Yesterday, Dave Shanley of ContentCamel.io and I ran a webinar: The AI-enabled buyer.
Not "AI is changing buying behavior," or "AI is coming for B2B."
The AI-enabled buyer is here.
The research process your prospects are running right now looks fundamentally different from 18 months ago, and most marketing teams are still building for the old one.
The full replay is below.
Here are the three things worth taking from the conversation.
A CFO comparing expense management platforms for a medium sized company in 2023 spent a lot of time compiling research.
The same CFO today covers similar ground in 4 minutes.
They type their requirements into ChatGPT or Gemini and get back a ranked list of recommendations backed by a comparison table.
Not 10 blue links. A shortlist, with reasoning, pulled from 164 sources in under 35 seconds.
Gartner puts 90% of B2B purchases as AI-intermediated by 2028. A Responsive study from late 2025 found that two of three B2B buyers already use AI as much as, or more than, Google for vendor research. This isn't something to plan for. It's the buying process running right now.
The practical implication is severe:
AI surfaces three to five vendors. Google gave buyers 10 blue links and a second page. AI doesn't. You're on the shortlist, or you're not.
You don't get rejected. You never get considered.
Ok, so the AI-enabled buyer is here, and is already researching your company before anyone on your team gets to talk to them.
The AI-enabled seller can be just as prepared!
The capability is there. AI can surface the right asset at the right deal stage, handle CRM updates in the background, and keep agents on brand through the entire sales motion.
Dave put it plainly: "It lifts the burden and kicks them into a higher-order mode."
The constraint is the same every time; the content isn't organized well enough for agents to use reliably:
Positioning docs live in three different places. Sales decks are six versions out of date. Nobody knows which comparison page to send at which stage.
Dave's point was that agents aren't the problem, it's the structure underneath them.
When everything is centralized and organized specifically for go-to-market, agents work.
When it's scattered across generic shared drives, they hallucinate, answer inconsistently, and eventually, the reps stop trusting them.
Dave named the shift we're both feeling:
Before AI, execution consumed 90% of the effort. Strategy was an afterthought that teams got to when they had time.
That ratio is flipping. Execution is what agents handle now. The teams pulling ahead are the ones spending 80% of their time on strategy and systems, not output.
We ran AI visibility audits on over a dozen B2B companies last month.
Custom prompts built around what their specific buyers would actually search for, checked across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.
36% scored below 10% AI visibility.
One company had 2.9% presence on Perplexity.
One had zero presence on ChatGPT across every prompt we ran. Not low...
Zero.
These aren't thin web presences. They just haven't built for this or measured it.
The window to get ahead of this is narrowing. Every citation earned in 2026 is harder for a competitor to displace in 2027.
AI systems anchor on established citation patterns.
My estimate: 12 to 18 months before this is table stakes and expensive to catch up on.
The webinar covered a lot of ground. A few threads deserve their own treatment:
The six things working for AI search visibility right now, in detail
What B2B marketing teams should stop doing immediately
The 90-day plan to close the visibility gap
Watch the webinar for the details; write-ups are in the works. If you want them when they publish, follow along here or on LinkedIn.
If you want to know where your company stands in AI search today, we're running free AI Search Visibility Assessments.
Custom prompts, checked across the four major engines, with a prioritized action plan.
Dave and I are running a second webinar in late May. We're getting into how we're actually building AI systems for marketing and sales: what's working, the failures, the awesomeness when you hit it, and what we've each learned by doing it.
Sign up page coming shortly.