B2B Marketing Leaders Gather in Singapore to Address AI's Impact on Visibility and Brand Strategy
Marketing executives from across the Asia-Pacific region convened at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore on April 23 to discuss how B2B organizations are adapting to an AI-driven market. The B2B Marketing Summit marked the 10th anniversary of The Ortus Club, the agency that organized the event.
Over the past decade, The Ortus Club expanded from hosting local roundtables to organizing executive events for major technology and SaaS companies including Canva, OpenAI, Twilio, Freshworks, Stripe, PayPal, and NVIDIA.
CMOs Are Moving Into Revenue Roles
Jess Circi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The Ortus Club, opened the summit by framing the core challenges facing B2B marketers: AI-driven visibility, the demand for human-centric branding, and complex customer journeys.
"Marketing is no longer just 'support' for sales," Circi said. "More and more CMOs are turning into Chief Revenue Officers and finally grabbing those seats on the board."
The room included nearly 2,000 years of collective marketing experience, according to organizers.
AI Overviews Are Changing How Buyers Find Information
Constance Tan from Ahrefs presented data on how AI is reshaping search behavior. AI overviews reduce click-through rates by about 30 percent, and only 38 percent of top ten search results appear in AI answers.
"The rules are not exactly the same," Tan said. "Brand and video mentions are becoming more important as sources for the AI machine."
Nicholas Kontopoulos from Twilio described a shift in how buying committees research solutions. "They are now going dark because they are going in by the LLM," he said, referring to large language models. "It is no longer just individual buyers, but the buying units involved in making a decision."
Data Quality Determines AI Output
Karen Ko from SailPoint emphasized the need for human oversight in AI systems. "The output of AI is only as good as the data you feed it-garbage in, garbage out," Ko said. "We must maintain human review and shared governance."
For marketers, this means the quality of training data directly affects campaign performance and customer targeting accuracy.
Networking Remains Central to B2B Marketing
The summit included several interactive networking elements. Attendees used icebreaker cards throughout the venue, while a cupcake cart sponsored by Twilio maintained energy between sessions.
VIP attendees participated in an unrecorded, private three-course lunch that allowed executives to discuss panel topics without the pressure of a recording.
Event Content Creation Is Becoming a Core Campaign Tool
The Ortus Club used the summit as a live showcase for its expansion into event content creation and podcast curation. The organization brought its CMO Chats podcast to the event, with staff conducting interviews with marketing leaders on-site.
This reflects broader demand among B2B organizations to capture insights from executive events and pair them with tailored campaign content.
Curated summaries and discussion breakdowns from the summit are available at https://b2b-singapore.ortusclub.com/.
For marketing professionals looking to deepen their understanding of AI's role in B2B strategy, resources on AI for Marketing and the AI Learning Path for CMOs offer structured guidance on campaign optimization and digital transformation.
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