Back2Brave Podcast

• Introduction & Background Ash introduces Tom Rudnai, founder of Demand Genius. Tom shares his background in publishing and tech, and how his focus shifted to helping B2B brands navigate Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) rather than traditional search.
• – The Danger of Treating GEO Like SEO Tom explains why treating AI visibility as a traditional search problem is flawed. AI reflects a brand's entire digital footprint, yet marketing teams remain siloed in their specialisms, applying outdated SEO playbooks to a fundamentally different landscape.
• – AI Behaviour Across the B2B Funnel Discussion on how AI adapts to user intent. It acts as an educator during the awareness and consideration phases (retrieving external links 0% of the time) and only behaves like a traditional search engine providing citations at the final conversion stage.
• – The Power of 'Information Gain' To influence AI before the shortlist is built, brands must focus on differentiation rather than keyword optimisation. Tom breaks down Information Gain into three tiers: Interpretive (new narratives), Empirical (new data), and Conceptual (new paradigms).
• – Tackling Content Debt Tom highlights the risk of outdated historical content actively confusing AI models. He advises shifting the content team's focus from exclusively publishing new material to auditing and maintaining their existing digital estate to ensure a unified narrative.
• – Why Generic Prompt Tracking Fails in B2B Tom argues that standard AI prompt trackers strip out user context, which fails to reflect the complex, context-heavy queries used by actual B2B buyers. He advises that tracking must be segmented and highly specific to provide valuable data.
• – Quick-Fire Advice & Bravery Tom urges marketers to ignore "hacky" GEO solutions, ditch corporate jargon (like "I'm delighted to announce") on LinkedIn, and treat GEO as a cross-functional brand investment rather than a pure performance channel.

LINKS

Tom Rudnai (LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-rudnai-0539b6151/

Ash Lockett (LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashlockett/

Babel Website: https://babelpr.com/

Demand Genius Website: https://demand-genius.com/

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

B2Human Marketing, Brand Transformation, and Proving Value - with Sarah Roberts of Boldyn Networks

Ash Lockett hosts Babel’s Back to Brave podcast, welcoming guest, Sarah Roberts, a top marketing leader and former Global CMO of Boldyn Networks, discussing how to champion a B2Human mindset in B2B by focusing on customers’ ambitions, fears, and motivations, alongside their product requirements. Roberts explains, combining research, internal stakeholder input, and iterative customer dialogue to shape messaging, especially across M&A, where Boldyn unified multiple businesses under a single purpose (centered on an interconnected future). She describes bringing teams along on the rebrand journey, using AI-generated imagery to create a distinctive visual identity that also built credibility with engineers, while noting AI’s limits for repeatable style and originality. Roberts outlines the “grit work”, that marketing leaders can't avoid, as piloting foundational initiatives to build trust and gain internal advocates. She also details aligning marketing metrics to business strategy, by moving from vanity metrics to value metrics tied to true revenue outcomes.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:45 Sarah Roberts Background & Bio

02:04 What B2Human Means

04:48 Finding Human Insights

08:38 Listening and Iteration

09:43 Unifying Brands After M&A

12:56 Rebrand Change Management

17:09 Engineers and AI Credibility

22:12 Brand Versus Performance Trap

23:16 Grit Work and Pilots

27:16 Turning Naysayers Into Champions

30:32 Measuring Brand Value Metrics

35:42 Brand Metrics Beyond Campaigns

38:04 Dashboards to Business Alignment

39:21 Sales Marketing Metric Handoffs

42:16 AI Visual Identity Experiment

48:25 Originality Trust and Human Edge

53:26 Implementing AI Without Tool Sprawl

57:35 Quickfire Bravery Takeaways

01:01:23 Create Value Without Permission

01:03:38 Closing Thoughts and Thanks

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

Timestamps

0:00 - 1:21: Introduction to the podcast and guest Andrew White, detailing Sapio Research's focus on B2B and tech audience and brand research.

1:22 - 6:57: Ash introduces the Mental Availability Index and discusses the growing reliance on AI in B2B purchasing, highlighting the debate on whether brands should optimize for human memory or machine recommendation.

6:58 - 10:56: A breakdown of the research methodology, which included surveying 400 UK and US B2B tech decision-makers and auditing various LLMs to rank top brands.

11:08 - 15:05: Key findings on buyer habits: 87% of buyers still choose familiar vendors, but a staggering 32% of those choosing net-new vendors use AI tools for discovery.

