The B2B Marketing Summit:
Recaps, Insights, and Reports
Explore panel recaps, photos, and download the Curated Insights reports from every session and breakout.
Hear from senior B2B marketing leaders across APAC on what is driving growth, where strategies are shifting, and what the best teams are doing differently.
- April 23, 2026
- Marina Bay Sands Singapore
What the Summit Delivered
The Summit was built around one goal: putting the right people in the right room.
What the Panels Covered
Every session closed with concrete actions senior B2B marketing leaders could take back to their teams the next morning.
The leaders on stage had a word for teams still treating APAC as a single market: behind. This panel reframed the entire conversation. APAC isn’t a problem to be solved by a global playbook, it’s an incubator. The place where lean, high-touch strategies get stress-tested before they go anywhere else in the world.
The sharpest insight of the session? The real barrier to scaling isn’t strategy or budget, it’s misaligned KPIs. When marketing and sales are measuring success differently, no amount of alignment workshops will fix it. The panel landed on a deceptively simple solution: unify the metrics, and let execution stay local. Teams that figured this out stopped fighting the tension between global and local, and started using it.
If your brand isn’t the answer ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini gives, your buyers think you don’t exist. That was the uncomfortable truth this panel refused to dance around. The panel put hard numbers to it: AI overviews are already cutting click-through rates by 30%, and only 38% of top-ten search results even make it into an AI response.
The marketers winning in this environment have stopped chasing traffic and started chasing something harder to build: authority. Generic content is invisible to AI. What gets cited is niche, specific, and deeply human. The new game isn’t ranking, it’s becoming the source these tools trust. The panel left attendees with a clear homework assignment: go look up your brand in those tools right now, and close the gap you find.
The buying journey has changed more in the last two years than in the decade before it, and the panel didn’t mince words about what that means for teams still optimising for MQLs. Buyers are educating themselves through LLMs long before they ever speak to sales. They’re going dark, and they’re going in groups.
The panel’s verdict landed hard: stop building funnels, start building utility. The brands cutting through are borrowing liberally from the B2C playbook, with raw content, real voices, and experiences that feel less like a pipeline and more like a relationship. To put it bluntly: it’s no longer about individual buyers, it’s about entire buying units. The brands ignoring that distinction are already behind.
“How many people wake up in the morning, and just think, I can’t wait to receive a white paper on financial technology from some random person I’ve never heard about? But if I engage with them through a sports sponsorship… build a relationship, then slowly, over time, transition that into something more of a B2B sale or marketing, that’s where you start to get that connection, and that’s where marketing gets interesting.” — Jon Stona, VP of Global Marketing at Airwallex
Nobody wakes up excited to receive a white paper from a stranger. A panelist said it better than anyone: the connection only comes when you’ve built a relationship first. This panel was the most energising of the day, and the most confronting for anyone still running broadcast-first marketing.
The number that stopped the room: the combined reach of a company’s employees is 20x what the brand handle can generate on its own. Twenty times. The question isn’t whether to activate employee voices. It’s whether the brand is willing to give up enough control to let those voices be real. The algorithm rewards individuality, and sameness is invisible. The human voice is the one thing audiences still can’t scroll past.
“The way that marketing has developed… you almost need that individualism, that variety, that creativity, to be recognized by search or by the machine… That individualism is really key.” — James Baldwin, Head of Influence at Ogilvy
The hype says AI will do everything. The leaders in this panel disagreed, and they had the experience to back it up. AI gives you speed, but it does not give you judgment. In a world drowning in AI-generated content, the brands standing out are the ones that kept a human in the loop.
To put it plainly: the output is only as good as what you feed it. Most teams haven’t built the governance dimensions yet for AI, and shared frameworks for data quality and human review should be the foundation. The marketers ahead of the curve aren’t the ones using AI the most. The ones ahead are those using it deliberately, treating it as infrastructure while fiercely protecting creativity as a human function.
“My firm stance is that you cannot rely on AI to do everything for you… It’s about what content you put in. You can make it more personalized and tailored. Making sure that what you feed into it fully reflects what you’re trying to achieve.” — Marina Snegirjova, Head of Field & Partner Marketing Asia & India at Zendesk
As Seen On
In collaboration with media partners shaping and amplifying strategic dialogue
The Experts on Stage
Real insights from the people leading creative and marketing at some of the world’s top brands
Clare Robson
Head of Marketing APAC at OneTrust
Denisha Ramanandi
Senior Marketing Manager at LinkedIn
Ramon Chow
Marketing Director, Asia Pacific at Cloudera
Sameer Thakkar
Vice President, Marketing – APAC & Emerging EMEA at SAS
Alexander de Leon
Group VP Marketing & Growth at PropertyGuru
Constance Tan
Product Marketer at Ahrefs
Zoheb Gafoor
General Manager at Havas
Nipun Agarwal
Director of Marketing Strategy at Zscaler
Nicholas Kontopoulos
Vice President, Marketing at Twilio
Jon Stona
Vice President, Global Marketing at Airwallex
Viktoriya Chamata
Customer Advocacy Marketing Director, APJ at ServiceNow
James Baldwin
Head of Influence, APAC at Ogilvy
Darren Thang
Chief Marketing Officer at Sunrate
Adam Bawany
Head of Asia, Enterprise and Corporate Sales at Sprout Social
Fiona Chong
Global Creative Director at TikTok
Karen Ko
Senior Director Marketing APJ at SailPoint
Nicholas Braman
Marketing Director APJ at Kyriba
Marina Snegirjov
Head of Field & Partner Marketing, Asia and India at Zendesk
Who Was in the Room
Attendees brought over 2,000 years of collective marketing experience to the table. Directors, VPs, and C-suite executives from global powerhouses across technology, financial services, and professional services.
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