Your Buyer Has Moved. Has Your GTM? What IDC’s 2026 Data Means for Your Sales Funnel
IDC ·
If it feels like buyers are bypassing your branded content, you’d be right. Until recently, technology company websites were key stops for buyers on the information superhighway. That stopped being true the moment AI tools became buyers’ default starting point. Your traffic is being rerouted onto the AI expressway: the high-speed road that eschews off-ramps […] The post Your Buyer Has Moved. Has Your GTM? What IDC’s 2026 Data Means for Your Sales Funnel appeared first on IDC .
If it feels like buyers are bypassing your branded content, you’d be right.
Until recently, technology company websites were key stops for buyers on the information superhighway. That stopped being true the moment AI tools became buyers’ default starting point.
Your traffic is being rerouted onto the AI expressway: the high-speed road that eschews off-ramps and at-grade crosses. Since it’s built for speedy decision-making, the AI exit is enticing buyers faster than marketing teams can adapt their go-to-market strategies.
As technology companies struggle to keep pace, here’s where the shift is already showing up in sales funnels, starting with how buyers evaluate vendors today.
Here’s how fast buyers are merging onto the expressway. During the evaluation stage, 68% of buyers say they use AI always or often to compare products and solution features across vendors. In addition, 70% say they use it always or often to research industry and technology trends.
It’s easy to see why. Ask AI to evaluate a dozen vendors and it can research and analyze all of them at once. A buyer’s favorite AI tools can analyze vendor offerings according to specific preferences and deliver customized rankings – all within a couple of minutes.
What buyers aren’t doing as often is asking your sales team for information, even after they’ve narrowed the list down to two or three vendors.
As buyers bypass your website and your sales team exerts less influence, your vendor content is losing to AI tools and analyst sources.
Nearly half, 46%, of today’s buyers say they turn to AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to evaluate vendors, while 45% trust industry experts and analysts. Yet only 33% rely on the vendor salesperson as an active evaluation source, and vendor website usage as an evaluation source has dropped from 66% to just 37%, as buyers increasingly treat vendor-published content as marketing rather than something to lean on.
This distrust has created a credibility gap.
Senior leaders now demand greater scrutiny of sources, and they’re creating checkpoints to verify claims before making a buying decision. Ninety percent of enterprise legal buyers are writing AI clauses into guidelines, creating formal triggers to challenge unsupported vendor claims.
Want the numbers on one page? Download the infographic for a quick look at the three stats reshaping how buyers evaluate vendors.
So, buyers have moved. Their AI preferences have restructured the journey.
But vendors? Most haven’t adapted their go-to-market strategy, and they aren’t keeping pace. Their sales and website content is the equivalent of a once-loved, now-forgotten exit on the old information superhighway, still fully staffed while the traffic moved somewhere else.
But not every vendor is stuck on fading superhighways or dusty intersections. Some are adapting to the new AI reality and aligning their go-to-market strategies to match the AI-mediated buyer journey.
A small cohort is pulling ahead. Just 3.1% of organizations have reached the optimized AI maturity stage, up from just 0.4% a year ago. These vendors have moved quickly to close the gaps in strategic decision making, sales enablement, and data and governance.
For vendors struggling to keep up, these organizations offer clear signposts of where to head next. The good news? They don’t have bigger teams or excess resources. Instead, they’re restructuring their GTM strategies to deliver intelligence in the right places along the AI expressway.
Today’s technology vendors can accelerate their GTM transformations by understanding how these leaders have mapped their operations to the buyer journey. These diagnostic questions about your GTM stack are a good place to start.
Once you know where you stand, benchmark against the leaders and map your plan for meeting buyers on the AI expressway.
Find out who’s leading, why, and what you can do to adapt your go-to-market strategy to today’s AI-mediated buyer journey.
IDC’s full report breaks down the maturity gap by GTM function and includes IDC’s worldwide AI software market share data. Download it here .
The post Your Buyer Has Moved. Has Your GTM? What IDC’s 2026 Data Means for Your Sales Funnel appeared first on IDC .