Key Takeaways
- G2 found that 69% of software buyers chose a different vendor than planned because of AI chatbot guidance, so B2B marketers who wait for intent, traffic or MQL signals often join the buying conversation after the shortlist has formed.
- Circle & Square CEO Neeta Goplani said AEO platforms only help when teams point them at the right buyer conversations, and measuring AI visibility in the wrong part of the journey creates a false sense of security.
Your buyers are building shortlists before you know they exist. They ask an AI assistant to explain a problem, compare approaches and name the vendors worth a look, and they do it long before anyone fills out a form or lands in your CRM. When an intent spike, a traffic bump or an MQL finally shows up, AI has often already helped shape the shortlist. If your demand gen engine starts listening only at that point, you’re joining the conversation at the end.
Circle & Square CEO and founder Neeta Goplani reads these signals from the buyer’s side of the table, bringing an experience strategist’s lens and a background in neuroscience and behavioral science to a question most teams answer with dashboards: what is the buyer actually trying to solve right now?
That thinking drives two of Goplani firm’s core frameworks. The Buyer Intelligence Radar treats intent as one signal among many. It surrounds that signal with triggers, forcing conditions, buying group activity and the barriers that can still stall a deal. Her Buyer Visibility methodology starts before any AEO platform comes into play. It pulls evidence from forums, Reddit, review sites, search behavior, sales conversations and investor relations to map the Buyer Zones where real decisions take shape.
In this Q&A with B2BMX Insights, Goplani draws on Circle & Square’s Buyer Intelligence Guide to explain what’s changing and what you should do about it before your next planning cycle and she breaks down how AI is reshaping B2B buyer discovery and shortlisting, and shows why measuring AI visibility in the wrong part of the journey gives you a false sense of security.
B2BMX Insights: Of everything in the report, which shift in how B2B buyers actually buy is moving fastest right now, and why should everyone on this call act on it before their next planning cycle instead of after?
Neeta Goplani: The fastest moving shift is AI’s greater influence at the very beginning of the B2B buyer journey, particularly on discovery and shortlisting. A few years ago, Bain and Google found that between 80 to 90% of B2B buyers entered the buying process with what they called a “Day One” list, and roughly 90% ultimately bought from that list. That initial consideration set was incredibly hard to disrupt.
What’s fascinating is how AI is starting to change that. G2 found that 69% of software buyers chose a different vendor than they originally planned because of guidance from an AI chatbot, and a third ended up buying from a vendor they hadn’t even heard of before. AI isn’t just another research channel. It now has the ability to reshape who even gets considered in the buying decision.
Although AI may decrease the time for B2B buyer discovery, the entire buying journey is not simply getting shorter. Discovery is becoming dramatically faster and decision making is becoming more rigorous. Forrester says the typical B2B buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, and Gartner found that even though B2B buyers are using AI heavily, 69% prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a salesperson. As the top of the journey becomes compressed, the decision itself can actually get harder. If you wait until a buyer shows up as intent, traffic, or a lead, AI may already have helped form or change the shortlist. You need to understand the conversations happening before that signal ever reaches your systems.
That’s also a big part of why we created the Buyer Intelligence Guide — to give B2B marketing leaders a practical way to identify those important buyer conversations earlier and connect them to what buyers need as the decision moves forward.
B2BMX Insights: Every vendor swears their intent signals are gold. Based on what the data shows, how do you tell an account that’s genuinely ready to talk from one that just looks busy?
Goplani: I come at intent from the buyer side because I’m an experience strategist. Intent signals are another form of buyer behavior, and they’re useful. But you can’t take an intent score on its own and assume that means an account is ready to talk.
Part of the issue is that there’s an abstraction layer. Buyer behavior gets classified into a vendor’s taxonomy, and while that helps you work at scale, you can get further away from the actual voice of the buyer and what they’re really trying to solve. When we see an account heating up, we surround that signal with other signals. What do we already know internally? What are they saying publicly? What’s in their earnings calls, investor relations, press releases or strategic plans? What are the people who are likely to be in the buying committee talking about? What behavior are we seeing on our own properties?
That’s actually why we built our Buyer Intelligence Radar. Intent is one signal on that radar, but then we ask: What triggered this? Why might they be looking now? Is there actually a forcing condition that means they have to act? Who in the buying group is involved? And what could still stop the decision?
That forcing condition is important because an account can have budget, interest and plenty of activity and still do nothing if the pain isn’t strong enough to force change. I’m less interested in whether an account is ‘surging’ and more interested in whether I can see a real decision taking shape around it.
