At the Master B2B Mindshare Summit, Andy Hoar asked that exact question across multiple roundtable discussions with senior B2B e-commerce executives. The result: 18 different answers, but one clear winner. Data and AI stood out far above everything else, and for a surprising reason: they’re really the same investment.
In this episode of Friday 15, Brian Beck and Andy Hoar break down exactly where B2B leaders are putting their next dollar, why data is the most undervalued asset in B2B, and how to think about prioritization when everything feels urgent.
FAQ
Q: Where are B2B executives investing their next dollar? A: At the Master B2B Mindshare Summit, Andy Hoar collected 18 distinct answers from roundtable discussions — but they clustered into three clear tiers. Data and AI stood out far above everything else as the top investment priority. The second tier included site search, PIM, ad spend, paid search, analytics, and Amazon. The long tail included e-commerce platforms, hiring, customer experience, ROI measurement, channels, and more. In a LinkedIn community poll, product data tied for first at 25% (alongside analytics tools), while a full third of respondents said “something else” — reflecting just how broad and fragmented the priority landscape is.
Q: Why are data and AI really the same investment? A: As Andy Hoar observed, “You can’t have the AI without the data and you can’t really do anything with the data without the AI.” The two cross-pollinate: data is the foundation AI needs to function, and increasingly AI is being used to clean and organize the data that feeds it. Rather than viewing them as separate line items, the hosts argue this is essentially one answer: your data strategy. Brian Beck emphasized that data is one of only two things a company truly owns that can’t be replicated — the other being intellectual property. Everything else is fungible.
Q: Why is bad data worse than no data? A: Hoar made a provocative argument: “Bad data is almost worse than no data because bad data will cost you time and effort to make it into something. You’re almost better off not having any data at all because if you put the bad data in there, it’s going to create bad results that you’re just going to have to go back and fix later.” This is especially acute in B2B, where product data complexity — technical specifications, compatibility requirements, application data — far exceeds B2C.
Q: What was the #1 business priority from the Master B2B regional roundtables? A: ROI of digital investments was the most frequently cited business priority across regional roundtable discussions throughout the prior year. This was followed by analytics and reporting (which enables ROI measurement), customer experience (both digital and cross-channel), product data, and then technology implementation. The hosts noted that the community is thinking about business outcomes first rather than technology for technology’s sake — a sign of maturity in B2B digital.
Q: Why do B2B companies only use 40% of their e-commerce platform? A: At the Mindshare Summit, discussions revealed that companies estimated they use only about 40% of their existing e-commerce platform capabilities. Some companies even purchase separate point solutions for functionality that already exists in their current platform — without realizing they’ve already paid for it. This is why “e-commerce platform improvements” was the top technology investment priority: it’s increasingly about enhancing and maximizing existing platforms rather than the traditional rip-and-replace approach.
Q: How should B2B leaders think about the trade-off between big and small investments? A: Brian Beck cited economist Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” With a fixed budget, leaders must choose between large foundational investments (like data taxonomy restructuring or platform replatforming) that are hard to show immediate ROI on, versus smaller tactical projects (like product recommendation engines or checkout improvements) that can demonstrate direct ROI quickly. Beck’s personal approach was to pursue smaller projects with clear, measurable ROI to build credibility and momentum, while making the case for larger strategic investments that require C-suite alignment.
Q: Why is attribution such a critical unlock? A: Attribution — proving that digital investments influenced offline sales — remains one of B2B’s oldest unsolved problems. Hoar argued it may be the single most important enabler of future investment: “If you can draw that connection, then it might unlock the ability to invest in a lot of different areas. But if you can’t spend any money on attribution, you can’t prove it.” Many B2B companies spend money on digital but can’t connect it to outcomes because purchases happen through sales reps, phone orders, or branch visits.
Q: What happened with OpenAI, Sora, and the $122 billion raise? A: OpenAI shut down Sora because it was consuming massive compute resources — losing roughly $1 million per day — while generating only $2 million in revenue with 500,000 users. By contrast, ChatGPT generated $8 billion in revenue with a billion weekly active users. Days after killing Sora, OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation. Hoar connected the timing: investors needed assurance that the money would be spent on the “super app” race — AI systems that run your entire desktop and automate your life — rather than on compute-intensive video generation. Meanwhile, Oracle announced layoffs of 18-20% of its workforce, joining Meta in redirecting human capital spending toward AI infrastructure.
