The decision now happens in a room you can’t enter

PLUS: A third of buyers now choose a vendor they’d never heard of.

From the aibl team

I’ve been in B2B businesses for most of my career, and for all the digital upheaval the industry has experienced over the years, there’s never been a marketing and sales challenge like AI.

It used to be that buyers would pore over websites and white papers to narrow their choices. Now AI can compress much of that work into a single query that spits out a short list. What the tools say about our businesses, whether right, wrong, or nothing at all, increasingly determines our ceiling. And we’re blind to when it happens and why.

That’s one of the big things I was left thinking about after our speaker sessions at growthLIVE earlier this month. The highlights are in the lead article.

In our research slot this week we take a look at the numbers on how AI is affecting the B2B buying process.

The decision now happens in a room you can’t enter

The message was never the problem

Last week we covered the growthLIVE roundtables from London, 10 June. This week, the speaker sessions. The talks covered different ground. The thread underneath was the same.

The objective hasn’t changed, argued Matt Pahnke, VP of product at Customer.io. Right message, right audience, right time. What has changed is the infrastructure.

Les Mills, the New Zealand fitness platform, built exactly that. An AI segmentation tool identified customers showing early churn signals, connecting behavioural data to retention campaigns before a cancellation was ever filed. Every campaign hinges on “the quality of the data and the cleanliness of the data and also the activation of the data.”

200 messages and no way to know which one matters

Achilleas Kasimidis, who leads GoStudent’s global revenue operations, faced the same problem at the level of individual conversations. Account managers would open WhatsApp to find 200 messages waiting: new leads, angry customers, cancellation requests, support queries, all in the same queue.

“Normally what the sales team would do at any given moment, they will wake up, they will open up WhatsApp, they probably have about two hundred messages in the inbox, but they have to go one by one and answer those replies.”

aibl’s Research: How AI Is Reshaping the B2B Buying Process

Earlier this year, Forrester surveyed nearly 18,000 business buyers for its State of Business Buying, 2026, and twice as many named generative AI or conversational search as a more meaningful or important research source than anything else.

That puts AI ahead of vendor websites, product experts and sales reps. Now you might say “well, that’s just a reflection of the role of search”, but over 50% also say that they start more research in chatbots than Google, et al.

AI use across the buying process is now at 94 per cent, up from 89 a year earlier. G2‘s Chief Innovation Officer put the history in one line: the Yellow Pages compressed the market into one big book, Google compressed it into the first page of results, and AI now compresses it into a single answer.

All that reading that buyers used to do still happens, but now it’s by a large language model in a few seconds before it hands over a short list.

Product spotlight of the week

Following their appearance at growthLIVE, we’ve been tracking BuzzTrail, a tool built for mid-market sales teams haemorrhaging inbound leads before a rep ever gets to them.

A prospect lands on your site, wants to know if the product is right for them, and the average B2B firm takes close to 48 hours to respond. BuzzTrail puts an AI avatar at that moment instead. It qualifies intent, answers product questions live, and hands serious buyers to a rep with context already in your CRM.

For teams that want to test before committing, there’s a pay-as-you-go Startup plan at $1 a minute with the first 20 minutes free. Monthly plans start at $2,500.

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