This article was based on the interview with TrustRadius’ Katie Allison on how B2B buying decisions get made today by Greg Kihlström, AI adoption keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As enterprise marketing leaders, we’ve all built sophisticated demand generation engines predicated on a simple, if not always easy, idea: we can guide a buyer through a journey. We create content for awareness, nurture leads through consideration, and hand them off to sales for a decision, meticulously tracking every touchpoint along this more-or-less linear path. We have optimized this funnel, invested in technology to orchestrate it, and built careers on our ability to master it. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that this model is becoming a relic of a bygone era. The journey is no longer a path we pave; it’s a complex, decentralized web of influence that exists largely outside our control and visibility.
The forces reshaping this landscape are not merely technological; they are fundamentally human and generational. The next wave of B2B buyers, raised on peer-to-peer networks and now armed with AI, operates with a different set of assumptions about where to find truth. They place more faith in a candid review from an anonymous peer than a polished case study, and they turn to AI tools to summarize the market long before they ever fill out a demo request form. Drawing on insights from TrustRadius’s comprehensive “2026 B2B Buying Disconnect” report, which surveyed thousands of software buyers and vendors, we can begin to map this new terrain. The findings, as shared by Katie Allison, Senior Manager of Research and Insights at TrustRadius, don’t just signal a need for tactical adjustments; they demand a strategic rethink of how we build trust, earn influence, and show up in a world where the most critical decisions happen in the dark.
The AI Trust Paradox: A Tool for Research, Not a Source of Truth
The adoption of AI in the buying process is no longer a question of if but how. The data shows that a majority of buyers are leveraging these tools to accelerate their research, understand the market, and get a lay of the land. Yet, this widespread usage comes with a significant asterisk: trust is not keeping pace with adoption. While buyers find AI useful for discovery, they remain deeply skeptical of its conclusions, treating its output as a starting point for their own verification, not as a definitive answer. This creates a critical new stage in the buyer’s journey: the AI-driven fact-check.
“This year, at least 63% of buyers said that they used AI at some point in their buying journey. The interesting thing that we found this year is that this is the first year that trust has leveled off. Trust in those AI answers is not increasing meaningfully year over year… buyers are going elsewhere to get additional information. These tools are a really good place to do some research, but they’re not a one-stop shop, and we don’t think they will be a one-stop shop for software buying anytime soon.”
For marketing leaders, this is a nuanced challenge. The old SEO playbook of keyword dominance is insufficient. Showing up in an LLM’s response is now table stakes, but it’s the beginning, not the end, of the conversation. The real work lies in arming the buyer for the inevitable next step: validation. When a buyer asks their AI of choice to “fact-check this,” where does it go? It goes to third-party review sites, community forums, and independent content—the very places brands don’t directly control. This means your off-site reputation, the candid feedback from your users, and your presence in trusted, independent ecosystems are no longer just a “nice to have” component of brand building. They are the essential assets that determine whether you survive the buyer’s cross-examination.
The Network Over the Org Chart: Influence in a Communal Buying Era
The concept of a “buying committee” has always been a staple of B2B marketing. We map our engagement strategies to the org chart, targeting the economic buyer, the technical user, and the champion. However, the report’s findings suggest this internal committee is now dwarfed by a much larger, external, and informal network of peers, creators, and online communities. This “communal buying” dynamic is supplanting traditional sources of authority. The most telling data point is the dramatic decline in the influence of analyst reports, which only 13% of buyers now consult, down from 35% just a few years ago.
“…brands who focus exclusively on an executive’s preferred third-party source, whether it be an analyst report or really just any one source, they’re facing a really real risk of limiting their visibility by not focusing on the third-party sources that their buyers are looking at… It’s really a case of defining your off-site strategy and making sure that you’re reaching your target audience through that strategy.”
