The Buyer Journey Just Skipped the Funnel

There’s a strange thing happening in B2B right now. Marketers are pouring budget into campaigns, optimizing funnels, fine-tuning messaging, yet buyers are slipping further out of reach. It’s not that demand has dried up. It’s that the way people discover, research, and decide has quietly changed.

Think about it. A procurement manager no longer leans on a vendor pitch first. They ask their AI copilot to compare options. A marketing team considering new software doesn’t sit through endless demos. They run self-serve trials, read peer reviews, and only talk to sales once they’re 70 percent convinced. A founder looking for a tool doesn’t land on your blog via search the way they once did. They skim an AI summary, and if you’re not cited there, you don’t exist.

This isn’t theory. Forrester says more than half of large B2B deals, those over a million dollars, will close through digital self-service by 2025. PwC reports that nearly 80 percent of organizations already use AI agents to accelerate decisions. And Bain notes that up to 80 percent of consumers rely on zero-click results in 40 percent of their searches. The evidence is everywhere.

In Edition 58 of Vik’s M.I.X., we’re unpacking what this means for us as marketers and leaders.

Here’s what we’ll break down today:

• AI-agents are moving from shiny demos to real buying copilots

• Self-service is rewriting the rules of big-ticket B2B deals

• Search is shifting from pages to answers and the click is disappearing

Grab your coffee. By the end, you’ll see how these three threads tie together into one message: the buyer is building their own path, with AI quietly steering in the background.

AI-Agents & Multimodal Hyperpersonalization

The easiest way to dismiss AI-agents is to call them another passing tech fad. The harder but more useful view is this: they are quickly becoming the middle layer between your brand and your buyer.

Forrester and PwC data already show the trend. Nearly 80 percent of organizations are using some form of AI agent, and 96 percent plan to expand usage in 2025. PwC’s survey breaks down the benefits: 66 percent of leaders report productivity gains, 57 percent cost savings, and over half faster decision making. That’s not a lab experiment. That’s enterprise workflow being rebuilt in real time.

Now picture how this plays out in B2B buying. Instead of the old playbook where a manager downloads your whitepaper, sets up a demo, and talks to sales, the new flow looks different. The manager types into their AI copilot: “Compare Vendor A vs Vendor B for data security, total cost of ownership, and peer reviews.” Within seconds, they have a side-by-side summary, pulled from public sources, analyst notes, and even company filings. If your brand isn’t showing up cleanly and credibly in that agent’s answer, you’ve lost the deal before sales even knows it existed.

Brands are already testing what this future feels like. Salesforce ’s Einstein GPT is embedding agent-style copilots into CRM workflows so reps and buyers both interact with AI guidance. HubSpot ’s AI assistants can draft emails, build workflows, and surface recommendations in-app, creating a “trained agent” that knows customer context. Microsoft Copilot is expanding across Office and Teams, where procurement and finance teams increasingly rely on it to interpret contracts and compare vendor terms. On the procurement side, Walmart famously deployed Pactum’s autonomous negotiation bots to handle long-tail supplier deals. These bots are fed Walmart’s objectives and negotiate accordingly is proof that the largest companies are comfortable letting agents make commercial calls on their behalf.

Closer to home, Indian SaaS players are pushing hard too. SuperOps in Chennai has launched an agent marketplace for managed service providers, reducing manual workload by 40 percent in early pilots. Zycus is experimenting with procurement agents that not only flag risks but suggest cost optimization strategies. BrowserStack is layering AI into testing workflows, giving developers agent-style copilots that cut hours off repetitive test cycles. These aren’t gimmicks, they’re competitive levers.

The multimodal twist makes it even bigger. Agents are no longer text-only bots. They process voice queries, parse screenshots, interpret videos, and output results across formats. A CIO can literally say, “Show me how Vendor X’s uptime compares to Vendor Y, and summarize last year’s earnings calls,” and get an answer with charts and citations. That’s what buyers will grow used to.

So where does that leave marketing? The tactical play isn’t to build your own agent tomorrow. It’s to recognize that buyers will increasingly rely on them. Which means your content, pricing, FAQs, product documentation, and customer proof points need to be structured in ways that agents can pull, interpret, and rank with authority. Think structured data, clear positioning, transparent pricing, clean case studies, and analyst references. Think about training the agent as much as targeting the human.

Here’s the hard truth: you can’t outshout an AI agent with ads. But you can earn your way into its answers by being the most credible, structured, and agent-ready source in your category. The brands that treat AI-agents as the new gatekeepers won’t just get discovered, they’ll get trusted by default.

Digital Self-Service & Buyer Autonomy

The cliché about B2B buyers wanting “more control” is no longer just lip service. It’s now quantifiable, boardroom-level reality. Forrester predicts that by 2025, more than half of all large B2B purchases worth over a million dollars will be processed through digital self-service. Think about that for a second. Deals that used to take steak dinners, week-long RFPs, and a parade of account reps are increasingly being handled through online portals, self-serve demos, and automated workflows.

And the driver is simple: buyers don’t want a rep in the room unless they absolutely need one. McKinsey & Company’s global B2B survey found that decision makers now spend only 17 percent of their total buying time meeting with potential suppliers. The rest is spent researching independently, comparing notes with peers, or testing products themselves. That means in practice your sales team is competing for just a sliver of attention, and often entering after the shortlist is already locked.

Look at how the strongest brands are adapting. Adobe has perfected the trial-to-enterprise pathway. A designer can start with a free Creative Cloud trial, swipe a credit card for a Pro license, and only months later, once adoption is widespread, the enterprise team gets involved to negotiate a broader contract. Canva ’s growth story is similar: teams self-onboard with Pro, adoption spreads bottom-up, and suddenly IT realizes they need a company-wide deal. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has built its empire on a consumption model where the easiest way to buy more is… to simply use more. No rep required.