Transcript:
Brian Beck
Welcome everybody to Friday 15 with Master B2B. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy, my partner in our Master B2B community and thought leadership series. Welcome Andy to another Friday 15 and another exciting episode and great conversation.
Andy Hoar
Yeah, good to be here. We got some good breaking news and a really good topic as usual.
Breaking News: The Real Reason OpenAI Killed Sora
Brian Beck
Last week we saw and talked about OpenAI discontinuing Sora, the video app that caused all kinds of ripples in production, marketing, and media circles. You had people stopping their production studio builds because all of a sudden OpenAI and Sora was going to take on this brand new capability and make it easier and faster to produce high-quality video. And then all of a sudden they shut it down.
Andy Hoar
Yeah. And don’t forget Disney was going to invest a billion dollars in it, too. But it turns out the real reason behind all this was that Sora was sucking way too much compute power. They had a dashboard internally and they were monitoring where all the compute power was going — was it going to ChatGPT? Was it going to Sora? And they were losing a million dollars a day because the vast majority of the compute power was getting consumed by Sora, which was only generating $2 million in revenue with 500,000 users.
To put that in perspective, ChatGPT is reputed to have generated $8 billion in revenue last year. Billion with a B. A billion weekly active users. So when you did the math — Sora is doing $2 million with 500,000 users, ChatGPT is doing $8 billion with a billion weekly active users — I think Sam Altman had to look at the numbers and despite what he probably wanted to do, he had to say, look, there’s a sense of reality coming here.
OpenAI’s $122 Billion Raise and the Super App Race
Brian Beck
And then of course yesterday they announced they raised — what was it, Andy? $122 billion?
Andy Hoar
Yeah. With a valuation of $852 billion.
Brian Beck
That’s insane. So, what the heck are they going to do with all this money?
Andy Hoar
That’s actually not an open question — no pun intended. We all know that OpenAI has been in a horse race. ChatGPT versus all the other guys out there, and they’re kind of popping ahead — Gemini, one of them pops ahead with a new release and then it’s overtaken by the next one.
Well, Claude actually overtook them recently by almost every measure, and Claude is really invested in what has come to be known as a “super app” — an app that essentially runs your desktop. There was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal called “The Trillion Dollar Race to Automate Our Entire Lives.” It’s about using AI to run your life — artificial intelligent systems that work autonomously on a user’s computer to carry out a variety of tasks including writing software, analyzing data, etc.
This is what we’ve all been waiting for. People are doing this right now with Claude, where they basically wake up in the morning and Claude tells them what to do, how to do it, when to do it. Within the next three to five years, this is going to become common practice. And this is the game that OpenAI has been sitting on the sidelines from, and they’ve got to get back in. That’s what they’re going to spend their $122 billion on.
I think they had to reassure investors because the timing was amazing — they dropped Sora and a couple days later they closed the funding round. They had to assure investors that the hundred billion dollars was going to be spent on the super app and not on Sora.
Oracle, Meta, and the AI Spending Shift
Andy Hoar
There was another tangent to this story this week. We told the story a couple weeks ago about how Meta is rumored to be laying off 20% of its workforce. Well, this week Oracle also announced they’re laying off the equivalent of about 18 to 20% of their workforce.
If you add up Meta laying off its workforce, Oracle doing it, and now OpenAI dropping Sora and refocusing on the super app — what’s happening here is clear. The jury’s still out about whether AI is going to replace humans. But the jury is not out about whether companies are going to spend all their money on AI instead of on humans, because that’s exactly what’s going on right now.
Brian Beck
These are the tech companies and they’re at the leading edge of this stuff. Just like Amazon’s done layoffs. I’m curious — in some future Friday 15, we need to maybe pull somebody in from one of those companies and ask them, is the function and the role still being filled, or are these companies using this as an excuse to eliminate some inefficiency?
Andy Hoar
There’s a slightly different notion here, too. These other companies like Microsoft and Amazon can spend cash flow to finance the AI and data center buildout. Oracle is actually using debt to do it. Because they’re not using cash flow and they’re using debt, they’ve got to make payments. And apparently their debt ratings have gone down pretty significantly because of this. So reality is now set in.
If you’ve got tons of cash and a large channel, then AI means one thing to you. But if you want to build out data centers and you’re using debt like Oracle’s doing, they don’t have an unlimited pool of money. And OpenAI just put $122 billion in the bank — that seems unlimited, but it’s probably not unlimited either.