Activity tells you an account is looking. Readiness tells you there’s a real decision taking shape. Our Buyer Intelligence Radar identifies a clear trigger, a reason they need to act now, the right people are becoming involved, and shows evidence that the barriers to moving forward can actually be addressed.
Where Do B2B Pipelines Leak, and What Content Closes the Gap?
B2BMX Insights: Where’s the biggest leak B2B pipeline, and what’s the one fix you’d hand a team to close it?
Goplani: There’s generally more than one place where the B2B pipeline leaks. I see leaks across the entire journey, wherever the experience stops meeting the buyer’s expectations. The buyer journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the beginning, the leak is often visibility. You’re simply not present in the conversations where the buyer is first trying to understand the problem.
For example, we observed this with a client that was showing up when someone asked for a very specific vendor recommendation, so on paper everything looked okay. The client was generating a pipeline; they were running campaigns and all the normal things were happening. But when we looked at the actual conversations buyers were having earlier — ‘What is this problem? Why is this happening? How should I solve it?’ — the client was barely present, while competitors were showing up everywhere. This indicated that the client was entering the journey at the tail end of the conversation.
By the time you get to the middle of the buyer journey, you’ve worked hard to get someone’s attention and bring them into your world. Yet companies serve them essentially the same campaigns and the same content regardless of what that buyer is actually trying to solve. However, once we could see which conversations were heating up, for which audience, on which platform, and around which specific pain point, we could become more precise in our signals in the middle of the buyer journey. What does this particular buyer need right now? How do they want to hear it? What proof or content would actually help them move?
At the end of the buyer journey, the questions change again to: Is there actually a forcing condition? What could stop the decision? Is there an objection? Is the buying group aligned? Is there enough proof to make the decision feel safe?
The biggest leak isn’t in just one funnel stage. It’s the disconnect between what the business is doing and what the buyer needs at that moment. If I could give a team one fix, it would be to stop managing each stage as an isolated marketing activity and start continuously reading the buyer across the journey — what they’re asking, what’s changing, where they’re getting stuck, and then adapting what you give them accordingly.
B2BMX Insights: The report is clear on what buyers respond to, and what they tune out. What’s one thing you’d tell marketers to stop saying today?
Goplani: The one thing I would tell marketers to stop doing is communicating from the inside out. I see this all the time. They start with their product, capabilities, categories, differentiators, and everything they want to say about themselves. Then they expect the buyer to do the work of translating that into something that matters to them.
There is a very fast, automatic layer of processing happening before anyone ever sits down and rationally evaluates your features, your ROI, or your proof points. With AI, that happens in milliseconds, faster than even a blink of an eye. I bring my neuroscience and behavioral background into my work, which helps me break down the processing layers. Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that as much as 95% of purchase decision-making happens in the subconscious mind.
Marketers often go straight to that rational layer. They lead with capabilities and proof before they’ve even earned the buyer’s attention. The fastest way to earn that attention is to get as close as possible to the actual voice of the buyer. What words are they using? How are they describing the problem? What are they already asking? What changed in their world that made this matter? Then mirror that back in what you put into the market.
Marketers should be working from the outside in instead of inside out. You want somebody to see your message and immediately think, ‘Oh, they get it. They understand what I’m dealing with.’ Then you’ve earned the right to give them the logic, the evidence and the proof they need to move forward.
If I had to boil it down to one piece of advice for marketers, I’d say, don’t start with what you want to tell the buyer. Start with what the buyer is already thinking.
B2BMX Insights: Buyers are already using AI to research and shortlist vendors before they ever talk to sales. How does that reshape the content we produce, and how early in the funnel does it start to matter?
Goplani: How buyers are using AI is one of the areas I’m most excited about right now, because what’s happening is having a big impact on B2B marketing. Forrester calls it the GTM Singularity. AI, buyer autonomy and access to information are all converging, and one of the consequences is what they call a visibility vacuum. Buyers are making more of the decision in places we simply can’t see anymore. Forrester now says 94% of business buyers use AI somewhere in the buying process, and they’re using it across the journey, not just at the beginning. That creates an incredible opportunity for marketers.
We’re seeing all of these really powerful AEO platforms emerge, and I’m a big believer in them. But I’m also seeing teams say, ‘Great, now I can measure my AI visibility, see where I’m showing up, create content to fill the gaps, and I’m done.’ The problem is that those tools are only as useful as where you point them. If you’re measuring the wrong zone of the buyer journey, you can get a positive result and still be missing the conversations that actually matter. That’s more dangerous than having no data at all, because now you have a false sense of relief. Which is why, in our Buyer Visibility work, we actually start our research before the AEO platform.
