appointment management: Agents automate event logistics, such as sending details, booking sessions, and conducting surveys, or schedule appointments based on customer history, streamlining personalized marketing efforts and improving customer experiences.

Real-world impact: Salesforce cites reference customers who assert that Agentforce is reducing customer inquiry response times by nearly 50% during peak seasons, demonstrating the ability to handle high-volume marketing tasks efficiently.

In summary, Agentforce has the potential to transform marketing by automating workflows, personalizing customer interactions, and providing actionable insights, all while ensuring scalability, security, and alignment with our broader business goals.

The challenge, as always with sophisticated, potentially complex marketing tech, is execution and for that we need not only smart AI but also smart, tech-literate marketers.

Too few, according to CX guru and the Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute Bruce Temkin.

Bruce has recently revisited the case he originally made back in 2010 for organisations to focus on the value customers derive. He argues for a concept called Point of Value to be recognised as the next logical step after the traditional Point of Sale or transaction stage.

According to Bruce sales without customer value are like a Ponzi scheme. They feel good in the moment, but the long-term outcome is likely to be negative.

“Too many organizations overly focus on selling their products and services, keeping a tight eye on short term metrics like sales targets,” Bruce writes, “but sales are not necessarily an indication of long-term success. What’s missing from the picture? Value!”

“If customers don’t get value from their purchases, then they are likely to return them, stop using them, not renew them, and tell others to stay away. Does that sound like a sustainable blueprint?!? Of course not. However, most organizations have a hard time breaking their addiction to sales numbers.”

Bruce challenges companies to compare and contrast their focus on sales targets versus the usually secondary effort they devote to delivering value.

“It’s time for organizations to shift their focus from sales to value! If we see an economic downturn, then the focus on value will become even more critical as companies are pushed to target their limited resources at retaining customers.

According to Bruce a POV mindset would mean the following:

• A clear measure of customer value that’s used as a critical KPI for the entire business, driving everything from sales commissions to bonuses for the product development teams.
• Support for customers to help them envision and articulate their POV and match their purchases accordingly.
• Cross-functional journey teams with responsibility for driving success during the engagement phase for key customer segments, and continuously monitoring any changes in how customers perceive the POV.
• Product organizations adopting a focus on “designing for value” by prioritizing features and enablement that streamlines the path to POV over new capabilities. Rather than considering feature adoption as a customer success function, product teams are responsible for ensuring that it is as easy as possible for customers to reach the POV.

As most professionals know, dashboards are visualization tools used to communicate actionable information. Governments do appear to have them, in various iterations, but are they being effectively utilized, dynamically reflecting real-time data and transparently available to their citizens?

Seeing our leaders, from the Victorian State Premier, Daniel Andrews, here in Australia, to the UK’s Boris Johnson and the United States’ Donald Trump, repeatedly stand at their podiums with their paper notes, and little else, I cannot help but wonder are these guys analogue leaders adrift in our digital age?

#dashboards