Even in enterprise support, companies are leaning hard on self-service to reduce friction. Salesforce integrated @Coveo’s AI-powered search into its help and documentation, cutting 20,000 support cases annually and saving roughly $2 million a year. That’s not just efficiency, it’s proof that buyers and users prefer solving problems without escalation.

Closer to India, apna has built a massive professional marketplace where AI-driven job matching happens without recruiter intervention. Buyers and seekers alike rely on algorithmic recommendations, which is a preview of how discovery and purchase can bypass human brokers.

The signal is clear: autonomy isn’t a “small deal” behavior anymore. It’s moving upstream into million-dollar procurement decisions. And when buyers want autonomy, the experience you offer digitally matters more than any relationship-building your reps think they can do later.

For marketers, the tactical takeaway is sharp: your website is your top-performing salesperson. Not your SDR, not your outbound sequence. The quality of your digital experience determines whether buyers progress on their own or bounce back to competitors. That means clear product pages, transparent pricing where possible, interactive demos, sandboxes, resource hubs, and peer proof. It also means reducing friction, buyers won’t fill out six-field forms just to see a demo anymore.

The irony is that autonomy doesn’t weaken relationships. It strengthens them, because by the time buyers engage, they’ve already built confidence in your brand through self-service. The real opportunity isn’t to fight self-service but to design for it.

The companies that will win aren’t the ones who can out-negotiate in a boardroom, but the ones who can out-deliver in a browser window.

AI-Driven Search & Discovery Shifts

Search has always been the frontline of discovery in B2B. But the rules of that game are quietly evaporating. For two decades, the marketer’s playbook was simple: optimize for keywords, climb the Google rankings, and win the click. Today, that click is vanishing.

Bain research shows that 80 percent of consumers now rely on zero-click results for at least 40 percent of their searches. @SearchEngineLand reports that in the US, the share of searches ending without a click jumped to 27 percent, with a similar rise in Europe. And Pew Research Center search found that when Google displays an AI-generated summary, users are significantly less likely to click through to results. Add in AI-native engines like Perplexity, and the pattern is undeniable: the buyer journey is moving from pages to direct answers.

For marketers, this is more than a traffic dip. It’s a trust shift. Buyers are beginning to rely on generative summaries, produced by large language models, as their first and sometimes only source of validation. In a large-scale academic experiment across 12,000 queries, trust in AI search rose dramatically when results included citations, even if those citations weren’t fully accurate. In other words, buyers don’t just want answers, they want answers that look anchored. If your brand isn’t cited, you’re invisible. If you are cited, you’re suddenly positioned as authoritative, even if you didn’t orchestrate it directly.

Brands are experimenting with how to ride this shift. Notion has built extensive structured documentation, FAQs, and use-case libraries, designed to be easily ingested and surfaced by AI search engines. Canva has leaned into short, clear explainers and use-case examples that appear in Perplexity answers. HubSpot has started creating AI-ready content hubs with structured data and schema markup, ensuring their guides are discoverable not just by Google, but by AI summaries.

Some companies are going even further. Xponent21, a US-based marketing firm, grew organic traffic more than 4,000 percent in under a year by deliberately optimizing for AI search. Their playbook included concise explainers, structured markup, and content designed for AI summarization rather than traditional SEO. It’s a glimpse of what “AI-SEO” looks like. In India, Google’s new AI Mode is already live in Labs, with multimodal support for voice, image, and complex queries, proof that discovery is getting even less text-bound.

So what do we do? The tactical takeaway is this: stop optimizing only for humans reading pages, and start optimizing for machines that summarize. That means structuring your data so it can be parsed cleanly, investing in authoritative references that AI engines pick up, and creating multi-format content - text, video, infographics that aligns with multimodal queries. It also means thinking about the new kinds of keywords buyers are using. Instead of “best CRM software,” they’re asking “which CRM has the fastest implementation for a mid-sized SaaS team with under 200 employees?” If your content doesn’t answer that, an AI summary will hand the stage to your competitor.

We’re entering a world where “being found” isn’t about page one of Google, but about being the trusted citation in a buyer’s AI agent feed. The brands that adapt will own the invisible first impression, the moment when a buyer reads a summary and decides, without a single click, that

you’re credible.

To Conclude

If you step back, these three shifts aren’t separate trends. They’re strands of the same story.

AI-agents are becoming the copilots shaping what information buyers see first. Self-service is turning digital experiences into the main arena where decisions are made. And AI-driven search is rewriting discovery so that trust flows through summaries and citations instead of page-one rankings.

Put them together and the funnel we grew up with looks almost quaint. Buyers aren’t moving step by step from awareness to consideration to decision. They’re moving in loops, with AI agents, peers, and digital platforms doing most of the heavy lifting. By the time your sales team enters, the buyer has already formed an opinion, validated it with data, and often tested a version of your product.

For marketers, the challenge and the opportunity are the same: adapt faster than your buyers. That means treating your website like your top-performing salesperson. It means designing content not just for humans but for the agents and engines that summarize it. It means seeing self-service not as a loss of control, but as proof of trust earned before a human conversation even starts.

The brands that win the next twelve months won’t be the ones shouting loudest. They’ll be the ones showing up cleanly in an AI agent’s comparison, empowering buyers to progress independently, and earning citations in answers that buyers actually trust.

This isn’t about waiting for the future. It’s already here. The only question is whether your brand is discoverable inside it.