A practical playbook for creating connected experiences that move complex deals forward.
JPC Competitive Edge Playbook Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world A practical playbook for creating connected experiences that move complex deals forward. Developed through JPC’s work with enterprise growth teams and sharpened through our September 2026 Competitive Edge Roundtable.
Introduction AI has made research, targeting, content and personalisation abundant. It hasn’t made trust easier to earn. In high-stakes enterprise decisions, buyers still need confidence in the people on the other side of the table, as well as in the solution being presented. And as information becomes easier to generate, the signals that are hardest to manufacture – judgement, peer credibility, live dialogue, a relationship with history – become more valuable. That’s the thinking behind JPC’s Experiential ABM approach, developed over twenty years of complex enterprise pursuits. In September 2026 we took that point of view into our Competitive Edge Roundtable and asked senior leaders across sales, marketing, ABM, customer success, RevOps and experience to pressure-test it against their own organisations. One of the first things we asked was where value leaks most in business experiences – before the room, in the room, or afterwards. Only 24% pointed to the experience itself. The rest split evenly between what happens before it and what happens afterwards. What follows is JPC’s point of view, strengthened by what our attendees validated, challenged and added. The bar has moved from being noticed to being believed. Three plays: Intent, Experience, Momentum. Each one runs the same six sections. How to use this playbook The core tension – the trade-off leaders need to navigate In practice – the recognisable moment where this tension shows up What we heard – the lived reality expressed in the room JPC’s point of view – our strategic perspective from 20+ years in complex ABM and pursuits Why this matters – what’s at stake What good looks like – practical principles and recommended actions We explored three questions. How do you design human experiences that actually move complex buying groups? Where should machines enhance those experiences, and where should they deliberately stay human? And how do you turn what happens in the room into evidence, intelligence and commercial momentum? 2 1 3 JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
What it is Experiential ABM treats face-to-face moments as high- value staging posts in a connected account journey. Every element – format, guest list, agenda, environment, conversation design – is engineered around specific accounts, specific buying-group members and a specific relationship ambition. This isn’t an argument for running more events, nor for replacing digital engagement with face-to-face activity. It’s about identifying where a human moment can materially change the outcome, then using data, technology and account intelligence to make that moment more relevant and what follows it more valuable. The human encounter is where trust, confidence and relationships can move fastest – but its value depends on what happens around it Experiential ABM is an account-based strategy Why it matters commercially These numbers explain why face-to-face moments carry so much weight now. 71% of B2B buyers purchase their first-choice brand. The shortlist is decided before you’re in the room. (TrustRadius) On average, 5 people are involved, on average, in technology buying committees (Foundry), and B2B buying groups range from 5–16 people across as many as four functions (Gartner). At this scale, you’re navigating a system. 59% of B2B customers will only buy from a supplier they’ve met in person at least once. (McKinsey B2B Pulse) Intent What relationship movement are we trying to create? Start with the account, the people and what needs to change – not the format. Experience What human moment could create that movement? Design an interaction that can do something another channel cannot. Momentum What did we learn, and what changes next? Turn behaviour, dialogue and commitment into better account intelligence and the next relevant action. Momentum feeds back into Intent. What you learn from one experience should make the next one sharper. 76% said the greatest value leak happens outside the room. Before 38% | In the room 24% | Afterwards 38%. 21 responses – a directional view from the roundtable, not a market benchmark. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
Design the movement, not the event PLAY 1 – INTENT The core tension The format gets decided first. Then every decision that follows is built around filling a room rather than moving a relationship. In practice “We need a dinner.” “We’ve got a stand.” “We’re sponsoring the conference in March.” The venue’s booked. The guest list is assembled from job titles. The agenda is made interesting. But nobody’s answered the question that matters: what should change in the account because these people came together? The experience will probably go well. People will enjoy it. And three weeks later nobody will be able to identify what moved. What we heard We gave every table the same fictional enterprise account – operationally trusted, strategically shallow, good access to the CIO, a major renewal fourteen months out – and asked to choose the three people whose movement mattered most. What emerged was strikingly consistent: Access doesn’t equal relationship. Seniority doesn’t equal influence. And an org chart doesn’t tell you what matters to an individual. The movements they defined were deliberately human. Remote to engaged. Cost to value. No relationship to advocate. Each