We take a 360-degree view of the evidence. We look at forums, Reddit, review sites, G2, search behavior, customer feedback, NPS, sales conversations, investor relations, what the market is saying, and sometimes synthetic users as another exploratory layer. Then we weigh that evidence toward the voice of the buyer and look for patterns. What situations keep coming up? What questions are buyers actually asking? What has changed in their world? Which audiences are asking which questions? Through that clustering, we narrow down what we call the Buyer Zones.
Next, we take those zones into the AEO platforms and ask: Are we present in these conversations? Where are the gaps? Which personas aren’t we reaching? What sources are shaping the answer? What does the buyer see when they ask the question? And then you make the content decision.
The content strategy isn’t, ‘We need 20 articles so we show up in ChatGPT.’ It’s, ‘There is a real buyer conversation happening here, with this audience, around this problem, and we have a credibility gap. What would genuinely help that buyer?’
Your content has to change too. We’re seeing this with clients right now. AI engines are very good at filtering out generic marketing language because they’re synthesizing what a company says about itself with reviews, third-party sources, social content, and other evidence. The content that performs better is often more authentic, specific, and evidence-based — content that helps the buyer understand the issue, not just content that tells them why the brand is great.
Content starts mattering incredibly early, before you can even see that buyer in your funnel. And then it becomes a loop: listen, identify the buyer conversation, show up with something genuinely useful, measure what changes, learn, and do it again. The goal isn’t AI visibility for the sake of visibility. The goal is to be present in the conversations that can actually change the decision.
Who’s on the B2B Buying Committee, and What Proof Do They Trust?
B2BMX Insights: Buying committees keep growing and getting harder to serve. Which role on that committee do the findings suggest we’re quietly underserving right now, and how do we win them back?
Goplani: There are really two layers of buying committees. You still have the buying group inside the organization, which is already getting larger and more complex. And you also have this broader buying network of external influences — analysts, peers, communities, journalists, review sites, and increasingly AI.
Where teams get into trouble is if they don’t always know which role is actually carrying the decision, which role is influencing it, and which role can quietly stop it. I see a lot of focus on the obvious people: who has the budget, who signs, who’s our champion. But the quieter roles are often the ones that get underserved. Ratifiers are a good example. They may come from finance, procurement or purchasing, and they can have a lot of influence over whether the decision actually moves. Forrester specifically separates ratifiers from champions and decision-makers because they care about different things and often enter at a different point in the buying process.
But there is no one universal role you should focus on. What matters is being able to sense, for this account and this decision, who is becoming important right now. Which roles are showing up in the conversations? Where is the buying group thin? Who hasn’t been engaged? Is the person we thought was the champion actually behaving like a champion? Is finance suddenly becoming active? Is an external analyst shaping the shortlist?
That’s where the Buyer Intelligence Radar becomes useful. You’re not just counting how many contacts you have. You’re trying to understand the shape of the decision as it changes.
Multi-threading isn’t just about having more people in the account. It’s about knowing whether you have the right people — inside the buying group and around the broader buying network — and understanding what each of them needs to move the decision.
B2BMX Insights: What content does the data show buyers trust most today, and which long-standing tactic is losing ground faster than people want to admit?
Goplani: What buyers trust is changing because the information environment around them is changing. We’re living in a world where AI can give us an incredibly polished, personalized answer in seconds. The more sophisticated those answers get, the more important validation becomes.
There is more value in voices that feel independent and credible: customers, peers, analysts, practitioners, review sites, strong thought leadership, earned media. Essentially, people or sources that aren’t just the brand talking about itself.
That’s why PR is becoming even more valuable. It’s not just about getting coverage. It’s about building a body of third-party evidence around your company. And now that evidence is influencing both the buyer and what AI systems learn about you.
What is losing ground is the idea that we can just keep pushing more paid messages into the market and equate attention with trust. I’m not saying paid media will go away. It absolutely has a role. But a click tells me I got someone’s attention. It doesn’t tell me they believe me. And that distinction matters more now than it used to. You can buy attention but credibility has to be earned.
B2BMX Insights: Buyers walk in with sharper ROI demands than they did two years ago. How should that change the proof points marketers lead with, and what’s landing versus what’s falling flat?
Goplani: ROI means something a little different than it did two years ago. It’s not enough to put a giant number on a slide and say, ‘You’ll get 300% ROI.’ Buyers are under so much more scrutiny that the real question is, ‘Can I actually believe this, and can I defend this decision when I take it back into my organization?’
