ABM and the empathy paradox

As AI floods B2B marketing with more content than ever, senior ABM practitioners gathered to ask an uncomfortable question: are we becoming less human just as the technology promises to make us more effective?

On a bright morning in London, a group of senior account-based marketing leaders took their seats around a table with a shared admission hanging in the air: everyone was using AI, nobody was quite sure they were using it right, and almost nobody felt closer to their customers as a result.

The gathering, hosted by Ada Create, brought together ABM practitioners and leaders from some of the world’s largest B2B technology, professional services and financial organisations. The session operated under Chatham House rules — candid by design, attribution-free by agreement. Into this room, Ada Create introduced Dr Paul Marsden: a chartered psychologist specialising in positive psychology, empathy and the science of human flourishing, who has spent years studying how technology shapes the way we think, feel and connect.

The conversation that followed was part therapy session, part masterclass — and entirely timely.

Where the room was starting from

Before Paul said a word, the group went around the table introducing themselves and describing how they were using AI in their ABM programmes. The picture that emerged was consistent: AI was being deployed primarily for account intelligence, account selection, insight generation and — increasingly — content creation and personalisation.

Some organisations were racing ahead with agentic workflows. Others were hemmed in by regulation, data governance and cautious procurement teams. One participant described using custom AI models to reduce dependence on expensive SaaS seat licences — what she cheerfully called the “SaaS apocalypse.” Another noted that her company wasn’t officially permitted to use external LLMs, but that AI was already quietly embedded in the platforms they’d already bought. “We say we’re not using AI,” she said. “But it’s in a lot of the platforms. You just don’t know.”

What nobody mentioned, unprompted, was empathy.

The empathy deficit

Dr Marsden opened with a statistic that landed quietly but didn’t leave: 80% of people working in business believe they sell the best product in their category. Ask their customers the same question and only 8% agree. He calls it the 88 rule.

“Empathy is your ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. And one really simple way to boost your empathy quotient — because that exists, and it’s arguably as important as intelligence quotient — is to simply look at the person next to you and note the colour of their eyes.”

It sounds almost absurdly simple. But Marsden’s point was grounded in clinical research: physicians who make eye contact with patients automatically shift into a more empathic mode. They begin to see the other person as a person, not an object. The same dynamic applies, he argued, across every sales meeting, every client interaction, every ABM campaign.

Empathy, he explained, operates on two levels. Cognitive empathy is the intellectual ability to take another’s perspective — useful, but also the tool of the manipulator. Affective empathy is something different: the involuntary mirroring of another’s emotional state. When you see someone wince, you wince. You feel what they feel. And critically, this kind of empathy only happens in person.

“When you see somebody on a screen, you don’t get that emotional contagion effect — this emotional mirroring. And when you don’t get that, it’s difficult to know what it feels like to be the other person.”

This, Marsden suggested, is where the AI efficiency drive is quietly doing damage. The more time we spend producing content via screens, the less emotional intelligence we develop — and the less we actually understand the humans we’re trying to reach.

The ARC of happiness — and why your clients need it too

Marsden introduced what he called the ARC of happiness: three core psychological needs that underpin wellbeing and performance, drawn from decades of validated research in positive psychology.

Autonomy: the sense that you are in control of your own decisions, not at the mercy of your device, your IT department or your procurement process. In a period of rapid technological change, clients are often feeling the opposite — overwhelmed, constrained, out of control.

Relatedness: the deep human need to be genuinely connected to other people. Social isolation is, as Marsden put it, a loneliness crisis — and coming to an event like this one, making the effort to be physically present with others, is itself an act of psychological health.

Competence: the sense that you are growing, achieving, building capability. AI used well — as a coach, a tutor, a thinking partner — builds competence. AI used as a substitute for thinking erodes it.

“There’s a difference between cognitive surrender — handing your mind over to AI — and cognitive engagement, using it to actually think harder. When students use AI as a coach rather than a ghostwriter, they perform better even when the AI is taken away.”