Where Are You Spending Your Next Dollar?
Brian Beck
Our topic today comes from our Mindshare Summit recently at the University of Chicago. We had table-topic discussions about different issues that B2B executives are facing. One of the questions you facilitated, Andy, was: where are you spending your next dollar? This is a burning question for B2B execs because resources are limited — and time and bandwidth even more importantly are limited. So where do you put your next dollar in transforming your business digitally? What kinds of things came up at the table?
Andy Hoar
What struck me about this was the number of answers. We’d sit at the table and ask this question — it’s such a simple question, not controversial, pretty easy to answer. People spend the whole day prioritizing things. So, where are you spending your next dollar? What’s the highest priority?
I have 18 listed here on screen.
Brian Beck
Wow. 18.
Andy Hoar
There was a long tail of answers, but it did cluster. In random order: data, AI, site search, PIM, ad spend, Amazon, e-commerce platforms, hiring, customer experience, determining ROI, channels, and more.
But what I was doing at the same time was clustering them. When people would answer the same thing, I would make note of that. And here’s what we learned: data and AI stood out far and above everybody else. Then the next cohort was site search, PIM, ad spend, paid search, analytics, and Amazon. Then the long tail of e-commerce platform and several others.
What was interesting is that those two things — data and AI — kind of cross-multiply. They cross-pollinate. You can’t have the AI without the data and you can’t really do anything with the data without the AI. So that’s really in effect one answer.
Data as the Most Undervalued Asset
Brian Beck
It’s essentially your data strategy. And I’ve said this for years — there’s intellectual property that companies possess, but next to that and perhaps in addition to that, I personally think that what separates companies, what differentiates them from one another, is their data. Because that’s what they own.
You can take everything else away. The people, the facilities — these things are all fungible. They’re transferable. You can build, borrow, buy, or steal all that stuff. But the two things you cannot do that to are intellectual property, which you have patents on, and your data. Your data is completely unique to you. And how many times have you and I had conversations with people where they saw the data as a cost center, a problem to deal with?
Andy Hoar
I think companies don’t recognize it as much as they should as an asset that needs to be invested in.
Brian Beck
It’s foundational. I’m even thinking about this as it relates to our own business here at Master B2B. What’s the most valuable thing we have? It’s the knowledge of what people are investing in, what they’re doing, what their priorities are, how they’re looking at their careers. All the things we learn running this large community of B2B e-commerce executives.
Andy Hoar
Without data, there’s nothing. And what we’ve known for ages has now kind of hit a lot of B2B companies square between the noses: if your data is in poor condition, it’s useless.
Bad data is almost worse than no data because bad data will cost you time and effort to make it into something. You’re almost better off — I say this flippantly — not having any data at all, because if you put the bad data in there, it’s going to create bad results that you’re just going to have to go back and fix later. Massive efforts are underway in B2B, and I think it’s worse in B2B than B2C for a whole variety of reasons.
Brian Beck
It’s complexity, right? The complexity of the applications, the amount of data, the technical aspects of the products, the compatibility, everything else.
The Long Tail and the Trade-Off Problem
Brian Beck
What’s fascinating to me is this long tail. Practically speaking, you’ve got this big issue of data, and then AI — whatever AI is on its own — but then you’ve got all these long-tail issues. One of the things I used to struggle with as a VP of e-commerce was: okay, do I implement a new product recommendation engine? Little point solutions? Do I improve my checkout? Do I deploy something that’s going to help me in the store or with the sales team? How do I make decisions around this stuff?
Andy Hoar
You’ve got a dollar. You have to make a decision where to spend it. Some people were saying, “I’ll spend 80 cents on this and 20 cents on that.” Realistically, that’s probably what ends up happening. But you can also dilute it to the point where you’re spending a penny on something that’s not moving the needle. You’ve got to make some tough calls.
Without data, there’s nothing. And AI is an enabler. Now, you need the data to make AI work, but often now we’re seeing that AI is actually enabling the data to enable the AI.
Brian Beck
It seems like AI is getting baked into things. “Investing in AI” as its own line item isn’t necessarily the right framing — you invest in AI to do something specific. But a lot of those small things can end up being more important than the big things. I could take on five or ten smaller incremental efforts and it’ll have as much impact as one large initiative.
