Buyer Behavior

B2B Buyers Let AI Agents Build Shortlists, Not Sign Contracts

G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report finds 61% of B2B buyers now use AI agents to research vendors, but almost none let an agent sign a contract.

By The Pull Desk·Today·6 min read
Buyer Behavior

B2B Buyers Let AI Agents Build Shortlists, Not Sign Contracts

The short version

THE SHORT VERSION: G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report finds 61% of B2B software buyers now use or plan to use AI agents somewhere in the purchase process, mostly for total-cost-of-ownership analysis and shortlist building. But only 9% are comfortable letting an agent execute a purchase within guardrails, and just 2% allow it without pre-approval, a wide gap between research automation and buying authority.

What happened

G2's 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, published July 22, surveyed software buyers on how AI has changed their purchase journeys. Fifty-one percent use agents to build vendor shortlists and the same share use them to understand total cost of ownership, while 47% say they're comfortable with agents researching options as long as a human retains final decision authority. The report also found review sites now edge out AI chatbots as the top source shaping shortlists, 38% to 37%, the first time review sites have reclaimed that lead since AI search tools took off. Separately, outcome-based pricing preference more than doubled year over year, from 11% in 2025 to 23% in 2026, and 91% of buyers said they're either navigating or expecting new vendor pricing structures tied to AI usage.

Why AI agents get research, not buying, authority

From the publisher

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The pattern is buyers delegating labor, not judgment. Agents are welcome to pull pricing pages, compare feature matrices, and flag total-cost surprises, because that work is tedious and low-risk to get slightly wrong. Signing a contract or committing budget is a different category entirely, one still tied to accountability that a buyer can't hand to software, especially with a CFO now involved in nearly half of all software deals. For vendors and founders selling into this motion, that means the AI-agent research layer is becoming table stakes to be discoverable in, while the actual close still runs through a human relationship and a signature someone is willing to be accountable for.

  1. Make your product legible to an AI agent doing TCO comparisons
    If 51% of buyers now use agents to size up total cost of ownership, your pricing page needs machine-readable clarity: explicit tiers, per-seat costs, and implementation timelines, not a "contact sales" wall that blocks an agent from extracting the numbers it needs.
  2. Reinvest in review sites now that they've overtaken AI chatbots
    With G2 and similar review platforms back ahead of AI chatbots as the top shortlist source, prioritize collecting fresh, specific reviews this quarter over chasing AI-citation tactics alone. Both matter, but review site presence just became the higher-leverage lever again.
  3. Offer a shorter, outcome-tied contract option explicitly
    With outcome-based pricing preference more than doubling to 23%, buyers increasingly want to pay for results, not seats. If you sell annual contracts only, test a pilot or usage-tied tier for prospects who hesitate on a full-year commitment.

By the numbers: Just 9% of buyers are comfortable letting an AI agent execute a purchase within pre-set guardrails, and only 2% would allow a fully autonomous purchase, per G2's 2026 report.

What to do this week

Open your own pricing and comparison pages and try to extract your total cost of ownership as if you were an AI agent scraping the page cold: seat cost, implementation time, and any hidden fees. If you can't answer those three questions from the page alone, an agent doing vendor comparisons for a prospect will skip you before a human on their team ever sees your name, no matter how strong your actual product is.

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