The implication for ABM practitioners was direct: if you want to win clients and keep them, consider which of their ARC needs your marketing is actually serving — and which it might be undermining.

AI in the loop, not human in the loop

One of the session’s most quoted moments came when Marsden reframed a phrase that has become almost a mantra in responsible AI adoption.

“Everyone says you’ve got to have a human in the loop. But do you really want to be a human in an AI loop? Have an AI in the human loop. That’s the way to think about it. Be team human first.”

The distinction matters. When humans are inserted into AI workflows as approvers or safety checks, they become subordinate to the machine’s logic. When AI is instead a tool that humans direct — one that handles the cognitive drudgery of screen work so people can focus on relationships, judgement and context — the equation flips.

This led to a practical and rather striking suggestion: use AI to role-play your clients before you meet them. Ada Create’s own platform, built on Marsden’s psychological frameworks, does exactly this — creating synthetic simulations of target personas, drawing on personality science, cultural dimensions and publicly available behavioural data, so that marketers can test their messaging against a psychologically realistic version of the person they’re trying to reach.

“You put your presentation in,” explained one of Ada Create’s founders, “and it gives you a completely different perspective. Nine times out of ten, even though I’ve used it a thousand times, I still find myself guilty of thinking my product’s great — and then it plays it back and shows me what the client is really thinking.”

Marsden added a further dimension: the idea of a “System 3 mind.” Psychologists describe human cognition as operating across two systems — System 1, the fast, automatic, intuitive mind; and System 2, the slower, deliberate, reflective one. AI, he proposed, should be thought of as a third system: an extended mind running in the background, handling routine cognitive tasks and surfacing insights only when they’re genuinely needed. The goal is not to replace thinking, but to free up the thinking that matters.

The sea squirt, and what your clients’ brains are really for

Marsden’s most memorable image of the session was borrowed from marine biology. The sea squirt, a tiny ocean creature, spends its early life floating through the sea searching for a rock to call home. Once it finds one and settles, it does something remarkable: it eats its own brain. It no longer needs it.

The lesson for ABM marketers was pointed. The human brain exists to solve problems. It is not a passive receptacle for brand messages or a vessel for white papers. Every piece of content you produce should therefore start not with your product but with a genuine problem your client is trying to solve. If there is no problem, there is no reason to engage.

“Rather than sending a PDF, why not create something that actually helps solve a real problem they’re having right now? The opportunity is to stop with the written world and create something genuinely useful.”

The irreplaceable value of being in the room

A thread that ran through the entire session was the question of where real empathy actually comes from. The group’s consensus, reached organically, was that it comes from physical presence — from meetings, from events, from being on-site with clients in their own environment and seeing what their world actually looks like.

This is not a sentimental argument. Several participants noted that events, for all their cost and complexity, consistently appeared in their data as one of the top three tactics contributing to closed business. One described running sixty events per quarter and seeing the pipeline numbers to justify every one.

And yet, many of those same practitioners reported internal pressure to do fewer events and more digital. Marsden’s framework offered a counter-argument grounded in psychology rather than preference: affective empathy, the kind that builds genuine trust and long-term relationships, cannot be replicated through a screen. The emotional mirroring that happens when two people share a physical space is not available on a video call.

A function built for this moment

The session closed with a thought from one of the participants that captured something the whole room had been circling: ABM, as a discipline, is inherently more empathetic than most forms of marketing. It is built around understanding specific people, in specific organisations, at specific moments. It is designed, by its nature, to treat customers as individuals rather than segments.

The challenge — and the opportunity — is to use AI in a way that deepens that empathy rather than industrialising it away. To free up the time that currently goes into generating content, and invest it instead in being with customers, listening to them, and building the kind of understanding that no algorithm can replicate.

“Empathy is a human superpower. It’s linked to longevity, to compassion, to long relationships. And you can train it — it’s like a muscle. The more meetings you come to like this, and the less screen time you have, the more empathic you become.”

As Dr Marsden put it at the close, with characteristic directness: “I came to an ABM event and a psychologist said we just need to be more human.”

Turns out, that’s still the most radical thing you can do.