As more buyers build AI tools into their process, marketers are getting pressured on all sides to adapt quickly— 71% of B2B software buyers rely on AI chatbots at some point in their research.
But before you toss the old playbook, take a hard look at what buyers are actually doing in our new report— Intent Data Meets AI: How B2B Marketers Can Win Earlier, Smarter and With Greater Precision sponsored by Informa Tech Target
It’s evident the buying journey is still multi-source and nuanced. But with 68% of Google searches now ending without a click, there’s no denying more pieces of the research puzzle are happening fully out of your view. The traditional demand signals your team has relied on for years are fading. And with weak data underneath it, even the smartest AI in your stack will confidently chase the wrong buyers.
Informa TechTarget Tara Faulkner on Intent Data
Tara Faulkner, VP of Campaigns and Demand Generation at Informa TechTarget, verdict in the report is blunt: “Don’t spend another dime on intent without taking a hard look at what happens to the signal you already have. A strong signal fumbled by poor processes produces the same result as a bad one.”
Faulkner shares the two questions every signal must pass before it touches your stack. Can you name the person, not just the company? Did the engagement actually happen, or did a model guess from an IP address? Her own numbers make the case. At her last company, 80% of prospects who took a meeting became real opportunities, but only 13% of flagged leads ever reached that meeting. That’s not a demand problem. That’s a follow-up problem, and no amount of premium data fixes it.
Download the Report Today
Intent data is still how you close that visibility gap, but the kind you use will make or break your success. Much of what’s on the market is scraped from the open web, inferred from account-level patterns and stale by the time it reaches you.
What holds up now is multi-layered intent built from the click up: directly observed, person-level buying intelligence that tells you what a real buyer engaged with, when they did it and what problem they were trying to solve. When that’s what goes into your AI-accelerated GTM stack, your scoring, targeting and outreach can reach the right buyers at the right moment, with a scale and precision that weren’t possible before.
Download the report to learn:
- What AI actually changed about the B2B buying journey, and what stayed exactly the same
- How to use intent data with precision, from reading signals over time to matching your response to the buying stage
- How to stay discoverable in the AI era, with content strategies that earn citations across chatbots, AI overviews and communities
Win earlier. Get the full report here.
