There was a time when buying B2B technology took enough browser tabs to qualify as a cry for help. Buyers searched Google, downloaded reports, visited ten websites, sat through demos, asked peers for recommendations and eventually worked a long list down to three or four vendors.
AI has compressed a lot of that. A buyer can describe a problem to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, ask who solves it, and get a comparison of features, pricing approaches, strengths, weaknesses and customer sentiment before anyone on your sales team knows they exist. G2's 2026 survey of more than 1,000 B2B software buyers found that over 80% had used AI chatbots to source software recommendations in the previous two years. Expect this number to grow even higher.
You would expect that to make selling easier. It hasn't. Finding vendors is fast now, but buying from one still takes a long time. For 40% of buyers, evaluation is now the longest stage of the process, not research.
For years we built our marketing around getting discovered: create awareness, drive traffic, capture the lead, hand it to Sales.
Bam. Now, that still matters. It just doesn't win deals the way it used to.
AI Is Building the First Draft of Your Shortlist
Your website may not be the first place a prospect learns about you anymore, and Google may not be either. An AI tool may have already explained who you are, compared you with three competitors and offered an opinion on which one fits best, all without you in the room. G2 also found that buyers who sourced recommendations this way were more likely to buy from their initial shortlist, so that first draft carries real weight.
That puts a premium on being understandable. A buyer, or a model, should be able to tell quickly what you do, who you're best for, why someone would pick you over a competitor and what proof backs it up. If answering that takes four paragraphs of corporate prose, six invented category terms and a diagram that looks like NASA drew it, you have a problem. Humans struggle with vague positioning, and so do machines.
The companies that benefit will be the ones that are easy to understand across their own website, review sites, customer stories and industry coverage. This is positioning work, and it just got more valuable.
The Shortlist Is Where the Work Starts
Once the buyer has a few credible options, everything slows down. Security review, implementation questions, integrations, procurement, pricing and budget approval all land at once. In G2's research, IT security was the biggest source of delay after vendor selection, followed by budget approval and implementation planning. Among enterprise buyers, half named security review as the biggest delay.
That makes a standard funnel report misleading. The opportunity sits at 80% in your CRM, your champion loves the product and everyone is quietly spending the commission. Meanwhile, a second buying process is starting inside the customer's company, run by people who never saw your demo. They don't care that your champion is a fan. They want to know if it's secure, how hard it is to implement, what it replaces and what happens if adoption is poor. Increasingly, they also ask why the company can't do some version of this with the AI tools it already owns. That is where a lot of deals are decided.
Your Champion Needs Help Selling You
We've always talked about building internal champions. In 2027, take that literally. Your champion is selling your product inside their company, so give them something to sell with.
Nearly half of buyers in G2's research said their CFO had reversed a software purchase the buying team had already approved, and finance has more say in these decisions than it did a year ago. A CFO reviewing a purchase wants to know what happens if the company spends the money, and what happens if it doesn't. So the business case can't show up as an emergency PDF three days before the finance review. Marketing and Sales should build it into the process from the first conversation: what the product replaces, what labor it saves, what risk it reduces and how fast it pays back, with the assumptions behind the number stated plainly.
G2 found that three-quarters of buyers now expect positive ROI within six months. You can debate whether that's reasonable. Your buyer still has to answer for it.
Proof Has to Show Up Earlier
Most companies treat proof as a late-funnel tool: the customer story, the reference call, the ROI calculator. That made sense when Sales did most of the educating. Buyers now do a lot of evaluation before they talk to anyone, so proof has to be findable early. A buyer should be able to see specific examples of the problem you solved, the type of customer, what changed and how long it took.
Generic praise does almost nothing. "Acme Corp has been a fantastic partner and transformed how we work" is pleasant and tells the next buyer nothing. "Implementation took eight weeks and manual processing dropped 30%" gives them something to use. Pick the result that's true for you and make it concrete. AI makes it easy to compare claims, which makes vague claims worth less.
The Buying Committee Isn't Going Anywhere
A lot has been written about AI agents eventually researching, evaluating and buying software on their own. Some of that is coming, and the research part is already here. But nobody is handing the corporate Amex to ChatGPT yet. G2 found that nearly two-thirds of buyers stop short of letting an AI agent complete a purchase, and higher-stakes decisions still involve people.
AI takes work out of the process, but the people are still in the room. Once vendors are easy to find, companies put their time into risk and cost, and the rep's job becomes helping a committee get comfortable signing. Marketing's job is to give those buyers what they need to keep moving.
Your Existing Customers Can Shop Faster Too
AI makes comparison shopping easy, which is great when you're chasing a new account. It's less fun when your current customer asks the same tool whether something cheaper or easier has come along. The idea that a customer leaves the market once they sign a three-year contract is getting weaker. G2 found that 70% of buyers say rapid AI innovation is pushing them toward shorter contracts.
That raises the stakes on onboarding and adoption. The first six months of a customer relationship are part of the next renewal, so Customer Success is now part of how you grow. Customers need to see the product doing something useful, and a surprising number of companies wait until renewal to prove it.
Marketing Has a Bigger Job Than Generating Leads
Lead generation is a narrow definition of what marketing does. Gartner's 2026 CMO survey found budgets flat at 7.8% of company revenue, with CMOs still expected to fund AI adoption and deliver more growth. There's no big pile of new money coming, so the question is where the existing dollars and hours go. My view is that more of them belong on the stages after the lead.
Walk the path from first search to renewal and look for the thin spot. For most companies it's somewhere after the lead, like proof that's too vague or security answers nobody has ready.
Marketing should own more of that work than it does today.
The 2027 Playbook
The old playbook assumed information was scarce. We attracted buyers, educated them and walked them toward a sales conversation. Now there's too much information, plenty of credible choices and good tools for sorting through all of it. What buyers lack is confidence that they're making a safe decision.
Here's what I'm prioritizing with companies going into 2027:
- Make your positioning plain enough that a person or an AI tool can summarize it correctly.
- Put specific proof where buyers look first.
- Hand your champion a business case early. It doesn't matter if it's logo'd or not. Quantified proof is proof.
- Clear friction out of evaluation, starting with security and implementation answers.
- Show customers value within the first few months.
You still need a good product and a team that can sell it. But if I had to pick one place to look first, it'd be where deals stall after the shortlist. The calculus has changed here -- A lot of them are won or lost there now.