one names a change in a person. The exercise also exposed the danger of assuming someone will behave in a particular way because of their title. The org chart tells you who’s senior. It doesn’t tell you who carries the room. Why this matters A curated account journey can’t be based on fixed choreography. It must create movement and tell you if your assumptions about that movement were right. During the exercise we introduced new intelligence about a stakeholder each table prioritised, materially reframing our understanding of what that stakeholder wanted. Most groups made relatively little change to their plans. That doesn’t mean their plans were wrong. But it shows how easily new evidence gets absorbed into an existing hypothesis rather than tested against it. Adaptability is easy to design into a framework and hard to perform under time pressure – which is the condition every account team works in. Confirmation bias can survive good customer intelligence unless adaptability is deliberately built into the journey. So, before you design the experience, answer the three questions laid out below: What do we believe about this account? What would prove us wrong? What evidence would cause us to change the plan? If you can’t answer the third question, the journey’s already fixed. You’re just rehearsing it. 1 2 3 “Good access doesn’t mean we’ve got a good relationship.” From the room JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
JPC’s point of view Design every experience to test what you believe. If there’s no point at which the plan could change, you haven’t designed a journey – you’ve scheduled one. That means building the test in before the invitations go out, not reviewing it afterwards. By then the plan has an owner, and owners defend plans. One attendee pushed the thinking on. The fastest way to test an assumption may be to build the next thing with the customer rather than for them. True co-creation does more than create engagement. It exposes priorities, disagreement, influence and commitment while there’s still time to change course. What good looks like Identify the people whose movement genuinely matters. Define the FROM TO shift needed in each. Be explicit about what you still don’t know. Only then decide what experience can create that movement. Proof in practice: BT and Translink - From network provider to strategic partner BT had built Translink’s network – but not yet the strategic conversation. The relationship was strong operationally, yet BT was still seen as an infrastructure provider rather than a strategic partner. JPC worked back from what Translink’s leadership needed to see, shape and buy into – creating a new customer value proposition and a sequence of experiences designed to shift that perception. Each experience had a job to do. Targeted workshops opened up new parts of the organisation. A senior engagement day brought the Chief Executive and leadership team together. Co-creation around new ideas and proofs of concept deepened the relationship further. What this proves: work back from the relationship movement you need, then design the experiences that will get you there. The result was real commercial momentum: £10MN of pipeline developed and a £4MN contract secured with BT positioned as a strategic partner rather than defending an incumbent role. Designing the sequence is one thing. Deciding how much of it a machine should touch is another. View case study JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
The core tension AI belongs in Experiential ABM. The work is deciding where it strengthens the human experience and where it starts to undermine the trust you’re trying to create. In practice Twenty senior guests arriving in three days. There‘s more data available on them than the account team can absorb manually. AI can research them, consolidate the signals and identify the patterns. But who decides what matters? What’s relevant? What the customer should actually see? And what somebody’s prepared to stand behind in the room? That decision usually gets made by the person who runs out of time first. What we heard We put four scenarios like that one to the room and asked for a choice on each: automate, augment, or keep human. The room was comfortable asking machines to do more of the heavy lifting. It was far less comfortable handing them the relationship. The boundary moved with the task. Preparing for senior guests drew 88% for augmentation – the highest of the four. Using an AI avatar to extend expert follow-up got 82%. Why this matters Machines are disproportionately good at research, pattern recognition, signal consolidation, scalable preparation, transcription and surfacing the next question. Humans remain disproportionately valuable for judgement, ambiguity, empathy, challenge, co- creation, negotiation, trust and commitment. The discussion exposed two useful tensions. First, AI-positive practitioners still hesitate to put unchallenged machine output in front of senior customers – one attendee described repeatedly re-reading augmented content before sending it to a CIO, because the real question wasn’t whether it was technically good but whether it still sounded like them. Second, good AI isn’t simply a model problem. It depends on the data, architecture, governance and human guardrails around it. Design the human and machine boundary PLAY 2 – EXPERIENCE 71% chose augment. 24% chose keeping the activity human. Only 5% chose full automation. Combined responses across four scenarios. The 88% and 82% cited opposite were the two highest. Directional view from the room. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
