In a survey published in May 2026, Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers now turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights. (Gartner, 20 May 2026)
Before reading that as good news for sellers, a caveat. Buyers are still doing the early research without us. They still prefer the rep-free experience for that part of the journey. When the work gets specific, the rep walks back into the room, this time as the auditor of the AI’s homework. The auditor’s job is more demanding than the explainer’s used to be.
A client of mine runs a SaaS B2B platform, with a strategic prospect they very much wanted to win. Before the meeting, the prospect’s team sent through their agenda. The questions were sharp, specific and feature-led, and the texture of them gave the team away. These were AI-generated.
We spent the pre-meeting on one question of our own: what is the prospect actually trying to fix here? You can usually feel the gap between a feature request and the underlying problem. We listed the most likely answers and prepared the demo against each.
In the meeting itself, we asked the prospect directly why those features mattered to them. They told us. With the underlying answer in hand, the demo did not have to argue the features one by one. It showed how the system differed where it counted for them: cost savings, risk reduction, gained efficiencies.
We won the right to the next round. If we had walked in and read their agenda back to them, we would have lost to whichever vendor read it back faster.
First, the discovery opener still earns its keep. Mine has not changed much in years. After the introductions, I ask the prospect what it was about us, what we wrote, what we said, what they have read, that made today’s meeting worth thirty minutes of their day. The answer almost always takes them straight to what is top of their mind. Generic demos die fast against that opening.
Second, preparation is the only reliable answer to a better-prepared buyer. I have been approached, as a buyer, by suppliers so generic in their pitch that I once offered the seller sales training on the spot. Ten to fifteen minutes of structured preparation, used well, is the difference between a productive meeting and an awkward one. Buyers can feel the difference inside the first minute.
The bar has moved. The sellers who do well over the next two years will be the ones who treat an AI-prepared question as the opening of a real conversation, rather than a script to survive.
If your team is working this out on live deals, and you would like a second pair of eyes on the ones where the AI shows up before the rep does, a short conversation is the cheapest way to see whether the work fits. Half an hour, no charge.