Rewiring strategy with AI: how Anna Harris is reshaping B2B at the core.

At The B2B Collective in London, three forward-thinking marketing leaders shared how their teams are rewriting the B2B playbook. Alex Collins, Head of Marketing at Wex, unpacked the new reality of mental and digital availability—how marketers must engage buyers across unpredictable, non-linear paths that go far beyond traditional work hours. Judit Szabo, Group Head of Demand Generation at Endava, urged the audience to see ABM not as a fixed campaign tactic but as an experience-led continuum throughout the customer lifecycle. 

And then there was Anna Harris, SVP of Global Strategy at Ledger Bennett, who took the conversation deep into the future—showing how AI is fundamentally altering how marketing agencies think, plan, and operate. Her message was clear: AI isn’t just a tool for execution. It’s becoming a strategic co-pilot, reshaping the very foundation of research, team collaboration, and decision-making frameworks. 

This piece takes a deep dive into Anna’s perspective—and how she and her team are making AI a core part of their strategic engine. 

The shift: from linear research to living intelligence. 

For decades, market research followed a predictable rhythm: commission a report, wait for delivery, pore over findings, then build strategies that (hopefully) remain relevant by the time they launch. But in a world where market conditions shift weekly, and audience behaviors shift even faster, that model simply doesn’t hold. 

At Ledger Bennett, Anna and her team have embraced a radically different approach. By embedding a secure, proprietary instance of a large language model (LLM) into their strategic workflow, they’ve collapsed timelines from months to minutes. Audience insights, segmentation analysis, competitor benchmarking—what once required entire research teams and budget-heavy studies can now be explored in real time, with dynamic data inputs and constantly updating outputs. 

This AI-first approach doesn’t just make research faster; it makes it deeper. Strategists can now simulate scenarios instantly: “What if we reposition this offer to digital transformation leaders in healthcare?” “What messaging resonates most with CFOs navigating AI investment?” These synthetic personas and test environments allow teams to A/B/C test ideas across multiple segments—well before media spend is even considered. 

The result? More refined targeting. Better hypothesis validation. And faster iteration across the entire campaign lifecycle. 

Governance as a growth enabler. 

But with speed comes responsibility. Anna is clear-eyed about the risks of poorly governed AI systems. Without clear frameworks, AI can introduce biases, hallucinate false information, and, if mishandled, undermine brand credibility. 

That’s why Ledger Bennett has built a structured governance framework around its AI deployment. Every model query runs within a classified data system, where inputs and outputs are logged, monitored, and reviewed. Access to sensitive data is tightly controlled, and all prompts can be traced through audit trails to ensure accountability. 

A key innovation? Quarterly “AI Ethics Checkpoints.” These sessions bring together strategists, legal teams, creatives, and data scientists to align on evolving best practices, compliance needs, and model behaviors. It’s not just about avoiding missteps—it’s about actively designing AI systems that are ethical by design and adaptive to change. 

In this way, AI isn’t treated like a magic wand—it’s governed like a business-critical partner. 

The new team dynamics: human + AI collaboration. 

Anna’s vision of AI is refreshingly human-centric. For her, AI is not a black box that spits out answers—it’s a new kind of teammate, one that thrives on clarity, context, and good direction. 

To fully activate this potential, Ledger Bennett has invested in upskilling across the organization. Teams are trained in prompt-engineering, model evaluation, and data literacy—not just the technical how-tos, but the strategic why. The goal is to ensure that everyone, from creatives to data analysts, can speak the same AI-native language. 

Equally important is workspace integration: Anna has helped design a model where strategists, creatives, and data scientists don’t work in silos. They collaborate in shared digital environments, where real-time insight generation can feed directly into concepting, copywriting, and campaign design. The output: campaigns that are more cohesive, context-aware, and built on a continuous loop of feedback and refinement. 

What’s most compelling is the mindset shift this drives. Teams are encouraged to think of AI not as something that replaces their roles—but as something that expands their impact. With the right brief, the “AI teammate” can surface patterns humans miss, automate what slows them down, and help scale experimentation at a level never before possible. 

The future is hybrid: technology + human judgement. 

Anna’s bet is bold, but grounded. She believes the agencies that will lead the next era of B2B are those that invest equally in AI infrastructure and in human governance. It’s not about using AI for the sake of efficiency alone—it’s about pairing speed with strategic judgment, scale with creativity, and automation with trust. 

In her eyes, AI isn’t replacing the art of strategy—it’s making that art more informed, responsive, and future-ready. 

The message to the broader marketing world is this: AI-powered strategy isn’t just the future. It’s already happening. The question is—are you building the systems, teams, and mindsets to make the most of it?