“I made this with AI, quickly, and I think it looks good (enough)!” is the shout across the commercial team where a democratisation of producing assets is happening and new decks are appearing daily. Somehow, everyone has become a designer.
LLMs are indexing and regurgitating so your carefully designed content is being taken apart before most people ever see it too. They read your words and break them down for meaning. Gartner found that 45% of B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase, mainly to research vendors and products. They strip away your design.
Buyers take what they find and turn it into their own documents, usually a few summary slides for the next internal meeting. Many customer researchers put your 40-page whitepaper into Gemini Notebook or ChatGPT to get a summary, or even a podcast, in whatever format suits them. They reformat your design.
You see it with the rise of influencers too – commentators, especially here on LinkedIn, repost your insights with their own views added. They append to your design.
Each of them removes the layout, typography, colour palette and brand you worked hard on. Often, only the words survive or specific graphics.
So, does B2B design still matter? Yes. More than ever, but good B2B design in different to before.
A brand isn’t just a layout. It’s being memorable and respected. It is being the name your audience thinks of when a relevant need comes up. You build that visually, verbally, out loud and in person. Good design is key.
The evidence supports this. Ipsos found that brands with many strong distinctive assets are 31% more likely to be considered and 38% more likely to be used. That research covers brands in general, not just B2B, but the principle carries over. There’s a catch, though. Of more than 12,000 brand assets Ipsos assessed, only 15% reached its top rating, meaning people instantly and uniquely linked them to the right brand. Having a designed identity isn’t enough. People must recognise it.
Your content may be reworked at the point of use, but it still has to earn that use. Before anyone summarises, reformats or reshares it, somebody has to notice it, trust it and understand it. Design does that work. It makes the complicated simple, gets attention in a crowded feed and signals that you’re worth listening to. If your content looks forgettable, nobody bothers to repurpose it.
Design must change with how people now use content
What has changed is what good design needs to do. It isn’t only about how a piece looks when it’s first published. That means designing for:
- Repurposing. Make content easy to lift, quote and drop into someone else’s deck without losing what it means.
- Indexing. Structure content clearly so that search engines and LLMs can read it, attribute it and surface it.
- Snippets. According to the Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 57% of hidden B2B buyers prefer quick, high-level takeaways to detailed analysis. Break long thought leadership into short, self-contained ideas, stats and visuals that hold up on their own.
- Recommendation. The same report found that 79% of hidden buyers are more likely to champion a company internally if it consistently publishes high-quality thought leadership. Your champion needs material they can forward, share and use to argue your case when you’re not in the room.
The two tests I keep coming back to are simple: “would someone forward this to their boss?” I find that information that does not look good, is never forwarded. The second is “is it easy to grab parts of this asset?” Embrace how they use your content, and facilitate it.
So, is there still value in B2B design?
Yes. But design has changed, again, to fit an AI-shaped world. The brands that see this will get quoted, summarised and recommended.
Those that don’t heed these lessons will find their comms lose effectiveness.
To go deeper into how B2B brands earn recommendation, and guidance on what to think about when designing, read Velo’s Recommendation Marketing Playbook.