What AI Changed: 5 Buyer Shifts

The buyer can prompt "Compare Vendor A, B, and C on full-funnel marketing attribution" and receive an instant comparison of features, reviews, and use cases. No clicking. No forms. No signals to you. AI provides instant, synthesized answers without the friction of multiple clicks and sources. Your carefully crafted website? They may never see it. Your gated content? They'll skip it entirely.. 50% of B2B buyers now START their buying journey in an AI chatbot, not a search engine. This jumped 71% in just four months. 1

Assume buyers have already asked AI about you before your first conversation. They've seen a comparison. They've read a summary. They've formed an initial opinion. Your job is no longer to introduce yourself. It's to confirm, correct, or expand on what AI already told them. Ask early: "What have you heard about us so far?"

A buyer can prompt "Give me the top five project management tools for distributed engineering teams with Jira integration" and get their shortlist before lunch. AI eliminates manual synthesis across multiple sources. It collapses research timelines dramatically. The evaluation that once gave you multiple touchpoints to build familiarity? Gone.. What used to be a multi-month discovery process is now compressed into a single afternoon. 2

You cannot count on multiple touchpoints to build relationships. Every conversation must deliver immediate value. There's no "getting to know you" phase anymore. No warm-up calls. No gradual rapport-building across a series of meetings. Come prepared to add insight from the first interaction. If you're planning to build up to your value over several meetings, you've already lost.

Buyers have been dubbed "invisible buyers" because their entire research journey happens under the radar. They learn about your product via AI summaries, third-party sites, and chatbot conversations. Your CRM shows nothing. Your intent data shows nothing. But they're deep in evaluation. By the time the buyer reveals themselves, they're likely far down the decision path. And they expect you to keep up.. Your future customer might be researching you right now without ever triggering a form fill or visit in your analytics. You're influencing deals you can't track. 7

You cannot count on lead scores or intent signals to tell you who's interested. Treat every inbound inquiry as potentially late-stage. That "cold" contact who just reached out? They may have been researching you invisibly for weeks. They may have already compared you to three competitors. They may be ready to make a decision. Be ready to engage at depth immediately. Every inbound could be further along than it appears.

They've already decided who's on the shortlist before you know they exist. Buyers prefer to form independent opinions before engaging sellers. They want to avoid being influenced or "sold to." They'll talk to you when they're ready, not when you want them to.. Buyers spend 83% of their journey in self-directed research. Only 17% involves any sales interaction at all. 4 90% of buyers do substantial research before their first engagement with a supplier. 37% compare vendors in-depth before ever talking to sales. 5

When buyers reach out, they've already formed opinions about you. Your job isn't to educate. They don't need your overview. They don't want your company history. They've already seen the comparison chart. Your job is to either validate their research with proof points or challenge their assumptions with insights they haven't considered. Come ready to do one or the other. Skip the 101 briefing. If they wanted that, they would have asked ChatGPT.

They've already consumed AI-generated product information and basic comparisons. As one Chief Business Officer put it: "By the time a vendor reaches out, we're already deep into evaluation. If a rep isn't enabled to demonstrate expertise and transparency throughout the sales cycle, then they are out, no matter how good their product is." The trust bar is higher. Any lack of candor or inability to answer detailed questions can be a dealbreaker. Buyers can fact-check your claims via AI or peers in real time.. By the time a buyer speaks to you, they may have a sophisticated understanding of the market landscape. Generic demos get one chance. Miss, and the deal is over. 8

Stop explaining features. Buyers already know them. Your value is bringing context they can't get from AI: specific customer stories from their industry, implementation realities and honest tradeoffs, nuances that don't show up in comparison charts, and proof points that validate what they're hoping is true. Be the expert who validates or challenges what AI told them. That's the only role left.