Three Important Insights on Buyer Use of AI

Source:  TrustRadius

TrustRadius, an HG Insights company, recently published its "2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report." TrustRadius has been conducting the buying disconnect research since 2017.

The 2026 report describes several important behaviors of business technology buyers, including how they use artificial intelligence (AI) in their buying process. The latest report is based on two surveys that were conducted in January 2026.

• A survey of professionals who were involved in a technology purchase for their organization in the previous year. This survey produced 1,862 complete and verified responses.

• A survey of members of go-to-market teams for technology vendors, which produced 444 complete and verified responses.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of the buyer survey respondents were millennials (ages 29-45). Forty-eight percent (48%) of the buyer respondents' purchases had purchase prices of less than $10,000, and an additional 24% of the purchases had purchase prices of $11,000 to $50,000.

AI is rapidly becoming pervasive in virtually every corner of the business world, so it shouldn't be surprising that it is having an impact on business technology buying. The 2026 TrustRadius report contains several valuable insights about the use of AI by business technology buyers, and this post will focus on those insights.

The following table depicts some of the AI-related findings contained in the 2026 TrustRadius report and also shows comparable results from the 2025 and 2024 editions of the TrustRadius research.

Buyers' Use of AI Has Grown Dramatically

As the above table shows, 63% of the 2026 buyer survey respondents said they used AI at some point in their buying process. That was up from 38% of buyers in the 2025 edition of the TrustRadius research and 21% in the 2024 research.

In my view, this dramatic increase in buyer use of AI is due in large part to the appearance of "AI Overviews" in Google search results.

Google introduced AI Overviews in the U.S. in May 2024 and by October of that year, Google had rolled out AI Overviews in 100 countries. AI Overviews leverage generative AI to provide an immediate answer to a searcher's query. Microsoft's Bing search engine is also now providing AI-generated summaries in search results, so AI-generated content is difficult for B2B buyers to avoid when doing search-based research.

Most Buyers See AI as Helpful

A majority (54%) of the respondents to the 2026 buyer survey said that AI makes their research process more efficient by making it easier to find the information they need. That was up from 40% of buyers in the 2025 TrustRadius study and only 20% in the 2024 research.

Meanwhile, the percentage of survey respondents reporting that AI had no impact on their buying process fell from 45% in 2025 to 29% in 2026.

Most Buyers (Sort Of) Trust AI Content

The TrustRadius research suggests that most B2B technology buyers are willing to trust content produced by AI in some cases, but not unconditionally.

In the 2026 buyer survey, 82% of the respondents said they trust AI content sometimes, very often, or always. That was up slightly from 80% in the TrustRadius 2025 buyer survey and up substantially from 61% in the 2024 survey.

However, most B2B technology buyers don't trust AI-produced content completely. Ninety-three percent (93%) of the respondents to the 2026 buyer survey said they fact check AI content sometimes, very often, or always. That was up from 85% in the 2025 edition of the survey.

What is more telling is that 72% of the respondents to the 2026 buyer survey said they fact check AI content very often or always. That was up from only 58% in the 2025 survey.

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Addendum

Just after I finished writing this post, 6sense published the results of its 2026 B2B buyer experience study. This study is an important piece of research, and I plan to discuss it in detail in a future post.

The 2026 6sense study is based on three surveys, and those surveys produced several findings relating to how B2B buyers are using AI - specifically, large language models (LLM's). So, it seems appropriate to add a couple of these findings to this post.

The 6sense study found that most B2B buyers are experienced professionals who begin their buying processes with significant prior category knowledge and previous category experience, and that over 90% of buyers keep current about relevant categories and solutions between buying cycles.

The study also found, however, that most B2B buyers don't use LLM's for this purpose. When the 6sense survey participants were asked what channels of information they use to keep current between active buying processes, the top four channels selected by survey respondents (from a list of 11) were:

• Vendor websites (35.9% of respondents)
• Industry events and conferences (33.4%)
• Product review sites (31.4%)
• Industry publications or media (31.3%)

Large language models were the information channel chosen by the lowest percentage of survey respondents (at only 15.0%).

The buyers responding to the 6sense surveys reported a substantial level of trust in LLM's. Over half of the respondents (51.8%%) said they have a high level of trust in LLM"s, and another 36.5% reported having a moderate level of trust in LLM's.