By Tom Whitfield

More than 60% of B2B buyers use or plan to use AI agents in the software buying process, according to G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, "The Evaluation Maze." Buyers deploy agents for research, shortlisting, and comparison while keeping final decisions with humans. For now.

Sales organizations keep investing in technology to make reps more efficient. Their buyers are learning to hand those same tasks to their own agents. That asymmetry, not AI capability alone, is what will decide whether sales jobs survive.

How far are buyers already going?

Automated procurement systems already purchase software licenses, cloud capacity, and supply chain inputs with no humans on either side of the transaction.

In Gartner's latest buyer survey, 45% of respondents said they used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information on vendors and products. Gartner also found 69% of B2B buyers still turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights.

Forrester's numbers cut harder. In its 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey, generative AI and conversational search ranked ahead of vendor websites, sales reps, and product experts as information sources for B2B buyers. Yet nearly one in five buyers who use generative AI say it made them less confident about purchasing decisions because of unreliable information.

AI still cannot navigate the buying group, corporate culture, and industry dynamics such as regulation, mainly because that data is not captured. The open question is whether "further into the process" eventually means "all the way."

What do buyers trust a human for?

Trust in a sales relationship comes down to three components:

• Competence: Do you know what you are talking about?
• Reliability: Will you be right, and will you follow through?
• Alignment: Are you on my side?

AI is closing the competence gap fast. It already out-researches most reps on product specs, pricing models, and competitive comparisons. Reliability is the one-in-five problem: every hallucinated feature or outdated price chips away at it. But that is an engineering problem, and engineering problems tend to get solved.

Alignment is the hard one.

Whose agent holds the trust?

When a buyer talks to a vendor's AI, they know whose side it is on. It is a salesperson that never sleeps, and buyers discount it accordingly. That is not a threat to the human seller. If anything, it makes a credible human more valuable.

The real threat is the buyer's own agent. A buyer does not need to trust your rep or your AI if they trust the agent working for them. That agent researches vendors, compares options, flags risks, and negotiates terms.

Trust does not transfer from the human seller to the vendor's machine. It transfers from the seller to the buyer's machine. AI will not kill sales jobs — buyers will, the moment they trust their own agent more than they trust your rep.

Where does the shift happen first?

The displacement is already underway at the transactional end: renewals, commodity inputs, cloud capacity, and standard software licenses. Low risk, repeatable, easy to measure. No one needs a relationship to reorder something that worked last year.

Complex, high-stakes deals will hold out longer — not because the information is harder to process, but because the risk is personal. When a buying group commits to a seven-figure platform, someone's reputation is on the line. Buyers want someone to call when implementation goes sideways. They want someone who will walk into the CFO's office with them. An AI cannot be held accountable, and accountability is a big part of what buyers are paying for.

Then there is the invisible work: knowing the IT director and the VP of operations do not get along, sensing a champion losing political capital, reading a "no budget" objection as "not this quarter." That knowledge lives in hallway conversations and side calls, and most of it never reaches a CRM.

Do not take too much comfort in that. Call recordings, email, Slack, and meeting transcripts capture more of those dynamics every year. The data gap protecting human sellers today is quietly shrinking.

What should sales leaders do?

Sales organizations are investing heavily in making sellers more efficient at the exact tasks buyers are learning to hand off to their own agents.

The skills that keep a human at the center of the deal — exercising judgment, navigating buying group politics, translating risk into confidence, and owning the outcome — do not come bundled with a software license. They have to be developed.

The question for every sales organization is not whether AI will get good enough to replace their reps. It is whether their reps will give buyers a reason to keep them in the room when it does.

Buyers will decide. They always have.