B2B engagement is at a turning point, and buyer expectations are accelerating faster than most organizations can adapt. Static campaigns, siloed systems, and disconnected handoffs no longer match the ways customers want to interact with brands.
This urgency is reflected in the market. By 2027, IDC projects companies will spend $150 billion on AI-related infrastructure, platforms, and services to compete on delivering highly personalized customer experiences.
For CMOs, this level of investment underscores a simple reality: engagement has become a decisive factor in growth, loyalty, and competitive differentiation.
To succeed in the new B2B landscape, leaders must understand:
- How buyer expectations have shifted
- The principles that guide effective marketing teams
- The new AI-driven rules of engagement
- What it looks like to put those rules into practice.
Transform insight into measurable business outcomes. Explore the Omnichannel Experience Playbook to see how leading organizations are aligning teams and technology for impact.
Three shifts in buyer expectations
Today’s B2B buyers are digitally fluent, AI-assisted, and more self-directed than ever. They research, compare vendors, and evaluate solutions on their own terms, often without speaking to sales until late in the process. Marketing must now own the entire journey, not just the top of the funnel.
Three shifts define this new reality.
- Customers expect personalization powered by real-time data to make every interaction relevant. Nearly 70% of buyers say personalization influences whether they engage with content.
- Buyers are relying on AI-driven tools and insights to shape decisions, with 77% of B2B buyers depending more on AI tools than traditional search engines.
- Trust, transparency, and agility determine brand credibility. Brands risk losing over 79% of customer loyalty by 2026 if they fail to implement digital trust practices for AI transparency and ethical data handling.
These shifts have redefined the baseline for engagement. Omnichannel orchestration isn’t just about connecting campaigns, it’s about creating journeys that grow with the buyer, foster trust, and make every interaction feel relevant.
Core principles to guide marketing teams
To meet these expectations, CMOs are embracing three guiding principles:
- Buyer intelligence requires building a full picture of the customer journey by integrating intent signals across content, events, demos, pricing activity, and social interactions. With deep insight into the buyer experience, teams can deliver omnichannel engagement that adapts in real time instead of relying on static campaigns.
- Intentional transitions ensure consistency across touchpoints. Consider a buyer who attends a webinar: in a standard scenario, they receive generic emails that ignore the details of the session. A strong, omnichannel approach references the session topic, offers related resources, and provides sales with context for the next conversation.
- Cross-functional alignment creates a unified relationship with the buyer. Marketing and sales must act on the same intelligence. Integrated platforms, shared dashboards, and common definitions of success allow teams to orchestrate experiences that feel coherent across every channel.
By following these principles, marketing leaders can create the foundation for adaptive, buyer-centric engagement that moves the needle from discovery to loyalty.
The new AI-driven rules of engagement
AI isn’t just enabling marketing efficiency, it’s reshaping how buyers experience brands. New rules now define how engagement must be delivered.
- Dynamic personalization
Static nurture paths no longer resonate with digital-first buyers who expect experiences to adapt instantly to their behavior. Instead of generic follow-ups, leading strategies trigger personalized interactions that build on a potential customer’s last action.
IDC research shows that 80% of buyers say personalized communications make it feel like a brand cares about them, a reminder that personalization isn’t just a tactic, it’s an avenue to build trust. In an omnichannel world, this means tailoring not only what content is delivered, but where and how it appears across touchpoints.
- Conversational engagement
Modern buyers don’t want to wait for gated PDFs or delayed responses: they expect dialogue in real time. By 2026, 65% of individuals will engage with brands through GenAI, signaling a shift from static content toward dynamic, two-way engagement.
The challenge is scaling these conversations authentically. Successful organizations embed conversational AI into their omnichannel strategy, ensuring digital dialogues seamlessly transition to well-informed live sales interactions when the time is right.
- Proactive trust and transparency
As AI becomes more integral to both the sales and buying process, buyers need clarity from brands about how AI is used. They want to know when they’re interacting with a computer or a person and how their data is being handled.
IDC research shows only about a quarter of marketing executives currently prioritize enabling trust-based marketing practices. This is a gap, and an opportunity. Brands that lead with transparency and governance will differentiate themselves in a market where credibility pays off in loyalty.
Together, these rules highlight a new reality: AI is no longer behind the scenes. In an omnichannel, buyer-led world, it is the front line of customer engagement, shaping perceptions, guiding decisions, and determining loyalty.
Practical examples of modern engagement
Principles and rules matter only when they are translated into action. These examples show how these elements work together in real-life scenarios to create connected, intelligent, omnichannel experiences that resonate with today’s buyers.
- Turning missed clicks into seamless journeys
A buyer abandons a demo request form. Because transitions are thoughtfully designed, the system triggers a tailored follow-up referencing the product they explored and suggests next steps. Instead of losing the lead, the personalized interaction builds momentum and draws the buyer back in.
- Powering conversations with insight
A buyer exploring pricing models engages with a GenAI chatbot. The bot responds with context drawn from centralized buyer intelligence (previous site activity, firmographic data, or content downloads) and then routes the conversation to a live expert when needed. This blend ensures the AI-driven dialogue is relevant, accurate, and supports the sales team with the knowledge they need to close the deal.
- Building trust across the organization
A buyer interacting with AI-generated recommendations accesses the brand’s AI and data protection policies. Because the entire organization operates under consistent governance standards, transparency is embedded in every practice, reinforcing credibility and ensuring every department is in alignment.
These examples show the path to buyer-centric engagement isn’t about isolated touchpoints. It’s about executing the plays that create connected moments – where personalization, communication, and trust work together across the omnichannel journey.
The CMO’s mandate for engagement
For marketing leaders, the imperative is to orchestrate engagement by aligning the principles and rules, grounding every journey in intelligence, designing AI interactions with intention, and aligning teams and buyers around shared trust.
The rules of engagement have shifted, and buyers are moving quickly. Those who adapt now will define what success looks like in B2B marketing, building buyer journeys that not only meet expectations but set new ones.
Discover IDC’s Omnichannel Experience Playbook and learn how to align your marketing organization with the new rules of engagement and future-proof your GTM strategy. You’ll find game-changing plays and an accompanying AI Supplemental Guide to operationalize intelligence, build trust, and build winning customer experiences.
