Update: Out from the Shadows… AI's Impact on Marketing and BD

When I first wrote about AI enabling M&BD teams to come “out from the shadows” in February this year the argument felt a little future-gazing. The premise was that technology wouldn’t replace marketers and BD professionals but would clear away the noise around them (directories, manual research, endless capability statements, etc.) and give them the space to operate at the strategic altitude they have always been capable of reaching.

Reading Clementine Doyle’s recent piece in The Lawyer, “Futureproofing the Marketing and BD Team” inspired me to revisit this argument. It’s striking how quickly the market has moved. AI is increasingly embedded in the mindset of how firms operate, and there is growing agreement that, through this ‘noise reduction’, M&BD teams can step into areas of increasing strategic importance.

That opportunity comes with a delicate balancing act however. As automation increases, M&BD teams are expected to take on broader remits: deeper sector engagement, greater influence on pricing, CRM, lateral integration, and commercial storytelling. This is exciting and reflects what many M&BD leaders have been advocating for years.

The challenge is that expectations are changing faster than firms can implement the AI needed to create the capacity to meet them. The debate once centred on whether AI would enables us to do the same with fewer resources, or more with the same resources. Increasingly, the expectation is simply: do more.

So what do we do? I think two things will help.

Firstly, the relationship between internal technology teams and M&BD functions must become stronger than ever. Firms need a practical framework that enables the trial, adoption (or rejection), and rollout of BD-focused AI tools at pace. Current procurement and approval cycles are simply too slow to deliver the impact required. This is partly because of point two.

For the most part (there are some exceptions) firms are focused on deploying legal technology for lawyers advising clients. This means internal tech teams are already stretched keeping up with demand and so additional tools for M&BD almost seem like nice to haves. While understandable, as client work sits at the sharp end of revenue generation, there may be an opportunity cost.

If firms are serious about unlocking AI’s potential, it needs to be applied holistically across the business, not just one channel. What if AI helped to free up significant partner/associate time across other areas of the business that is not pure ‘lawyering’, such as billing, invoicing, conflicts, drafting pitch content, writing articles…directories(!) etc? Harnessing AI to make changes to processes and workflows adjacent to core legal work will create more capacity for legal review, insight, and judgement. Lawyers could spend more time with clients adding the insight and judgement i.e. the value that’s going to be the biggest differentiator in the future market…food for thought?

For M&BD teams, the shining light in all of this is that the more AI accelerates work, the more human capability becomes the differentiator - judgement, curiosity, influence, and the ability to shape a narrative and guide stakeholders. Technology can’t do that, but it does expose who can.

What matters now for M&BD leaders, is ensuring that any capacity created through AI is not filled with more ‘stuff’ (as often happens), but with the thinking, creativity, and differentiation that teams rarely have enough time for.

If the original argument was that AI would pull M&BD out from the shadows, the update is simple: it has. The function is stepping into a far more ambitious role than many expected—and one it is more than capable of delivering.

If you’re a CMO, Marketing Director, or BD Director, perhaps we should talk. Through conversations with firms about their go-to-market strategies, I’ve developed a series of workshops designed to help marketing and BD teams prepare for exactly this future.

Original article: Out from the shadows…AI's impact on marketing and BD.