Content Marketing In 2026: Human Connection Meets Machine Discovery

If I’ve learned nothing else about marketers after attending Content Marketing World 2026, it’s that today, collectively, we’re no longer staring at this enormous AI wave bearing down on us and trying to figure out what it means. We’re all now getting up on our metaphorical surfboards and figuring out how to navigate and thrive in this new era of technology.

The conversations fell into two main threads: “How do we keep humanity an integral part of marketing?” and “How do we use technology to gain the attention of robots?” I think this divergence illustrates a widening gap between brand marketing and digital marketing and operations. For marketers, this gap actually can help us better understand our strategic roadmap.

Two Audiences, Different Needs

Brand marketing is all about gaining the attention and affinity of humans. We need people in these roles who have a high EQ, who can think outside of the proverbial box, push the boundaries of creativity, and deliver uniquely human experiences and conversations that excite and connect with the audience emotionally and intellectually. Brand is still important, and it’s what resonates with people in videos, virtual events, physical spaces, and 1:1 conversations.

What marketers are grappling with today is how to speak to AI and become a preferred voice, an authority, above competitors. How does a brand rise above the din generated by mass production to become a clear winner?

Among the mainstream marketing community, human marketers are using human solutions to solve their challenges with robots. But the AI “brain” is not built like ours. It’s actually better for finding solutions. It can process and retain millions of data points simultaneously, instead of the seven or so that our human brains can handle at one time. That is a massive disparity.

Authority Needs Evidence

While branding and marketing language are vital for connecting to humans, they’re essentially moot when communicating with AI, which runs on data. It needs specificity, clarity, and detail. It needs proof. To connect your brand with authority, AI needs data that is unique to your brand.

That’s what makes original research such a compelling asset these days. First, it does require humans to determine the right questions to ask. That requires someone with expertise to craft survey questions that go beyond just confirming biases and challenge the status quo. What arguments are happening in this space? What challenges present themselves? How can we dive into the tension that exists? If you go to AI for survey questions, it will just spit out the same questions it hands everyone else, because they are the same questions everyone else is asking. The data pool is vast, sure, but it doesn’t single out your brand’s expertise.

Once you have your data and can craft a compelling report, that report data goes out into the content ocean. The more you cite and repurpose that data, the more third parties pick it up. The more third parties pick it up, the more authority you drive. The more authority you drive, the higher your brand sits above the other recommendations in the so-called “dark funnel.”

With one survey and report, you expand your brand, increase your position through AEO and SEO, and develop a distinctive point of view to be shaped, perpetuated, and optimized over time. This, in turn, feeds the creativity of the brand team. Imagine if that team were no longer responsible for shaping the digital positioning, and free to focus on shaping the human-to-human connections. Not only would the value of our assets increase, but also the creative marketing experts would be freed to do what they do best.

Creating Reference-able Content

Solange Deschatres, Head of Marketing at Energize, speaks to Rachel Moore of the "But Wait, There's Moore" Podcast Network at Content Marketing World 2026 about what content formats perform in an AI world.

We already know that trusted content formats like whitepapers are performing the best among skeptical buying committees. Our Global 2026 State of Demand Generation Report found that 72% of B2B marketers cited those formats as most effective. Not only do these formats resonate with proof-biased, skeptical buyers, but the evidence they contain, when published in accessible, searchable forms, can inform the AI tools buyers use to seek information, evaluate vendors, and build shortlists.

Give Human Curiosity Somewhere to Go

There’s clear value in building content around something brands can uniquely contribute, and here’s how to start: Identify a question your buyers are struggling to answer and investigate it. Then, give your subject matter experts and creative teams the space to explore the findings. The result could deliver a compelling conversation between industry leaders, a useful framework for a buying committee, or a concept that gets people talking. The data provides a foundation, but it’s the human curiosity and expertise that give it legs.

A proprietary data foundation also provides a point of reference for brand and digital teams. A single finding can provide a clean source of information and a unique creative concept. Each team can bring its skills to using that knowledge, and both can help unveil the next question worth investigating, which keeps the content and data ecosystem, as well as the conversation with buyers, connected.

In this relatively new era of AI, I think we’re all challenged to be better marketers. What will you contribute that deserves someone’s attention? What can you explore about your market that hasn’t yet been explored? Technology has always been handing us new ways to develop and distribute our ideas. We have to come up with something that is worth putting into the ocean.