Optimizing for the C-suite’s preferred reading material while ignoring the Slack channels and Substack newsletters where your end-users congregate is a fast path to irrelevance. Influence has been decentralized. A brand’s credibility is now determined less by a single authoritative quadrant and more by the aggregate sentiment across a distributed network. This requires a fundamental shift in strategy. Marketing leaders must become digital anthropologists, identifying and understanding the ecosystems where their buyers actually live. It means investing in community, encouraging authentic reviews, and engaging with independent creators not as a channel to be managed, but as a critical part of the market conversation you must earn the right to join.
Winning the Unscripted Conversation: The Power of End-User Feedback
If buyers are having peer-to-peer conversations that you can’t see, hear, or script, how can you possibly influence the outcome? The data is clear: every single buyer who spoke to a peer found it helpful. The temptation is to try and orchestrate these conversations through formal customer reference programs, but that misses the point of authenticity that buyers are seeking. The real leverage, Allison suggests, comes from shifting your internal focus from the budget holder to the end-user. The most powerful insights for shaping your market narrative come from the people using your product every day.
“…if you get use case specific feedback from the end users, the power users, the individual contributors who might not be a part of that renewal conversation, it’s gonna help you know what tricky spots might come up in those peer conversations, or even on your sales calls, to help your team proactively address them…”
This is a call to break down the silos between Marketing, Product, and Customer Success. The candid feedback an individual contributor shares about a workflow frustration or an unexpected benefit is no longer just an input for the product roadmap; it’s a vital piece of marketing intelligence. It allows you to anticipate the questions, objections, and praise that will surface in those invisible peer conversations. By understanding the ground truth of the user experience, you can proactively build content, messaging, and sales enablement that addresses the real-world narrative, not the one you wish existed. This transforms marketing from a function of broadcasting to one of listening, interpreting, and responding with genuine understanding.
The Human Imperative: Thriving in an Age of AI-Fueled Skepticism
With the pressure to scale content and show up in AI-generated answers, the temptation to “flood the zone” with AI-generated content is immense. This approach, however, is not only ineffective but actively counterproductive. As buyers become more inundated with low-quality, soulless content, their skepticism grows. The report found that nearly half of all buyers now trust online resources less than they did before the rise of generative AI. In this environment, publishing generic, substance-free content is the fastest way to damage your credibility.
“I have seen and accidentally created a lot of AI content that sounds really decent if you’re skimming it, but when you try and dive in deeper, it really lacks the substance… We saw that 47% of buyers trust online resources slightly or much less than they did prior to AI content kind of coming out… a brand that launches a ton of AI-generated content that lacks substance or relevance is really gonna damage trust with their audience.”
The role of the modern marketing team is evolving from pure content creation to strategic curation and validation. Human judgment is the critical layer that transforms generic output into a valuable asset. This is where the voice of the customer becomes paramount. Weaving authentic customer quotes, detailed reviews, and real-world use cases into your content provides the substance and social proof that AI-generated text inherently lacks. These human stories are not just compelling; they are a defense mechanism against the erosion of trust. The ultimate competitive advantage will not go to the brand that produces the most content, but to the one that consistently produces the most helpful, authentic, and human-verified information.
The clean, linear B2B sales funnel we have worked so hard to perfect is dissolving into a far more complex and unpredictable ecosystem. The buyer is now firmly in control, armed with AI for discovery and a vast network of peers for validation. The most decisive moments of the journey—forming a shortlist, building conviction, and eliminating contenders—are increasingly happening before a brand is even aware a buyer is in the market. This reality can feel daunting, as it requires us to relinquish the illusion of control and precise attribution that has long defined our work.
Yet, it also presents an opportunity. The challenge for today’s marketing leaders is to shift their focus from orchestrating a journey to building a reputation that precedes them. It means investing in the unglamorous, long-term work of fostering a great product experience, actively listening to end-users, and earning trust across a distributed network of third-party platforms. It requires us to become less like architects drawing a blueprint and more like gardeners tending an ecosystem. The brands that thrive will be those that embrace this complexity, recognizing that in an age of AI and decentralization, a strong, authentic reputation is the only signal that can reliably cut through the noise.