Gemini learns your life: personal intelligence arrives
Andy opened with Google’s rollout of Personal Intelligence, a beta feature that connects Gemini to Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search to deliver answers tailored to a person’s actual life rather than generic web results. Instead of surfacing a list of options, the tool can pull a user’s travel dates from an email, cross-reference a calendar, and return a direct answer, or even locate a car’s registration due date from a photo of a license plate.
Andy tried it on his own inbox, asking when his company’s summit was and whether he had a hotel booked. Gemini found and cited the relevant email for the date, then correctly reported that no hotel booking existed, after searching across his multiple Gmail accounts and, it appeared, Google Drive.
I can just ask a question and get an answer, as opposed to a bunch of options.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
The hosts connected this to a broader shift already underway in search and answer engines: fewer link lists, more direct, sourced answers pulled from a person’s own context.
Setting up the topic: AI on both sides of hiring
The main topic was whether AI has rewritten the hiring process in B2B, a question with implications for both job seekers and the people doing the hiring. Brian laid out the numbers. LinkedIn found that 93% of recruiters plan to increase their use of AI in hiring in 2026, so adoption on the recruiting side is well underway. At the same time, hiring leaders are getting buried in applications, since candidates are using AI to polish resumes and distribute them broadly, which makes every resume look similarly strong. Resume Now’s research backs this up: 66% of job seekers believe AI has significantly intensified job competition by making it easier for more people to find and apply to the same roles, faster.
Brian also tied the conversation back to Andy’s own past prediction. Years ago, Andy wrote about “the death of the B2B salesman,” framed around whether ecommerce would replace field and inside sales teams. Brian’s read is that the prediction may be coming true, just not in the way Andy originally framed it. Goldman Sachs has estimated that roughly 300 million jobs globally are exposed to AI-driven automation, sales-related roles among them, though the pace and shape of that shift remains a live debate among economists.
When both sides use AI, truth becomes the casualty
Andy’s concern is less about volume and more about honesty. Job seekers are using AI not just to find openings but, in some cases, to embellish their qualifications, while companies use AI to widen their net on the recruiting side. His worry is that the intangibles that predict a good hire, leadership, grit, determination, are exactly what a resume screen cannot see and what AI-polished applications can obscure further.
Truth and trust matter a lot more now, probably, than they ever did.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
He pointed to a more extreme version of the problem: candidates using AI live during interviews, with a phone or hidden screen feeding them real-time answers to behavioral questions. The hosts framed this as the natural end point of an arms race where both sides increasingly rely on AI to compete with each other.
A hiring leader’s view: Kevin Stone, Motion Industries
The guest was Kevin Stone, Senior Vice President at Motion Industries, an industrial solutions distributor with roughly eight billion dollars in revenue, concentrated in North America and Australasia. Stone’s remit spans technology, procurement, ecommerce, and on-site solutions, and he is currently running two executive searches, including a vice president of ecommerce role, as Motion looks to grow that side of the business at an outsized rate.
Asked how to capture the intangibles AI cannot measure, Stone was direct that there is no technology substitute for grit, persistence, and perseverance. His method leans on an older discipline: conversation. He asks candidates to walk through their background, their mentors, and specifically how they applied lessons from past failures to later successes.
There is no technology substitute for grit and persistence and perseverance, and all the things we know as leaders we have to possess.
Kevin Stone, Motion Industries
What he listens for are gaps. A candidate who cannot describe the middle steps of a project they claim credit for, he said, reveals whether their involvement was as substantial as their resume suggests.
Verification through trusted networks
Stone’s second safeguard is his professional network. A candidate can be a skilled storyteller with a well-rehearsed narrative and no visible gaps, which makes independent verification more important now than before generative AI, not less. He described narrowing the circle to people he trusts and checking whether anyone in that network has direct experience working with the candidate. That verification, he said, is what turns a good story into a credible one, though he was careful to note it should not automatically disqualify a genuine outlier candidate nobody in the network happens to know.
Community reaction: mostly negative, for now
Master B2B polled its community on whether introducing generative AI into recruiting and hiring has been good or bad for B2B companies. Seventy eight percent said bad. Stone’s own reaction matched the sentiment.
I would probably say it has muddied the waters. It has introduced more bad than it has good.
Kevin Stone, Motion Industries
He expects that to shift, though, as enterprises start driving the roadmap for HR and recruiting software. His reasoning is practical: no recruiter can manually review 200-plus applicants per role at scale, so the technology will have to adapt to distill real signal out of the flood it helped create. Whether that response arrives as better tooling or simply more automation layered on existing problems, he said, remains an open question.
What this means for B2B hiring teams
Andy’s closing view was that AI hiring tools are following a familiar technology maturity curve: powerful and easily misused early on, refined over time as both overreaction and overconfidence give way to more grounded practice. His expectation is a middle ground rather than either extreme, AI will be part of every recruitment process going forward, but unsupervised AI hiring decisions are unlikely to take hold. For B2B leaders, the near-term playbook looks like Stone’s: use AI to manage volume, but keep structured conversation and trusted-network verification in place to surface the intangibles that still decide who gets hired.