Gartner: 67% of B2B Buyers Now Prefer a Rep-Free Experience

What happened

Gartner published the results of a survey of 646 B2B buyers on March 9, 2026, revealing that 67% now prefer a rep-free buying experience — up from 61% in a comparable 2025 survey. The research also found that 45% of respondents used artificial intelligence tools during a recent purchase, confirming that AI is becoming a principal component of how business customers research and evaluate suppliers.

The survey was conducted between August and September 2025 and represents one of the most significant data points on the accelerating shift away from seller-led B2B purchasing. According to Alyssa Cruz, Senior Principal Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice, "B2B buyers are progressing through critical buying tasks in more autonomous ways, and sellers can't rely on static collateral to carry influence in those moments."

To address the shift, Gartner issued three strategic recommendations: operationalize AI agents to support both self-guided buyer validation and seller-led value articulation; structure content into modular, agent-ready building blocks that can be dynamically assembled into context-aware resources; and embed enablement directly into sellers' systems of action to reduce tool switching and administrative burden.

Why it matters for CI practitioners

The 6-percentage-point jump in rep-free preference within a single year — from 61% to 67% — is not a gradual shift. It's an acceleration. For competitive intelligence and enablement teams, the implication is structural: if two-thirds of buyers are completing critical evaluation tasks without talking to a salesperson, then competitive positioning must reach buyers through channels they're actually using, not through the rep conversations they're avoiding.

1. Competitive content must influence the buyer journey before reps enter. When 67% of buyers prefer to self-serve, the competitive intelligence that shapes their vendor evaluation happens during independent research — reading comparison pages, reviewing analyst content, querying AI tools, and consuming vendor marketing. CI teams that produce competitive positioning only for sales consumption (battlecards, internal wikis, sales decks) are missing the larger influence surface. The positioning must also exist in formats that reach buyers directly: SEO-optimized competitive comparisons, third-party review responses, and content structured for AI retrieval.

2. The 45% AI-usage figure changes how CI content must be structured. Nearly half of B2B buyers are now using AI tools during their purchase process — asking questions about vendors, requesting comparisons, summarizing analyst reports. This means competitive intelligence is being consumed not just by humans reading web pages but by AI systems synthesizing information on behalf of buyers. CI teams need to ensure their competitive content is accurate, well-structured, and available in formats that AI systems can surface. Gartner's explicit recommendation to create "modular, agent-ready building blocks" applies directly to how CI teams produce and distribute competitive content.

3. Go-to-market strategy must account for invisible evaluation. The rep-free buying preference doesn't mean buyers aren't evaluating vendors — it means they're doing it invisibly. Buyers are forming preferences, building shortlists, and eliminating vendors before any sales conversation occurs. For CI practitioners, this creates a measurement challenge: you can't track competitive losses that happen before the CRM opportunity is created. Win/loss analysis, traditionally focused on deals that reached the proposal or decision stage, needs to be supplemented with research into how buyers are finding and evaluating competitors during the self-serve phase.

4. The gap between rep-free preference and rep-free readiness is the competitive opportunity. Most B2B organizations are not yet equipped for a world where two-thirds of buyers prefer to avoid their sales teams. The vendors that build comprehensive self-serve competitive content, CI-informed sales playbooks for the moments when reps do engage, and AI-compatible content architectures will win disproportionate share during this transition. The competitive advantage isn't just having better products — it's having better self-serve intelligence that reaches buyers during the 67% of the journey they prefer to complete alone.

Key details

Survey date: August–September 2025
Publication date: March 9, 2026
Sample size: 646 B2B buyers
Rep-free preference: 67% (up from 61% in 2025)
AI usage in purchasing: 45% used AI tools during a recent purchase
Analyst: Alyssa Cruz, Senior Principal Analyst, Gartner Sales Practice
Key recommendation 1: Operationalize AI agents for buyer validation and seller value articulation
Key recommendation 2: Structure content into modular, agent-ready building blocks
Key recommendation 3: Embed enablement into sellers' systems of action to reduce friction

Market implications

The 67% figure will be cited extensively across the B2B technology landscape throughout 2026. Expect every sales enablement, digital experience, and content management vendor to reference this data point in their positioning. For CI teams monitoring the competitive messaging of vendors in adjacent categories, this Gartner stat will become a ubiquitous proof point — and tracking how competitors use (and potentially misrepresent) it will be a recurring intelligence task.

More substantively, the survey accelerates the strategic importance of competitive positioning that exists outside of sales conversations. Organizations that have invested primarily in sales-facing competitive content — battlecards, talk tracks, objection handling — are exposed. The buyers who prefer rep-free experiences are forming competitive opinions based on what they can find independently: comparison websites, G2 and Gartner Peer Insights reviews, vendor marketing, analyst reports, and increasingly, AI-synthesized summaries of all of the above.

The AI usage finding — 45% and climbing — has a compounding effect. As more buyers use AI tools to research vendors, the quality and accessibility of a company's competitive positioning in AI-retrievable formats becomes a go-to-market variable. If a buyer asks an AI assistant to "compare Vendor A and Vendor B for mid-market companies," the vendor whose competitive content is more structured, cited, and available will influence that AI's response. CI teams that have been treating SEO and content strategy as someone else's problem now have a direct stake in how their company's competitive narrative surfaces through AI-mediated research.

For go-to-market strategy broadly, the 67% rep-free preference doesn't eliminate the need for salespeople — it redefines when they add value. Gartner's recommendation to "embed enablement directly into sellers' systems of action" acknowledges that the remaining 33% of buyer interactions with reps must be higher-quality, more contextualized, and more precisely timed than the traditional model allowed. CI teams have a critical role in making those interactions count: ensuring that when a seller does engage a buyer, they arrive with the specific competitive intelligence relevant to that buyer's self-serve research history and vendor evaluation criteria.

Related resources

Competitive Positioning — how to build positioning that reaches buyers before sales conversations begin
Go-to-Market Strategy — strategic frameworks for adapting GTM to rep-free buying preferences
CI for Sales Teams — playbook for connecting competitive intelligence to the seller moments that still matter