Companies can't prove their AI pays off. A product marketing leader says that's a communication gap

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - June 28, 2026 - PRLog -- Companies are shipping AI features faster than they can explain them, and a widening gap between what AI promises and what buyers believe is the result. McKinsey's "State of AI in 2025" report found that 64% of companies say AI enables innovation, but only 39% report an actual impact on EBIT.

Zack Alami, a B2B product marketing leader based in Copenhagen, reads that gap as a communication problem, not a technology one.

"When every product claims to be AI-powered, the words stop meaning anything," said Alami. "Buyers face a higher trust barrier, a longer evaluation, and differentiation they can't see. The companies that win aren't shipping the most AI. They're the ones whose customers actually understand and trust what the AI does for them."

The pattern is familiar to him. When products were simpler, companies could get by with weak positioning, generic messaging, and feature lists in place of outcomes. AI removed that margin for error. Every B2B product now advertises intelligent insights, smart automation, and predictive analytics, and to a buyer they all sound the same. The trust barrier rises, the evaluation drags, and the difference that should win the deal stays invisible.

That, Alami argues, is why more companies are hiring product marketers. The role exists to close exactly this gap: to understand what customers actually value rather than what was built, to translate AI capabilities into context that sets a product apart, and to build trust when buyers cannot judge quality on their own.

"AI that delivers real value but can't prove it before the sale is an expensive way to lose deals," Alami said. "Closing that gap is positioning work, not engineering work. It is the difference between a company that ships AI and one whose customers can say why it matters."

Alami writes about this and other go-to-market challenges on his blog. His analysis and frameworks for B2B SaaS leaders are collected in the product marketing insights on the PMM Playbook (https://zackalami.com/pmm-playbook/).

About Zack Alami

Zack Alami is a B2B product marketing leader based in Copenhagen, Denmark, with ten years of experience in positioning, launches, and go-to-market strategy across EMEA, the US, APAC, and LATAM. He writes about product marketing, positioning, and how buyers decide, drawing on psychology and systems thinking. His work is published on the PMM Playbook at zackalami.com.

Source: McKinsey, "The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation."

Media contact: Zack Alami, zackalami.com/#contact