It never went away. But the basis of competition is shifting, so the smartest companies are leaning in. More and more AI companies are hiring for brand. Not junior content hires — senior humans to own narrative, editorial judgment, exec social, and category POV. Here’s the pattern and some examples you can share if your CEO doesn’t get it.\

This post struck a chord.

I’ve long believed that “brand” is a big deal in B2B. And with AI dominating the conversation, it’s nice to see evidence that human creativity is in high demand.

I’m not talking about logo design. I mean earning trust, expressing a market narrative, taking a clear POV, exec social, community, and the bigger dynamic that Elena Verna explains beautifully in “Growth is Now a Trust Problem”

I’m now seeing evidence that the smartest AI companies see this as an increasingly important part of their GTM strategy. And they want humans to drive it.

These aren’t junior content/social hires. And they aren’t Lemkin’s AI VP. These are senior humans hired to own narrative, editorial judgment, exec social, creative direction, and category POV.

Look at who’s actually being hired, and the comp attached to it.

LangChain — Head of Narratives (SF, ~$210–230K). Wants a “media company operator” to “define the themes and narratives LangChain is hitting” — literally, what LangChain should be known for.

Vanta — VP of Brand (Remote, $275–315K). The JD says it out loud: “This is not a brand stewardship role. It is a brand creation role.” Brand that “drives both perception and pipeline.”

Cohere — Head of Brand Marketing (Toronto). The cleanest thesis statement I’ve read in a JD: “The product is technical. The buyer is technical. The category is loud. None of that exempts us from being a brand people actually want to be near.”

Harvey — Head of Content & Strategy (SF, $208–282K). Build “the authoritative voice in legal AI” — thought leadership and category narrative that “fuels the pipeline for GTM.”

Anthropic — Head of Copy & Content, Creative Studio (NYC/SF, $320–400K). “Shape how the world understands and relates to AI through the power of language.”

OpenAI — Executive Programs Narrative Lead (SF, $266–295K). Turn strategy into “bespoke C-suite narratives” — storytelling as a senior, named function.

Replit — Brand & Creative Strategy Lead ($200–235K)

Narrative is a thing you own. Editorial moved from content ops to executive strategy. Brand is tied to pipeline and category. AI shows up only as an accelerant — the human value is taste, POV, and judgment.

Brand building isn’t a new idea in B2B. Many of the best B2B companies have focused on brand. A few that I’ve learned from:

Tableau (SaaS 1.0). Elissa Fink is one of my favorite CMOs. She scaled marketing as Tableau went from $5M to $1B in ARR. Her core lesson is the one most teams still get wrong: brand vs. demand is a false choice — every demand touch is a brand touch. I went deep on this with her on this podcast: The “CMO Whisperer” — scaling Tableau $5M to $1B, and rethinking brand vs. demand.

Gong (SaaS 2.0). Udi Ledergor & Devin Reed were amazing brand builders. Udi was Gong’s first marketer and ran what he calls “courageous marketing” — the conviction that different is better than better — to will the Revenue Intelligence category into existence. Devin built the content engine that made Gong unavoidable in every seller’s feed. Udi walked me through the whole playbook here: Gong’s legendary CMO on courageous marketing and story-audience fit.

Drift (SaaS 2.0). I watched this one up close after Drift acquired Siftrock and I joined. As Drift’s CMO, Dave Gerhardt made founder-led and video content the distribution engine, and helped name the Conversational Marketing category before the product fully existed. The founders (David Cancel and Elias Torres) built this into the DNA from day 1.

Clay (right now). Brand and community sit at the core of how Clay grows. Mishti joined Clay as one of its earliest employees to “write about cold email,” and turned editorial into a category-defining function — defining the GTM engineer career path and launching Clay’s own journalism arm, 2500 Degrees. And Bruno Estrella’s team built an executive content engine that generated ~6M LinkedIn impressions last quarter — mapping each buyer persona to a Clay exec, adding 80,000 new followers, and making executive posting a top-line awareness goal with a dedicated leader behind it.

They see that the basis of competition is shifting.

AI makes average marketing nearly free. As the cost of production moves toward zero, AI slop floods the market, and buyers become insanely hard to reach and engage.

Marketers have a higher bar to really stand out. Brand is part of the answer – great stories, unique POVs, creative engagement. This takes humans.

Dave Gerhardt highlighted the bigger shift clearly: “I don’t think people realize how big of a shift is happening in marketing because of AI… marketing teams that rely on MQLs and content downloads are in big trouble. What works today is all going to be zero-click.”

When execution commoditizes, the value migrates to what AI can’t fake.

There’s even a mechanical version of this. In AI search, brand coherence is becoming a literal ranking signal — models synthesize every artifact you put out and surface the brands whose story is consistent. What you’re known for is increasingly what gets cited.

If they’re still measuring marketing only by MQLs and expecting to outbound their way to $1B, they’re missing it. The companies setting the pace are treating brand as a core focus in the GTM strategy.

Slack them the JDs in this post.

Who else is building a stand-out B2B brand right now? LMK who else I should study.