JPC’s point of view Amplify the human. Don’t standardise it. Understand – use machines to interrogate more signals than a human team could absorb alone. But probability is not truth. Empower – give people richer context, sharper questions and better preparation before they walk into the room. But personalisation is not always relevance. Extend – use technology to keep expertise and relevance available beyond the encounter. But scale is not automatically value. Start from the moment where human value materially changes the outcome. Protect that and make the technology serve it. What good looks like Automate the repeatable. Augment judgement. Let the machine contribute; let a human own the call. Protect trust moments. Some interactions stay person-led because of what’s at stake, not because automation is technically impossible. Be transparent. When AI extends human expertise, say so before anyone has to ask. The boundary should be designed deliberately – not discovered by accident. Proof in practice: NTT DATA and AWS - AI augmenting a deliberately human occasion A highly curated executive dinner used AI behind the scenes – guest profiling, personalised menu cues, projection-mapped patterns across the table, and far more specific pre-engagement. What happened in the room stayed deliberately human: a sensory dining experience, a shared peer conversation, an expert-led discussion about the future. In this programme, AI did most of its work backstage, while the value in the room remained deliberately human. What this proves: use the machine to make the human encounter better, not to become the encounter. Which leaves the hardest question of all: how would you know if any of it worked? View article JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
Design the evidence before the experience PLAY 3 – MOMENTUM The core tension Traditional event measurement asks: what happened? Attendance. Engagement. Satisfaction. Follow-up sent. Experiential ABM asks: what moved? What evidence did we see? How confident are we in it? And what changes next – for the account and for the customer? In practice The experience goes well. The debrief circulates. Sales receives an attendee list. Valuable conversations stay in the heads of the people who happened to hear them. Three weeks later nobody can say what materially changed in the account. The intelligence existed. It simply had nowhere to go. What we heard Most organisations design the activity first and try to prove its worth afterwards. We put that to revenue attribution expert Michelle McCann, who reversed the sequence: know what question you need answered, decide what evidence would answer it, then design the experience capable of producing that evidence. Why this matters Experiences create unusually rich first-party commercial intelligence. What people attend, ask, challenge, explore, ignore, revisit and offer to do next. Those signals are useful precisely because Intent came first. You already knew which accounts mattered, which relationships you wanted to move and what change you were designing for. So, the evidence is built into the experience rather than extracted from it afterwards. JPC’s point of view The aim is not to measure everything. It’s to create better evidence of relationship and account movement – evidence a commercial decision can actually rest on. Design the evidence and you won’t need to measure everything. Decide it afterwards and you’ll find evidence for what you already believed. “You have to know what questions you need answered and reverse-engineer it.” Michelle McCann, Revenue Attribution and Commercial Marketing Expert, B2B Marketing and Virtual CMO, Collingwood What good looks like Decide the movement you want before anyone sends an invitation. Name the evidence that would prove it happened. Capture signals during the experience , not from memory afterwards. Give one perso n responsibility for what the evidence changes. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
The Experience Signal Design Card Turning human moments into commercial intelligence – and better customer experience. Download our experience signal pack > Example: the COO moves from sceptical observer to active participant in shaping the transformation story. Example: the COO starts connecting Operations and CX priorities and asks Finance to respond. 1. DESIGN FOR What relationship or buying-group movement are we trying to create? 3. VALIDATE How confident are we that the signal means what we think it means? 2. WATCH FOR What would we see or hear if that movement happened? 4. ACT ON What changes now Move a sceptical stakeholder towards active sponsorship. Get two functions aligned around one shared issue. Give an advocate something credible to carry internally. Who challenges or reframes the issue? Who defers to whom? Who volunteers a next step, or brings another function in? Example: observed and explicit – “we need to work through this together”. Confidence: high. Explicit: said or committed. Observed: meaningful behaviour. Inferred: needs validation before action. Example: elevate the COO and change the follow-up. Create a cross-functional continuation session. For the account: stakeholder map, next action, owner. For the customer: content, continuation, meeting, experience. If nothing changes , it was only an observation. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