The proof has to get much more specific to the buyer: Have you done this for a company like mine? What actually changed? How quickly did they see value? What did implementation really take? What risk did you remove? What happened to efficiency, productivity, cost, or revenue? And can you show me, not just tell me?
That’s why customer evidence, benchmarks, trials, real use cases and very specific proof become much more important. The data we are looking at shows that buyers are increasingly using trials as a way to reduce risk and see value for themselves. This is where marketers sometimes get it wrong. We lead with the proof point we’re proudest of instead of the proof the buyer actually needs.
If the reason the deal is stuck is implementation risk, a big revenue statistic may not help me. If finance is the blocker, I may need a very different proof point. If the buyer is worried that no one will adopt it, I need evidence around adoption. The question at the end of the journey is always: what does this particular buyer still need to believe before they can move?
What’s landing needs to be proof that feels specific, credible and usable inside the buying group. What’s falling flat is generic ROI theater: huge numbers, polished claims and case studies that sound impressive but don’t help the buyer defend their actual decision.
Big ROI gets attention. Defensible ROI gets approval.
How Should Sales and Marketing Read the Same Buyer Signals?
B2BMX Insights: When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, what signal in the report should trigger a clean handoff to sales? How do you get both teams reading that signal the same way?
Goplani: I’ve spent a lot of my career working with marketing teams, but I’ve also had the opportunity to do some deep research with sales teams. And one of my biggest “ahas” was how differently the two sides can see the same buyer.
There’s often a lot of finger-pointing between sales and marketing. Marketing says, ‘We gave you qualified leads.’ Sales says, ‘These people weren’t ready.’ Everybody talks about becoming one revenue team, but I honestly haven’t seen many organizations where that’s fully realized.
Technology has actually reinforced the problem. A lot of intent platforms will tell you, ‘This account crossed this threshold, now it’s ready for sales.’ I’ve rarely seen that work cleanly. Those signals are useful, but they’re still probabilistic. A score doesn’t suddenly mean a buyer wants a conversation.
There are some very clear signals from prospects. If somebody raises their hand and requests a demo, asks for pricing, wants to understand implementation, or is asking very specific questions about risk or proof, obviously a human conversation can be useful. But outside of those obvious cases, the better question is: Would talking to a person help this buyer make the decision right now?
Buyers increasingly want to self-serve. They want to research on their own, use AI, read reviews, talk to peers. But that doesn’t mean sales goes away. Human interaction becomes really valuable when the buyer needs validation, context, reassurance, or help navigating complexity. Forrester’s 2026 research makes a similar point: answer engines are becoming a major entry point, but buyers still rely on trusted human and third-party sources as they move through the decision.
That’s also why ‘handoff’ isn’t even the right word anymore. The buyer doesn’t experience a marketing journey and then suddenly enter a sales journey. They’re just trying to make one decision through one journey.
What I want sales and marketing reading together is the same buyer story: What triggered this? Why now? Who’s involved? What are they trying to figure out? What could still stop them? What proof do they need? That’s what gets both teams aligned. Not that marketing has one stage and sales has a different stage in the CRM, but that both sides understand what is actually happening with the buyer and what would be useful next.
B2BMX Insights: If a marketing leader could act on just one finding from this report this year, which one delivers the biggest return, and what does the very first move look like?
Goplani: If I could get a marketing leader to do one thing this year, it would be to start where you expected momentum and didn’t get it. Don’t try to map the entire buyer journey. Don’t buy another platform. Don’t build a giant dashboard. Pick one product, one audience, one campaign, or one part of the pipeline where you thought buyers should be moving and they’re not. Then get really curious about the buyer.
What do we already know internally? What is the sales team hearing? What does the behavioral data tell us? And then go outside the organization. What are buyers actually asking? What are they saying in reviews, communities, search, AI, social channels? What changed in their world that may have triggered this behavior? Usually, somewhere in that comparison, you start to see the gap between the story the business is telling itself and what the buyer is actually experiencing.
Marketing leaders should pick one thing to test. Maybe you’ll find that you’re invisible in an important conversation. Maybe you’re speaking to the wrong role. Maybe the buyer doesn’t have the proof they need. Maybe there isn’t actually a forcing condition yet. Change one thing, watch what the buyer does next, learn from it, and feed that learning back in.
That’s where marketing leaders will find the biggest return because they’re not creating more work for the sake of more work. They’re focusing Buyer Intelligence on a real business problem where there’s already value sitting on the table.
