I didn’t expect the first CIM Midlands Social of the year to end up being one of my favourite evenings in a long time. But here we are.
24 June. One of the hottest days of June. Jake Third and Beth Sharma from Hallam in the room, talking about AI, agents and the future of search.
The room was full anyway, That tells you everything.
As CIM Midlands Vice Chair, evenings like this are the ones I show up for – not because I have to, but because they’re genuinely useful. Not a polished presentation of things you could have read in a newsletter. A proper conversation with people who are actually doing the work, asking the questions nobody’s quite brave enough to ask in other rooms, and leaving with something you can use the next morning.
This one delivered all of that. And it threw in a surprise.
The guest nobody was expecting
Before Jake had even started, the room was already buzzing – because Susan Hallam, Hallam’s former owner, had flown in from Florida specifically to watch him speak.
She also couldn’t resist the occasional heckle from the sidelines.
Honestly? It was perfect. That’s exactly the kind of warmth and community that makes these evenings what they are. It set the tone before the session had even properly begun.
What Jake covered
Jake opened by laying out two shifts he thinks every marketer needs to be tracking right now.
The first is external. How buyers search has fundamentally changed. 94% of B2B buyers are now using large language models as part of their discovery process. That’s not something coming down the line. That’s already happening.
The second is internal. How AI is changing the way marketing teams actually function – and what that means for the people doing the work day to day.
He talked us through Hallam’s “brains and bots” approach – built on the principle that AI should be invisible to the end audience – and shared how the agency spent six months building a centralised data warehouse to turn scattered CRM and marketing data into plain-English answers about what’s actually driving revenue.
The bit that got everyone talking was on SEO.
Jake called it “the great decoupling.” Demand hasn’t disappeared. Clicks have. As platforms answer queries directly within the search interface, the metrics we’ve been measuring for years are becoming less reliable as indicators of real performance.
His advice: think AI search first, search engine second. And shift your measurement away from traffic and MQLs towards revenue, share of search and share of voice.
Simple. Uncomfortable. Necessary.
What Beth added
Beth took the people side of the conversation – and for me, this was just as valuable as the strategy piece.
She shared an honest account of an early misstep rolling out new AI tools to a team. The lesson that came from it was straightforward: start with people, not platforms. Make the technology genuinely easier before you ask anyone to change how they work.
That landed with the room. Because most of us aren’t just thinking about AI as a marketing tool – we’re thinking about how to bring our teams with us. And that’s a completely different challenge.
It’s also, if I’m honest, exactly what the Your People side of our work at You and Your Story is about. The technology is rarely the hard part. The people are.
What I took away
The through-line of the whole evening was this: AI is changing the execution. It’s not changing the fundamentals.
Understanding people. Communicating clearly. Building trust over time. That’s still the job.
The marketers who will thrive are the ones using AI to do more of what they’re already good at – not the ones handing over the thinking entirely.
I went home more energised about this work than I have been in a while. Which, after a hot Tuesday evening in Nottingham, is saying something.
What’s coming next
This was just the first CIM Midlands Social of 2026. We’re back on 15 July in Birmingham, where Pete Morgan – founder of MonkeyPants Productions, and the person behind Marketing Ninja Unleashed – will be talking about podcasting as a marketing tool and how it fits into a modern digital marketing strategy.
If Nottingham is anything to go by, book early.
👉 Book your space here: https://www.cim.co.uk/events/cim-socials-birmingham-july-2026/
Thank you to everyone who came along, asked brilliant questions and made the first social of the year such a good evening. See you in Birmingham.