Close the design-to-attribution loop One well-measured experience is an event. A sequence that learns is an operating model. Why this matters Experience design improves the quality of the signals you can observe. Those signals show whether the design worked. What you learn then makes the next interaction more relevant and more precise. Run it without that discipline and you simply have a series of events that happen to involve the same account. The ownership problem The roundtable brought up a question that proved harder than expected. Who owns the connected human journey – sales, marketing, ABM, events, RevOps? Everyone has a contribution. But shared contribution isn’t the same thing as clear accountability. JPC’s point of view Every high-value experience needs a named commercial owner for the intelligence and the next action. Not an owner of the room. An owner of what the room changes. Somebody’s name, in the account plan. Without that, the relationship movement between sales, marketing, ABM and events falls into the gaps between them. One client turned a connected sequence of experiences into twelve months of engagement. See next page. Account signal Intended movement Experience Behaviour and conversation Validate the signal Update account intelligence Next action or experience 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Repeat JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
One story. Multiple experiences. Twelve months of engagement. PROOF IN PRACTICE – JMA WIRELESS 1:1 account experience It began with 121 conversations, supported by highly personalised presentations, content and invitations built around the priorities of key US operators. Mobile World Congress That insight scaled into an immersive stand, interactive demos and personalised product journeys, allowing customers to explore the proposition around their needs. Customer roadshow The story then travelled – 24 US locations in eight weeks, extending the experience to customers who were never in Barcelona. Evergreen digital experience What customers explored, asked about and showed interest in fed into a personalised digital experience they could revisit and share. The analytics from that digital layer showed JMA which topics mattered to which customers, what people ignored, and where the next conversation should go. Physical moments created the signals. The digital experience kept the story alive. The analytics made the next human interaction smarter. 1,480 unique registrations across the roadshow, and 969 new conversations created. 24 locations, 8 weeks. Power of One roadshow. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
The biggest opportunity is greater intentionality THE REALITY CHECK At the end of the roundtable, we asked participants what they would stop, start and change in their own approach. What was notable was what they didn’t ask for. Nobody needed another event format. The recurring themes were about intent, discipline and follow-through. Generic events built for everybody and nobody. Vanilla preparation. Activity without a defined outcome. Quantity over quality. Define customer outcomes and the evidence for them earlier. Design the follow-through before the experience. Use AI deliberately, for specific jobs. Co-create with customers rather than collecting feedback afterwards. Act on the intelligence already being gathered. Become more deliberate about follow-up. Improve how signals are identified and attributed. Set clearer objectives up front. STOP START CHANGE The biggest opportunity is greater intentionality: before the room, in the room, and in what happens next. JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
What account outcome are we trying to influence? Whose movement matters most – and are we sure it’s them, rather than simply the most senior person? What FROM TO shift do we need from each? What do we still not know? What account outcome are we trying to influence? Whose movement matters most – and are we sure it’s them, rather than simply the most senior person? What FROM TO shift do we need from each? What signals would tell us the relationship moved? Who will validate and act on them – by name? What should change if we learn something unexpected? 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 Ten questions to ask before you book anything TAKE THIS INTO THE ROOM 6 9 10 Intent Experience Momentum JPC Competitive Edge Playbook: Experiential ABM: The human advantage in an AI-powered world
Great experiences don’t end. They evolve. We’re ready to help you FIND YOUR EDGE. Three principles E: hello@thinkjpc.com W: www.thinkjpc.com T: +44 (0)207 326 5980 JPC, X+Why The Fulwood, 4 Fulwood Place, London WC1V 6HG Where the real edge lives AI capability is becoming universal. What remains rare is the ability to design a human encounter with enough commercial precision to change a relationship – and then use what it reveals to improve whatever comes next. The room is a staging post. What happens either side of it decides what it is worth. Design the movement, not the format. Start with the people whose confidence, perception, relationship or commitment needs to shift. Use machines to strengthen human value. Let AI notice more, prepare better and extend expertise. Protect the moments where judgement, empathy, challenge, co-creation and commitment create the value. Design the evidence before the experience. Know what movement you’re looking for, what signal would demonstrate it and who will act on it, before anyone sends an invitation. The experience signal pack Put the methodology to work – planning worksheet, Experience Signal Design Card and a worked example. The competitive edge community Private roundtables, peer conversations, expert perspectives and practical tools for senior enterprise growth leaders. Pressure-test a live experience Bring us one account, event or programme and we’ll work through Intent > Experience > Momentum with you. What topic or question should we tackle next? Share your ideas, register for our next Competitive Edge Roundtable or join the community below. Register for our next roundtable > Join our Competitive Edge community >