In an increasingly AI-mediated buying environment, organizations have less ability to control how buyers discover information, evaluate providers, and validate claims. AI is accelerating market forces and pushing organizations toward a go-to-market singularity, a point at which long-standing assumptions about visibility, influence, buying behavior, and growth break down. Buyers are becoming less visible, more informed, and more reliant on AI-powered tools and expanded buying networks. Still, many provider organizations deliver fragmented customer experiences, gate-keep access to information, and poorly govern engagement with disconnected go-to-market (GTM) motions. AI will magnify these shortcomings.

The loss of provider control has real consequences. Those who adapt, however, can turn credibility, adoption, and governance challenges into competitive advantages. Expect the following by the end of 2027:

  • Two-thirds of providers will lose deals because buyers cannot verify claims. Buyers who use AI-assisted search and analysis tools most frequently report using them to gather information about products and vendors. These tools rapidly synthesize provider claims and check facts, exposing hollow or inconsistent sales and marketing statements. We expect buyer use of AI fact checks to increase faster than go-to-market teams can restructure prospect information for AI-powered evaluation. As buyers validate claims in advance, and in real time with sellers, many providers will fail some aspect of AI buyer verification. To remain on buyer shortlists, go-to-market teams must ensure that their most compelling claims are credible, consistent, and supported by proof points that AI tools can index and validate.
  • AI will double product feature releases, half of which won’t achieve rapid adoption. AI is dramatically accelerating releases of new product features, but customer adoption will not keep pace. In the face of a continuing stream of enhancements, buyers and users will struggle to understand what has changed, what delivers value, and what deserves attention. Product marketing, enablement, sales, and customer teams will struggle to keep messaging, content, and adoption programs current. The result will be growing amounts of “shelfware functionality” that customers rarely use. As innovation becomes easier to produce, adoption will become the primary constraint on growth. Winning providers will focus more on commercializing customer outcomes that are easier to understand, adopt, and measure and less on maximizing new feature output.
  • Five Fortune 500 companies will apologize for AI content that damages customer trust. As generative AI enables organizations to produce content at unprecedented speed and scale, governance will fail to keep pace. We expect public apologies tied to inaccurate claims, tone-deaf personalization, offensive messaging, intrusive experiences, and other AI-generated content failures to become more common. These incidents will not primarily be the result of bad intentions but of governance models built for traditional content operations rather than AI-powered content production. Organizations must not scale content creation faster than they scale oversight, accountability, and responsible processes. Those that fail to address these needs will expose themselves to avoidable reputational risk.

The New Competition Is For Credibility, Adoption, And Trust

For decades, B2B GTM teams could influence buying decisions by controlling information, managing messages, and guiding customer journeys. AI is fundamentally weakening that model. Buyers can validate claims independently, customers can quickly determine whether new features deliver value, and poor GTM governance can become visible at scale in a matter of hours. Competitive advantage will come from building credibility, enabling adoption, and fostering trust with every interaction and not solely based on product capabilities.

Forrester clients can read our Predictions 2027: B2B Go-To-Market report for more details about each of these predictions, plus two additional predictions. Clients can also schedule a guidance session to discuss our predictions and what they mean in your specific context.

Not a client? Download our complimentary Predictions guide for B2B go-to-market leaders, which covers our top predictions for the year ahead, and sign up for our public webinar on Thursday, December 3, where we’ll dig into those predictions in greater detail. Additional resources, including blog posts, guides, and webinars, are available on the Predictions 2027 hub.

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