Your buyers are asking AI about you. Here’s what that means for the first call
Half of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot. By the time they book a demo, they’ve already been told a story about you. The first call is where you find out if it’s true.
What you will learn
- How many software buyers now start their research with AI chatbots?
- How much do AI answers change which vendors make the shortlist?
- How should the first sales call change when buyers arrive pre-briefed by AI?
In this article
A buyer asks ChatGPT for the best tools for a ten-person sales team in the UK. It gives four names and a paragraph on each. Two of the paragraphs are about you, and one of them is wrong.
This is now how a lot of software shortlists begin.
What G2 found
In March 2026, G2 surveyed more than 1,000 B2B software decision-makers for its AI search report. The headline numbers:
- 51% now start software research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google.
- 71% use AI chatbots somewhere in their research.
- 54% say AI chatbots influence their shortlist. Only 19% said the same of a vendor’s salesperson.
- 69% ended up choosing a different vendor from the one they first planned on because of an AI chatbot, and a third bought from a vendor they’d never heard of.
- 64% often come across inaccurate AI answers.
The shortlist forms before you know the buyer exists
Put those together and you get an uncomfortable picture. The most influential part of the buying journey now happens in a conversation you’re not in, using information you don’t control, which is frequently wrong.
By the time someone clicks “Book a demo”, they arrive with a set of beliefs about your pricing, features and competitors. Some will be right. Some will be months out of date. Some will be invented.
The first sales call has become a fact-check.
Why that’s good news for the first call
Buyers know AI gets things wrong, and they want someone to check. In Gartner’s 2026 research, 69% of B2B buyers said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. We explored this in why buyers want a rep-free experience, until they don’t.
That makes the first conversation more valuable, but it changes its job. It’s less about presenting and more about confirming, correcting and showing.
How to run a first call for an AI-briefed buyer
- Ask where they’ve looked. “What have you read about us so far?” surfaces the AI’s version of you in seconds.
- Correct gently and specifically. If they’ve been told you lack an integration you have, show it working on screen.
- Be straight about real gaps. Admitting what you don’t do builds more trust than any feature.
- Talk numbers. Pricing is one of the things AI most often gets wrong or out of date. Give real figures.
- Show, don’t describe. A live product demo settles questions that a dozen AI answers can’t.
Help the AI tell your story better
You can’t control AI answers, but you can make the right information easy to find. Clear pricing and feature pages, honest comparison pages, up-to-date reviews on sites like G2 and plain-English answers to common questions all give AI tools better material to work with. G2’s research found that citations of review sites are what make buyers trust an AI answer most.
The bottom line
Buyers are arriving at your demo better informed and occasionally misinformed. The teams that win are the ones ready, at the moment the buyer asks, to check what they’ve heard and show them what’s real.