Our first CIM Midlands social event of 2026 drew a full house, and a surprise guest - for a session that left the room rethinking how marketing is changing.
CIM Midlands kicked off its 2026 calendar of social events in style on 24 June, with non-members and members turning out in force for a session on AI, agents and the future of search - delivered by Jake Third and Beth Sharma of Hallam. Even on one of the hottest days of June, the room was full, the energy was high and the conversation didn't let up.
It's exactly the kind of turnout we love to see for the first social event of the year - a brilliant reminder of why these sessions exist: not just a download of the latest trends, but a space for Midlands marketers and students to learn from peers who are genuinely in the thick of it, ask the awkward questions and leave with something they can actually use.
A surprise guest in the room
Adding a real sense of occasion to proceedings was a surprise guest: Hallam's former owner, Susan Hallam, who flew in from Florida specifically to watch Jake speak - and couldn't resist heckling good-naturedly from the sidelines at one point. It's the kind of warmth and community spirit that makes CIM Midlands events what they are and a brilliant way to start the year's social calendar.
What the session covered
Jake opened by framing two shifts every marketer needs to be tracking. The first is external: how buyers search has fundamentally changed, with 94% of B2B buyers now using large language models as part of their discovery process. The second is internal: how AI is changing the way marketing teams function and what that means for the people doing the work.
He talked the room through Hallam's own “brains and bots” approach - built on the principle that AI should be invisible to the end audience - and shared how the agency has 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.
Perhaps the most talked-about section tackled SEO head-on: Jake described “the great decoupling,” where demand hasn't disappeared but clicks have, as platforms increasingly answer queries directly within the search interface itself. His advice to the room was to start thinking “AI search first, search engine second,” and to shift measurement away from traffic and MQLs towards revenue, share of search and share of voice.
Beth Sharma then took questions on the people side of AI adoption - sharing an honest early misstep in rolling out new tools to a team and the lesson that followed: start with people, not platforms and make the technology genuinely easier before asking anyone to change how they work. Her advice landed well with a room full of marketers grappling with exactly that challenge in their own teams.
More to come this summer
This was just the first of our CIM Midlands social events for 2026 and if it's anything to go by, the rest of the calendar is one to watch. We're back in just a few weeks with our next session on 15 July, where Pete Morgan, Founder of MonkeyPants Productions, will be exploring the growth of podcasting as a marketing tool - and how it fits into a modern digital marketing strategy.
Book your space here: https://www.cim.co.uk/events/cim-socials-birmingham-july-2026/
Thank you to everyone who came along, asked great questions and made the first social event of the year such a success.