Originally published January 2021. Updated June 2026.

Forty-four percent of B2B buyers used to start with a salesperson. Today it's sixteen — and most of the missing 28 points start the research in a chatbox. Wunderman Thompson called the salesperson decline back in 2020. It missed where the conversation moved next.

The 2021 piece on this page documented the COVID-era shift. Direct sales collapsed. Agility became survival. AI took over Tier 1 support. Supply chain became part of the brand. Adobe called the result B2E — Business to Everyone — when 70% of companies started operating as a hybrid of B2B and B2C. Five years on, that framing held. Customer trust is the dominant competitive variable, and the variable gets evaluated inside an AI engine before any sales conversation begins.

What changed since 2021

Buyers research vendors inside the chatbox. A CFO comparing payments platforms. A CIO sizing up cybersecurity. A head of procurement scoping logistics. All increasingly start the question in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews. The engines name vendors. Named vendors get the RFP. Unnamed vendors don't get the meeting.

Named founders carry more weight in B2B than B2C. Patrick Collison at Stripe. George Kurtz at CrowdStrike. Frank Slootman during Snowflake. Toby Lütke at Shopify. Brian Moynihan at Bank of America. The named operator on the record — long-form essays, conference keynotes, customer calls, podcast appearances — is what the engines cite. Ghost-written "thought leadership" reads as marketing copy and gets retrieved as marketing copy.

Customer testimony is the corpus. Named customer, named outcome, named date. Logo walls don't move retrieval. Detailed case studies on owned domains do.

Two budgets, one discipline. PR, content marketing, GEO, AI-visibility research, customer success, product marketing — one integrated job at the firms that win. Four siloed budgets at the firms that don't.

What B2B operators do in 2026

  • Founder voice on standing cadence. Long-form, dated, on the owned domain.

  • Named-customer case studies with specifics. Logo walls don't compound. Detailed cases do.

  • One integrated communications discipline. PR + GEO + AI-visibility research, one budget, one leader.

  • Quarterly Citation Share audit. Against the named B2B competitors in the category. The number predicts the next four quarters of pipeline.

  • Crisis-readiness corpus before the event. Security incident, customer dispute, executive transition — pre-write it.

Cross-Network Coverage

5W AI Communications operates the B2B PR practice across enterprise software, cybersecurity, fintech, healthcare IT, logistics, manufacturing, and B2B SaaS. Integrated earned media, founder voice, customer storytelling, analyst relations, GEO, and digital PR as one discipline.

Everything-PR tracks B2B and corporate communications — exec moves, M&A, analyst-firm dynamics, named-CEO reputation arcs, enterprise crisis events.

Related pillars

Financial Services PR · Technology PR · Cybersecurity PR · PR ROI · Brand Positioning · Marketing · Citation Share — The New KPI

Frequently Asked

What changed about B2B marketing between 2021 and 2026?
The 2021 shifts compounded. The new one: enterprise buyers research vendors inside AI engines before any sales conversation. Cited brands get the meeting. Uncited brands don't.

What is Citation Share for B2B?
The percentage of AI engine answers — across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — that name the brand when a CFO, CIO, CRO, or head of procurement asks the category question. For B2B, it predicts pipeline more reliably than MQLs or SQLs.

Why does founder voice carry more weight in B2B than B2C?
B2B buyers weight named accountability more heavily. The engines do the same. Founder content compounds because enterprise buyers buy from operators they can identify by name. Ghost-written content doesn't.

Where do I read more on the 5W B2B practice?
5wpr.com/practice/b2b-pr-firm.cfm.

Originally published January 4, 2021. Updated June 2026.

Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.