89% of B2B Purchases Are Now Impacted By GenAI. It Remade the B2B Buying Journey - Here’s How Signals Must Rise to the Moment
Forrester’s latest research makes it clear: generative AI has officially reshaped the way B2B buying happens. But beneath the headlines lies a deeper story - one that puts signals front + centre
The Forrester Wake-Up Call
According to Forrester’s “B2B Buying in the Age of Generative AI”, nearly nine in ten B2B buyers are already using genAI in their purchasing process.
That number should make every CMO sit up straight.
In some quarters it’s still dismissed - ‘not good enough’, ‘not relevant to my industry’ but the data is speaking - you now need to plan a GTM that talks to agents as well as humans
GenAI isn’t just another research tool. It’s become a frontline filter: buyers use it to discover vendors, compare solutions, draft RFPs, and even refine final purchase decisions. Forrester highlights three big shifts:
The buying process is now conversational. Instead of wading through PDFs, websites, and sales decks, buyers are querying AI tools that deliver synthesised, vendor-agnostic insights in seconds. This to me is the most obvious use - who in their right mind are downloading extensive white papers AND reading them in 2025? Getting instant summaries and making RFPs is all table stakes use of genai now
Buyers are going dark. Much of the evaluation process happens outside of vendor channels. That means your analytics stack isn’t seeing the real research, by the time prospects show up, they’re already deep in consideration. The ABM “go signal” comes later and vendors need to react when they see the prospect much faster
Complex purchases are accelerating. Even multi-million-dollar decisions are moving faster because buyers can process more vendor comparisons in less time. The sheer volume of data to analyse is part of what slows B2B down, I’ve long thought it’s about to speed up. Vendors will need to be much more on top of their TALs
The result? A collapsed funnel, and most of the conversation happening out of sight.
What Buyers Gain And Sellers Lose
On the buyer side, the benefits are obvious. Forrester reports that 87% of buyers using genAI say it helped them achieve better business outcomes, with the effect especially strong in deals worth over $1M (Forrester: “Buying In The Age of Generative AI”). Faster research, more complete comparisons, fewer missed options.
But for sellers and marketers, the picture is harder:
Less time to influence. Buyers arrive at your site or sales call already armed with insights — sometimes even with a shortlist pre-made. The traditional window to educate and shape perception is shrinking.
Content gaps are exposed. If your materials don’t answer the hard questions (“How does this integrate with X?”), then genAI won’t surface you in its responses. Structured smart on-site content designed for LLM as well as humans. Will we end up with 2 forms of content online - one set clearly aimed at robots and the other at humans? Guess we kinda have had that for years with SEO but again there is a shift here
The funnel illusion breaks. The neat, stage-based buyer journey that most martech stacks assume is being rewritten in real time.
In other words: buyers are empowered, but vendors are disintermediated.
The Signal Imperative
Here’s the critical takeaway: in a genAI-driven buying world, signals are the only reliable way to see and act on intent.
Hard deterministic levers are breaking and site based intent trails crumbling - we need to capture, measure and infer signals and then act on them fast
The old metrics — CTR, impressions, MQL counts etc become somewhat meaningless when most of the buying process happens in the shadows.
What matters now is picking up on the faint but powerful signals that still surface:
A repeat visit to your integration documentation.
Four minutes spent on your security page.
A sudden surge in traffic from accounts in your target list after an analyst report drops.
Each of these is a breadcrumb — not vanity noise, but evidence of real buying momentum.
This is why me and my paid subscribers use 100+ high value actions on site to capture these signals pertinent to different buying committee members. We don’t rely on ‘persona targeting’ to capture them in the age of privacy, we use signals. Join the club to pull down the full 100+
Why Content Must Be Built for GenAI
Another overlooked implication: genAI is now a distribution channel.
If buyers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot for vendor comparisons, those tools are pulling from the content you (and your competitors) have already published. This needs to answer the questions they (the buyers are asking). We need to reverse engineer what people are asking - a paid post for another day 😉
A hint - That means your materials can’t just be designed for humans — they have to be structured for machines to understand and synthesise. FAQ-rich pages, well-structured product comparisons, clear positioning statements: these are what get surfaced in AI responses.
Marketers who build for this will get found. Those who don’t will vanish.
Rebuilding Around Signals
So how do you adapt? It comes down to a shift in mindset: advertise to the signals, not the funnel.
Capture hidden intent. Extend your analytics to catch the micro-behaviors that matter — time on page, repeated logins to a tool, unusual content patterns from a specific account. Visits to clusters of pages talking to specific committee members
Map signals to action. Don’t just collect them — wire them into your CRM, DSP, and sales outreach in real time. If a CTO in your ICP spends five minutes on an implementation guide, your sales team should know today, not next quarter.
Feed the AI layer. Publish content designed for AI summarisation — structured, detailed, and question-led. Treat genAI like a new kind of search engine. It’s done from 1.5% of market share in search to over 10% by June of this year - there is a very profound shift happening here and brands in B2B are sleeping
Shorten your response loop. If the buyer’s journey is faster, your ability to respond to signals must be faster too.
The Bigger Picture
GenAI isn’t just accelerating B2B buying — it’s erasing the visibility vendors used to have.
The teams that will win in this new era are those that:
Recognise every micro-action as a potential buying signal,
Re-architect their measurement layer around signal capture, and
Build strategies that speak to both human buyers and the AI tools guiding them.
The funnel was always a model, not reality. GenAI just ripped off the mask.
Closing Note
The next stage of B2B isn’t about chasing clicks or cranking out ABM dashboards. It’s about signals — the proof of intent hiding in behavior that buyers can’t mask, no matter how much AI they use.
That’s where I’m focused, and it’s where the smartest marketers are pivoting.
In my next post, I’ll break down the 7 signals every B2B team needs to master to thrive in this post-cookie, AI-driven era.
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