AI is rapidly transforming how B2B tech buyers evaluate vendors and make purchase decisions. The closest comparison we have to this moment is 1996, when we entered the digital era, a revolution that massively changed customer behavior, markets, and entire go-to-market strategies and activities.
What’s different today is that growth is exponentially faster and greater. At this speed, technology vendors can no longer build assumptions based on what happened last year, last quarter, or even last month.
That means as we enter the AI and agentic era, CMOs and senior marketing leaders must rethink the way they plan. There’s incredible incentive to do so right now. Your buyers have already moved. They’re not only relying on AI to research and prioritize vendors, but they’re also using agents to act on their behalf. In fact, 80% of B2B tech buyers say they would use an agent in a complex transaction like responding to an RFI, IDC research shows.
Now is the time to transform your marketing plan and adapt to the new AI-mediated buyer journey.
In a recent IDC webinar, “2027 Marketing Planning: Intelligence-Led Strategy for a Market That Won’t Hold Still,” Laurie Buczek, IDC Group Vice President of Market and Business Intelligence, presented an intelligence-based framework for marketing strategy and planning. Her advice: CMOs and marketing leaders need to move fast and orchestrate AI across their marketing operations if they want to meet the CEO’s growth expectations.
With the market moving rapidly, CMOs and marketing leaders have a CEO-driven imperative to integrate AI and use it to drive growth. They’ll have to fill gaps in AI expectations between the C-suite and technology operations, but with careful planning they can advance their marketing strategy. As discussed in the webinar, there are several important trends CMOs must understand.
The rising importance of timely market assessments
To meet the CEO’s growth expectations, CMOs need to understand where they should place their bets. That’s especially tough in an AI-driven market, where intelligence ages fast. What was accurate six months ago could be false today, so they need to understand and validate findings continuously.
AI is ideal for this, and it’s what IDC Quanta is designed to deliver. CMOs can ask questions about market potential, sizing, and benchmarks, and receive a comprehensive overview about what the market looks like and where the opportunities are – all with just a single conversation.
Built primarily on IDC data and analyst intelligence, IDC Quanta can be layered on top of an organization’s proprietary data to get a more precise and accurate view. It will synthesize all of the information and create a detailed narrative quickly. CMOs can validate further and get advice from IDC analysts to fine tune the assessment and tailor it to their businesses.
Don’t wait for last quarter’s playbook to catch up. Watch the full webinar replay for the strategy built for a market that won’t hold still.
The evolution of the new buying committee
New buyers are emerging – and CMOs will need to be prepared with new messaging and new types of content to win them over. It’s no longer just the CIO or IT leader. In the AI and agentic era, full organizational orchestration is a priority, so the COO has significant sway over buying decisions. In addition, 42% of CEOs say they plan to hire a Chief AI Officer in the next 12 months.
As the focus increases on business process transformation, business leaders from across the organization are gaining a seat at the table. Security and governance concerns are also pulling the CISO back into the buying committee, as AI governance becomes core to the purchase decision.
Each buyer will have their own concerns and objections, which will require marketing teams to develop and personalize messaging and content for each.
Trust stalls AI adoption
Trust is one of the top barriers to AI adoption. Less than 5% of CXOs find fully autonomous agentic AI to be appealing, IDC’s research shows. There’s a certain level of caution that technology vendors must overcome to move buyers.
To do so, they will need to reframe how they position their solutions. CMOs can address the trust issue by focusing on innovation, strategic value, and how their technology will drive business transformation. It’s crucial to emphasize that agents will collaborate with humans. Messaging should also build confidence in how governance will be overarching, encompassing autonomous agents.
The AI-mediated buyer journey changes marketing
As B2B tech buyers integrate AI into more of their journey, CMOs need to orchestrate both human and AI interactions across the entire experience. Already, 63% of buyers say they always and often use AI to discover and evaluate vendors, and 80% say they trust information they receive from their AI-mediated journey to make sound business decisions. They’re even using AI for research typically conducted by humans in the past: 68% say they use AI to gain deeper technical understanding of how products and services work.
Technology vendors are finding that buyers are rewriting the rules for marketing. Today, they must market to both humans and AI. That means creating new content to meet the need of human buyers and attract the attention of AI engines. In this AI-mediated buyer journey, marketing teams need an entirely new content playbook: prioritizing interactive content over static, developing immersive content that allows buyers to experience your products, and creating hyper personalized content for a variety of personas.
This new AI-mediated buyer journey with both humans and AI means marketers need to rewire how they think about how things get done. Buyers are using AI to research and compare vendors. Technology vendors also need to integrate AI into their marketing process. And CMOs become the orchestrator of a combined human and AI workforce.
The characteristics that define leaders
A small cohort of technology vendors are adapting to the new journey faster than any of their competitors. These leaders that are transforming their global marketing organizations have the following characteristics in common:
- Strategy: Comprehensive AI marketing strategy backed by strong executive sponsorship.
- Focus: Innovation over efficiency, with humans and AI working together.
- Workforce: AI-enabled teams supported by ongoing change management.
- Foundation: Automated workflows built on advanced data and a real-time MarTech stack.
How to build an intelligence-led marketing strategy
So, what are the steps for building your 2027 intelligence-led marketing strategy and framework to keep pace with a rapidly changing buyer journey?
- Plan. IDC Quanta can help you quickly identify and understand growth and market opportunities.
- Assess. Evaluate your organization’s maturity across five areas: strategy, people and organization, processes, governance, data and technology. How far have you integrated or transformed your marketing process?
- Sequence your 2027 investment. Build a phased roadmap based on your readiness. Don’t fund everything at once.
- Make the case to your CFO. Focus on the value AI will bring to the organization in terms of gains and savings, backing it up with IDC data. For instance, 29% of mid-market B2B tech marketers expect an increase in marketing ROI within the next 12 to 18 months.
Our webinar covers each of these steps in greater detail. If you’re ready to jumpstart your strategic marketing plan and begin orchestrating the AI-mediated buyer journey, watch the replay of the full webinar today.