15:06 - 22:33: Exploring the four brand quadrants: Titans, Algorithmic Disruptors,  Sleeping Giants, and The Untapped. Ash and Andrew discuss how broad product portfolios from larger brands can cause "algorithmic dilution".

22:34 - 27:53: Best practices for conducting brand research, including the importance of using problem-specific questions over general ones, and the ideal frequency for tracking brand changes.

27:54 - 32:14: Tips for creating unique thought-leadership research by finding the intersection between audience interest and brand attributes. Andrew explains why specific AI centric use-cases perform better than generic AI surveys.

32:15 - 39:58: Advice on securing robust sample sizes (recommending a minimum of 400 for B2B) and ensuring audience representation. Andrew highlights common pitfalls to avoid, such as self-serving or rushed questionnaires, while Ash advocates for including "joker questions" to uncover unknown data points.

39:59 - 44:11: Final actionable tips on being bold with research methodologies, such as using monetary data extrapolations and maturity models to properly educate audiences.

Read the full Mental Av-AI-lability Index HERE.

www.babelpr.com

www.sapioresearch.com

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

 In this episode, we cover:  

Links & Resources:

Read Babel’s Brave Benchmark AI Audit

Connect with Ash Lockett on LinkedIn

Connect with Alice Widger on LinkedIn

Connect with Kyle Rushton

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

Jenny Mowat, CEO of Babel, launches Babel’s 2026 Bravery series on the Digital Communicators Podcast, focused on what “bravery choices” mean for B2B brands. She is joined by Sophie Hodgson, Communications Director at Cisco, who discusses how bravery can range from simply getting out of bed to voicing the “elephant in the room” in meetings, emphasising “progress, not perfection.” Sophie shares a personal example of posting “my name is Sophie, and I have ambitions,” and reflects on how being a “yes person” can backfire when issues arise later. She outlines her career path from studying public relations at Bournemouth University, working in agencies, moving into tech PR, then going in-house at Cloudera during the pandemic, which helped her understand internal approval processes, before joining Cisco.

Sophie explains the importance and difficulty of saying no as a people pleaser, reframing no as the start of a new conversation, and highlights guidance from coach Alison O’Leary on not over-validating a refusal. She recounts advice from Susan Space at Cloudera about only apologising when necessary, and references Mel Robbins’ “Let Them” framework as a tool for letting go of draining pressures. On managing demands, she describes protecting her peace by delaying checking messages in the morning, inspired by CEO Charles Sweeney’s approach of aligning messages to daily goals, and notes the constant expectation of instant replies. On AI, Sophie argues increased automation will make communications “more human,” citing Petri (SVP and GM for Splunk EMEA), and says audiences increasingly value authentic, less-produced content. 

She describes AI as useful for research, summarising documents, identifying trends, and journalist targeting, while warning about bias, limitations, fact-checking, and confidentiality; she notes Cisco provides AI courses to build awareness. Sophie also explains how global comms should keep a consistent core message while adapting tone and storytelling to local contexts and political environments. Her advice for ambitious communicators includes being curious, reading the news, asking questions, shadowing other functions, trusting your gut, and “talking truth to power,” echoing Cisco’s CCO Steve’s message to be truth tellers.

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

In this episode, Babel's Senior Director, Paul Campbell, sits down with Nadine Hawkins, Editor at Capacity Media, to discuss Capacity Europe, the leading telecoms event in London focused on "Keeping the World Connected." They explore key themes and trends shaping the event, highlight the industry's top players in attendance, and offer insights on how to effectively engage with the media around this major gathering. Tune in for an inside look at what’s happening at one of the most important telecoms events of the year.

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.

According to Babel’s B2B Tech Comms Barometer, the single most influential channel for B2B tech buyers is analyst industry reports, with 58 per cent of IT decision-makers relying on them for influencing and making purchasing decisions. In this episode Babel director Simon Coughlin speaks with Philip Benton, Principal Fintech Analyst at Omdia. Philip talks about some of the hot topics he is focusing on, including open banking and digital identity, as well as what fintechs need to offer when speaking with analysts.

Back2Brave is the podcast from Babel: the agency for B2B tech brands ready to move faster. We combine 20 years of deep sector insight with integrated creative strategies to help clients navigate risk and standout in crowded markets. With Babel, it’s safe to be brave.

Visit us at www.babelpr.com.