But data is so foundational it has to be invested in. And what I always struggled with on those big investments was not only knowing they were important, but getting the alignment of the rest of the organization. The CFO has to agree. And the CFO is going to say, “Well, what’s the ROI?” Defining the ROI of a big project can be challenging.
Andy Hoar
One of the things I would point out as a pretty necessary long-tail issue is attribution. Let’s say you do all this stuff, but you can’t prove the value of it because you can’t attribute it to any success. You spent money online and there were sales that took place offline, but you have no idea if one influenced the other. This is an age-old problem in B2B and frankly B2C. If you can draw that connection, it might unlock the ability to invest in a lot of different areas. But if you can’t spend any money on attribution, you can’t prove it.
Brian Beck
That’s right. That’s why I would do some of those smaller projects — because I could show direct ROI. A smaller project, still substantial change — like introducing a new product recommendation engine, which is a smaller investment of time and resources versus a PIM implementation or a replatforming or a massive data taxonomy effort.
Thomas Sowell, the economist, said it well: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” And I have to totally agree with that. When I was a VP of e-commerce, I would have a defined bucket of capital dollars every year that I could spend on improving the digital experience. And I had to allocate that. Sometimes I would make a case for a discrete larger investment like an e-commerce platform, but it is very much about trade-offs.
Business Priorities from the Regional Roundtables
Andy Hoar
The question is where do you start? Last year we spent the whole year doing regional roundtables, and we would ask people their priorities. The number one business priority we kept hearing over and over again was ROI of digital investments.
Brian Beck
That’s the same thing I’ve been saying. The ability to quantify the ROI points to the other priorities. Think about analytics and reporting, which came in at number three — that’s a way to measure your ROI. You need to have the analytics in place. Customer experience — both digital and cross-channel — was also one of the top priorities. Number four was product data. And then below all of that was technology, new and existing technologies.
The community has it right. They’re thinking first about the business aspects versus just rolling out technology for technology’s sake.
Andy Hoar
And by the way, the data thing is an interesting ROI question. What’s the ROI of data? How do you establish that, and what’s good enough? I remember years ago looking at research to figure out how many pictures, how extensive should the product description be for a PDP page. It’s not clear, although there is some research to suggest there’s an optimal number of pictures and an optimal length of a product description. If you have two pictures, that’s too few. If you have 75, that’s too many. I think the research suggested five to seven was optimal, but it depends on the product. If you’re at two, it behooves you to add more. If you’re at seven, the marginal value of adding content goes down at that point.
Technology Investment Priorities
Brian Beck
We also asked about technology investments specifically, and the results were fascinating. Improvements and replatforming of the e-commerce platform was number one. Search was number two. Analytics was three. Personalization was four. Creative and design improvements to the digital customer experience was number five.
The fact that number one is platform continues to drive home the practicality. And this isn’t just replatforming — this is improving the existing platform experience.
Andy Hoar
That’s the key here. In the past, investing in the e-commerce platform usually meant rip and replace. That was a synonym for it. That is not the case as much anymore. Now it’s about enhancing the platform using what you’ve already paid for. We did a discussion about that at the summit where companies estimated they only use about 40% of their e-commerce platform. And in fact, some companies go out and buy point solutions thinking they don’t have that capability, not realizing it was actually not only available but pretty good — and they’ve already paid for it.
Community Poll Results
Brian Beck
We asked our LinkedIn community this week: B2B e-commerce execs, where are you putting your next dollar? We had four choices — that’s what LinkedIn limits you to. Our fourth choice, “something other than what we listed,” was the one that won at 33%. Cleaning up product data got 25%. Analytics tools and resources got 25%. Site search got 17%. But a full third said, “Hey, you guys — it’s something else, nothing here.”
I think that speaks to the long tail.
Andy Hoar
It does. We had 18 answers, and the “other” is the rest of the world — those 15 other answers where a bunch of people would probably answer 4 or 5 or 6% to each. So not surprised — it fits with what we’ve learned. This is the broader community, but it’s very similar: product data was the number one answer other than “other.”
It’s very clear that this is where people are investing, but there’s going to be a day of reckoning around this — are we getting bang for the buck on the money we’re spending to enhance our data? The CFO is going to hold us to that.
Brian Beck
Well, all right, folks. Thanks for joining today. We will see you next week on our next Friday 15.
