NEWSLETTER
June 2026
Social media is cigarettes, buyers are tired of pretending, and software is getting interesting again
Date
Author
Justin Bailie
IN THIS EDITION:
Social media is cigarettes
How we are starting with customers now
The golden era of B2B software
I spent a couple of days with my son and five of his friends, fresh out of grade 12.
Smart kids. Very online. Plenty of exposure to technology.
What surprised me was how quickly they could smell fake.
AI-generated content. Synthetic creativity. Social media performance. Big Tech pretending the machine is here to help while quietly making everything more addictive, more artificial, and harder to trust.
Their reaction reminded me of cigarette smokers in the 80s.
Everyone knew it was bad. Everyone hated it. Everyone kept doing it.
I think we are getting close to that moment with social media. And maybe with a lot of the synthetic AI slop being pushed into the world too.
That matters for B2B because trust is becoming the scarce asset.
Customers, employees, buyers, and operators are tired of the same decks, the same demos, the same AI claims, and the same vendor theatre.
The companies that win from here will not be the ones that make more noise.
They will be the ones that do useful work, build real trust, and use software to make businesses actually run better.
1. Social media is cigarettes
The cigarette analogy is not about morality. It’s about awareness.
In the 80s, smokers knew what they were doing. The science was out. The warnings were everywhere. But the habit was still there, and the system around it kept reinforcing the behavior.
That is where social media feels like it is heading.
People know it is not great for them. They know the incentives are warped. They know the content is increasingly synthetic. But they keep scrolling, posting, and consuming because the system is designed that way.
My parents smoked when I was growing up. They smoked a lot. They hated it. They couldn’t quit. And they advised anyone around them not to do it while they hacked their way through a pack a day.
That is basically the relationship a lot of people now have with social media.
And AI is accelerating the problem.
We are moving from human-generated noise to machine-generated noise at scale. More content, less signal. More output, less meaning.
And the audience is adapting faster than most companies realize.
The kids I was with are not impressed by volume. They are not impressed by polish. They are not impressed by “AI-powered” anything.
They are impressed by things that feel real.
That is the shift. And it’s not just a consumer internet shift.
It is a B2B shift too.
Buyers assume your case studies are curated. They assume your demos are staged. They assume your AI claims are exaggerated. They assume your thought leadership was ghostwritten, optimized, repurposed, and sanded down until there was nothing human left in it.
And honestly? They are not wrong.
So the question becomes: what cuts through?
Not more content. Not better branding. Not louder messaging.
Useful work. Actual insight. Proof that you understand how their business runs. And a willingness to show the messy parts, not just the polished ones.
This matters a lot in distribution and operational businesses because trust has always been part of the product.
Customers do not just buy price. They buy reliability. They buy confidence. They buy the belief that when something goes sideways, someone competent knows what to do.
That is why I think the best use of AI in B2B will not be to make the world louder.
It will be to make work clearer.
Better data. Better workflows. Better decisions. Better answers. Better execution.
And the companies that figure this out will not look like traditional marketing machines. They will look more like operators who happen to share what they are learning.
2. How we are starting with customers now
This shift in trust is changing how we approach customers.
Selling software, services, transformation etc has changed, you may not know it yet but it has. So I thought I’d lay out how we’re doing it. This has been working.
Meeting 1: Counterpart Assessment
We start by understanding whether the prospective customer is aligned to our lofty vision and uncomfortable truth about the future of B2B. This becomes the anchor for everything that follows.
We are looking for a true counterpart using our counterpart assessment tools.
These people see the opportunity in front of them, want to be a part of a movement, are thinking beyond “another piece of software” and want to work with companies like us in true collaboration. If we don’t have a fit, we walk.
Meeting 2: Change Readiness Workshop
We assess where the organization is in terms of change readiness using Junction’s change readiness framework. The companies with the highest success rates are usually what we define as “confused and motivated”: they know the current way is not working, they may not have the full answer yet, but they have enough urgency, openness, and internal energy to move. If they are too early or too late (I have only seen one company who was too late) we walk.
Meeting 3: Shared Work
We work directly with the customer on a real business problem in a way that is Atypical to a traditional sales cycle. The goal is to help the customer develop useful skills, while also helping Junction learn how the business actually works: the people, the workflows, the informal decision-making, the blockers, and the hidden opportunities. The work does not have to be around our product at all, we are looking to teach skills and make friends.
In the process, we begin mapping the organization so we can understand where the biggest opportunities and constraints may exist, not just for the first project, but for the broader transformation. This is useful not just us but for our new friends as a take away.
A key mindset shift here is that you can't see attribution as linear. You may do a bunch of work with someone and it turns into dust, it doesn't matter, the results will come from somewhere else. You need to understand this principle for it to work.
Meeting 4: Freight Network and Cost Recovery Assessment
We review the customer’s transportation spend, carrier network, routing decisions, freight recovery practices, internal workflows, and customer-facing processes to identify where money is being lost and where operations can improve.
We’re excellent at this and it's a huge advantage we have that no one I am aware of in our space does.
So we flex it.
Meeting 5: Co-Created Business Case Presentation
We build the business case together, including the financial opportunity, operating improvements, workflow changes, technology requirements, and a clear ROI the customer can confidently promote internally.
Ongoing: Implementation
Once the case is approved, we help deploy the improved operating model by combining transportation expertise, change support, and Junction’s technology inside the customer’s day-to-day workflow.
What Junction Is
Junction is a transportation technology and operating partner for B2B distribution. We help companies find margin leakage and develop operational excellence in their freight management, processes, workflows, and customer experience, then deploy technology to govern and assist in the new way of working.
3. The new paradigm in B2B
For a long time, enterprise software was defined by constraints.
Long implementations. Rigid systems. Expensive customization. Limited flexibility.
You bought software and then adapted your business to fit it.
That is changing.
The combination of better infrastructure, more flexible architectures, and AI is making it possible to build software that adapts to the business instead.
This is especially true in distribution and supply chain, where complexity is the norm.
Different customers. Different products. Different pricing models. Different workflows.
Historically, this complexity forced companies into compromises.
Now, we can handle more of it directly.
We can integrate across systems more easily. We can model real-world processes more accurately. We can automate decisions that used to require manual intervention.
And we can do it faster.
For buyers, this is a shift in power.
You do not have to accept software that only solves part of the problem. You do not have to live with systems that create as much work as they remove. You can expect more.
But there is a catch.
The market is also flooded with vendors claiming to do all of this.
Which brings us back to trust.
This new paradigm in B2B is not just about what is technically possible. It is about finding partners who can actually deliver it. Who understand your business. Who are willing to do the work with you. And who are honest about what is possible, what is not, and what it will take to get there.
That is where the opportunity is.
Not in selling more software. In building better businesses.
The old logic was:
Custom software fits better, but it is too slow and too expensive.
SaaS is faster and cheaper(sort of), but you have to fit into it.
The new paradigm is:
Custom-quality fit, with SaaS-like speed and maintenance.
And that is a great outcome for software buyers!