On June 4, iResearch Services hosted the fifth annual Thought Leadership for Tomorrow (TLFT), welcoming over a hundred thought leadership practitioners from global brands to the Harvard Club in New York. Now in its fifth year, the day brings together panels, presentations, and conversations aimed at pushing the thought leadership industry and its standards forward.
Brittany Williams, SVP of Editorial at iResearch Services, kicked off the day with a first look at iResearch Services’ 2026 Thought Leadership in Practice (TLiP) survey data, revealing where the discipline is evolving, and where it’s stalling.
About Thought Leadership in Practice
Thought Leadership in Practice: Separating Strategic from Sporadic is based on a comprehensive survey of 1,000 professionals directly involved in their organization’s B2B thought leadership. For more insights, read the full Thought Leadership in Practice 2026 report.
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First, Williams described where thought leadership is still building its momentum.
Referencing the Global Thought Leadership Institute’s (GTLI) four-stage maturity model (published in January 2026), the TLiP research asked respondents to self-assess their organization’s thought leadership program, from “unstructured, inconsistent” ad hoc activity to “embedded, robust, and continually evaluated” strategic practice.
Williams revealed that—by practitioners’ own measure—the majority of organizations are still charting their course. Only around one in four identify their work with the highest level of execution defined by GTLI.
Perhaps that’s no surprise: thought leadership is still a young discipline, first taking shape in the 1960s and evolving namelessly until 1994. (Although precisely how recent that feels will vary between readers.) For more, see “A brief history of thought leadership.”
But the data makes a clear case for building toward strategic maturity. Williams shared that organizations further along this path tend to share a few traits: a dedicated thought leadership team, more people involved in the process, and a wider range of research methods in play. And these components have a purpose: organizations operating a strategic program also report more business outcomes—such as business growth, premium pricing power, and partnership opportunities—from their thought leadership.
The multi-hat majority
Thought leadership practitioners have largely carved their own path into the field; few dedicated qualifications or established career tracks exist yet. (GTLI is a pioneer in this area, having introduced a thought leadership practice standard and certification in early 2026.) Tenure reflects the informality of most professionals’ experience: TLiP study respondents have typically spent between two and ten years in the role, with only a handful reporting more than twenty. And, as Williams acknowledges of her own career (echoed later by others on the TLFT stage), most practitioners have built their skills elsewhere first—in research, marketing, or journalism—before bringing them to thought leadership.
However, those former lives are neither gone, nor forgotten. This year’s survey asked practitioners to identify which roles they play in the thought leadership life cycle. Williams asked the same question of the live TLFT audience:
Which of the following roles do you currently fulfill in your organization’s thought leadership efforts? [Select all that apply]
- Thought leadership executive
- Thought leadership sponsor
- Subject matter expert
- Researcher/analyst
- Writer/editor
- Marketing/communications
- Program manager
- Legal or compliance professional
- Other
In the room, a few thought leaders identified with a single role; one chose seven out of the eight defined options available. (Legal/compliance was the one left out, in case you’re wondering .) On average, the TLFT audience fulfills 2.5 roles in their organization’s thought leadership efforts.
The quantitative study found essentially the same: in the wider industry, thought leadership professionals are wearing an average of 2.7 hats. Four in five practitioners play at least two roles, and a burdened 7% are balancing five or more. “For anyone who’s felt like they’re constantly juggling professional capabilities, I’ll give you a moment to take a snap of this slide and send it to your boss asking for that raise you’ve earned,” joked Williams.
One reason it helps to be an expert generalist: thought leadership typically involves many stakeholders, with many interests. Practitioners with a multidisciplinary skill set who can speak the languages of sales, marketing, research, design, and strategy will have a more natural place among so many moving parts.
On average, there are a total of 15 people involved, directly or indirectly, with the average firm’s thought leadership production process, expanding to 25 people at organizations with 10,000+ employees, and narrowing to just a pair of practitioners at the smallest firms.
Reflecting the many hats involved, the departments required to produce thought leadership are numerous and vary heavily from company to company.
TLiP finds that an average of three separate business functions get involved with thought leadership. Most of the time (62%) Marketing is involved, but Sales, research departments, strategy teams, practice groups/product teams, and legal/compliance functions frequently wade in too. Separation of budget and strategy control over the company’s thought leadership is commonplace, and is split across different functions at 54% of organizations.
“The thought leadership budget and the thought leadership strategy sit with different teams in more than half of companies. If this is an intentional rule of law to ensure the governance of firm resources, then more power to them; but if it’s an accident of organic company growth as more people catch on to the commercial and reputational power of thought leadership, then I imagine getting projects over the finish line takes a Herculean level of coordination.”
— Brittany Williams, SVP Editorial at TLFT 2026
Getting the work done
On top of stakeholder demands, the industry presents a myriad of obstacles. A quarter of thought leadership practitioners say their team’s biggest challenge is a lack of skills, with distribution, content strategy, original research, and storytelling being the most prominent capability gaps. Like many professionals, they’re also up against a lack of time, and a lack of clear strategy.
But they know what the goal looks like, ranking “original data and research,” “content strategy,” and “storytelling” as the most important qualities of good thought leadership.
Unsurprisingly, practitioners are reaching for AI to help; a staggering 98% say they’re using it at least once during the thought leadership development process. Whether AI is genuinely raising the bar is a separate debate.
What may be less obvious is where it is—and isn’t—being deployed. The research finds that practitioners are front-loading their AI use in ideation and research stages. It’s being used less, and also less successfully, in distribution and measurement.
That’s a telling gap. A third (32%) of practitioners rank distribution as an important capability for good thought leadership—it’s also the capability they’re least likely to consider a strength, and most likely to identify as a gap. Yet, by a significant margin, practitioners are using AI to reinforce the areas they’re already comfortable with, not to help them tackle a known weak spot.
The real issue isn’t that practitioners are struggling with distribution—it’s that they know they’re struggling and keep focusing elsewhere anyway. Only 33% of organizations bring distribution into the room during ideation; 13% don’t consider it until their content is already finished.
It’s a costly habit. TLiP data shows organizations that plan distribution during ideation report a higher number of measurable business outcomes than those that plan it later. It’s also a trait of organizations operating a “strategic” thought leadership program. Getting distribution right early, it seems, pays for itself.
Channel choice is part of that equation. One of the most revealing findings Williams shares from the TLiP research is that owned websites remain the most used channel, but LinkedIn leads on ROI, with 44% of practitioners citing it as their best performer.
Ty Heath, Head of the B2B Institute at LinkedIn and TLFT 2026’s Head Judge, isn’t surprised: “The most-used channels tend to be the ones organizations control. But influence doesn’t come from control; it comes from credibility.” What makes LinkedIn distinctive for thought leadership, she explains, is that ideas don’t arrive alone—they come with context: who shared them, who engaged with them, which executives and practitioners found them valuable.
As Heath puts it, LinkedIn is ‘the conversation before the conversation’. “By the time a decision-maker engages directly, credibility has often already moved through their network.”
Where distribution goes beyond LinkedIn is its own conversation.
The bottom line
Before handing over the day to the first panel, Williams shares one final stat: 97% of thought leadership practitioners report measurable business impact from their work—a figure unchanged from last year. Perhaps only a quarter of practitioners consider their program strategic, but the others are managing to get results anyway.
