From Humans to AI Agents: Rewiring B2B Lead Funnels (Part 2)

In this 2-part series covering the new rules of B2B marketing in an AI-first world, we see how AI can really move the needle where businesses can see revenue growth, customer retention and increased productivity.

In Part 1, we expanded on the value of contextual AI, and observed how combining your unique first party data to your AI models via API integration and further layering it with public 3rd party data, you can uncover valuable insights, create tailored offerings, and refine processes that provide a competitive edge.

In Part 2, we now examien the changing buyer dynamics due to generative AI and agentic AI, understanding the biggest shifts in how decisions are made today.

From Humans to AI Agents: Rewiring B2B Lead Funnels (Part 2)

With the rise of AI agents, we are observing a change in the buying network for B2B purchases. Apart from internal buyers that are part of the organization making the purchase, there is a shift to agentic AI buyers trained in the industry context and armed with specific criteria to support buyer research and vendor recommendations.

According to Capgemini, 14% of organizations have already implemented AI agents, 12% at partial scale, 2% at full scale and nearly one-quarter (23%) have launched pilots, while another 31% are preparing for or exploring deployment in the next 6-12 months.

Increasingly, there is so much experimentation (61%) with AI agents to drive productivity and it’s vital to equip them with industry-specific context and rich vertical and horizontal feature sets to release agentic AI’s potential.

AI-powered agentic commerce

AI Agents are built using generative AI models to make decisions and take action either semi or fully autonomously. Imagine a future where an AI agent can buy securely and seamlessly either supervised or in a fully automated manner, trained by your unique first party data with the context and reasoning to create action plans and next steps. This trend will transform the way B2B customers handle procurement, from selecting suppliers, onboarding them and managing purchases, even post-purchase management.

How to Market for Machines, Not Just Humans

While the use of agentic AI is moving from the pilot stage to actual live use cases, how can marketers win in the age of Agentic AI?

Here are 4 ways:

1. Automate for Human or AI buyer group discovery

Marketers need to assess the new mix of buyer profiles. Are they a mix of internal buyers and external influencers, human or AI buyers? Are decisions collaborative between both human and AI or can the machine make decisions autonomously?

With the use of AI intent-based buyer signals, competitive intel and CRM data tracking new customer wins and win/loss takeaways, marketers can have a better understanding on buyer groups and designing campaign pathways specific to them – whether they are human or AI buyers.

2. Accelerate campaign execution with Generative AI

AI, if used well, can help you amplify a strong campaign and retention strategy. With a mix of both human and AI buyers, Generative AI can help marketers to accelerate the campaign journey creation process from audience segmenting, decision logic (creation of split paths etc), customizing content and coordination across multiple platforms.

Marketers who can integrate their own in-house first party client data, providing their AI with context from their CRM, will have more accurate account-based targeting and better recommendations on next-best action in terms of content and channel engagements.

According to Gartner’s AI in Marketing study, brands saw a 34% faster path to optimization via A/B testing of AI-generated variants. One can expand a single content piece both globally and locally and optimize for a variety of digital channels in various market contexts and languages.

3. Be API-friendly and machine readable

With nearly 70% B2B buyers through their purchasing process before engaging with vendors, purchase journeys have to be well-designed. Marketers need to ask themselves if their campaign contents and value proposition can be understood by an agent without human intervention.

Ensure your digital content is rendered for both front-end users and the back-end with structured metadata. Build trust by making your descriptors and benefit statements for human buyers and agents to process and make meaningful comparison.

For your brand’s website, this can be done on the backend with robot-readable structured content elements like FAQ schema, products and solutions schema. Both these tactics help contribute to stronger search results in both traditional SEO and Gen AI assisted searches.

4. Build trust with external validation

With the increased reliance on external validation from market analysts and review sites in purchase decisions, one needs to ensure that your product review and ratings can be easily digestible and are from verified sources. By integrating 3^rd party reviews via APIs into your digital and web content, you can ensure easy access by both humans and agentic buyers. 

Also, build human and agentic trust by broadcasting that your product is compliant or certified under recognized international standards such as ISO, GDPR, ESG etc. – a key criterion that buyers can checkbox.

These 4 tactics can help propel potential human or AI agentic buyers forward in the buying cycle, significantly accelerating the sales process by clearly demonstrating value. This proactive marketing approach secures a pivotal role in management decisions, influencing the go-to-market strategy and showcasing its undeniable impact on overall business revenue outcomes.

Final Thoughts

The future of B2B marketing will belong to those that use AI effectively, along with the best of what humans can offer including complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence and prioritising ethics and trust.

AI is here to collaboratively help us work faster, make better choices, and get better results but it requires the humans to be trained and finetuned.

Think of AI as an extension of your marketing team, giving you more time to focus on higher value tasks and more on what really matters, such as building strong relationships, adding value and connecting with your buyers.

With the changing buyer dynamics, AI tools are now influencing choices more than ever, so marketers need to anticipate the needs for both human and AI buyers. Start now and use AI with purpose to stay ahead.