Buyers skip the rep, then call one: what 2026 sales research says

Two numbers from Gartner’s 2026 research look like they contradict each other. In March, Gartner reported that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience. In May, it reported that 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. Both come from surveys of roughly 650 buyers fielded in August and September 2025.

They do not contradict each other. Together they describe how buying works now: buyers do the early research alone, often with AI, and come back to a person when they need to check what they found and commit. Below are four findings from the year’s research, what each one says, and what a sales team can do about it.

1. Buyers prefer to research without you

Gartner’s March 2026 survey of 646 B2B buyers found that 67% prefer a rep-free experience, and 45% said they used AI during a recent purchase.

What it means: the first conversation with a buyer now starts later, and the buyer arrives with opinions already formed, some of them from an AI tool. A discovery call that walks through information they could have found themselves is the call they were trying to avoid.

What to do:

• Open discovery by asking what they have already found and where they found it, then spend the call on what research cannot answer: their situation, their constraints and their decision process.
• Make the facts buyers look for easy to find without you: pricing, integrations, security answers. If they cannot find them, they will rely on whatever an AI tool tells them instead.

2. Then they come back to check

In May, Gartner reported that 69% of the 645 buyers it surveyed prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. The same survey found roughly equal distrust of both sources: 51% said they are more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI, and 49% from a sales rep.

Compared with GenAI, buyers were 39 percentage points more likely to say a rep understood their needs, and 32 points more likely to say a rep made them confident in their decision.

What it means: the rep’s job has moved from supplying information to checking it. The buyer is effectively asking, "Is what I found true for us?" A rep who can answer that with evidence earns trust. A rep who answers with claims is treated like one more unreliable source.

What to do:

• Bring evidence, not assertions: the source behind every claim, and an honest "that does not apply to you" when it does not.
• Ask buyers what their AI research told them, and correct it where it is wrong. It is the fastest way to show you understand their situation better than a general-purpose tool does.

3. AI saves sellers time, but most teams do not use it

Gartner’s May 2026 survey of 210 chief sales officers and senior sales leaders found that AI tools save sellers an average of 4.8 hours a week. It also found that 72% of sales organizations report low reinvestment of that time into high-value selling activities. Among organizations with moderate to large time savings, those that reinvested it in high-impact selling were 2.2 times more likely to exceed customer growth goals than those that reinvested less. Like any survey comparison, that shows a link, not proof of cause.

What it means: saved time does not turn into selling time on its own. Without a plan, it disappears into more email, more meetings and more admin.

What to do:

• Decide in advance where saved hours go, for example two more buyer conversations a week or one more deal review with a manager, and put that time on the calendar.
• Measure the outcome you wanted (buyer conversations, multi-threaded deals), not the hours saved.

4. Sellers need to be told what to do next

In the same week, Gartner reported that sales organizations that give sellers AI-enabled next best actions are 2.6 times more likely to achieve commercial growth, and predicted that by 2027, 95% of sellers’ research workflows will begin with AI, up from less than 20% in 2024.

What it means: the advantage is not having AI; it is turning what AI finds into a specific next step for a specific deal. This is a correlation from a survey, not proof that next-best-action tools cause growth, but it matches what most sales leaders see: deals stall when nobody knows what the next step is.

What to do:

• Give every open deal one dated next step with an owner. If a deal has no next step, that is the first thing to fix in your pipeline review.
• Review the next steps, not just the stages, on your forecast call.

The pattern behind all four

Buyers do more alone, sellers have more help from AI, and the value of a person in the process has moved to the moments that need judgment: checking what the buyer found, finding the people who decide, and agreeing on what happens next. Teams that redesign their process around those moments will get more from the same number of people. Teams that use AI to do the old process faster will mostly send more email.

How SealDeal helps

SealDeal turns replies, meetings, notes and news into one ranked next step per deal, with the evidence attached, and your team can act on it from Slack or Microsoft Teams. Prospect research cites where every fact came from, so what you tell a buyer can be checked. The CRM is free for the whole team, and you pay only for AI actions: a deal review is 1 action, and Starter is $100 a month for 1,000 actions. Sign up today at sealdeal.ai.