For B2B vendors navigating AI adoption, shifting buyer expectations and ongoing market uncertainty, the fundamentals of customer experience and sales execution are being tested in new ways.
While AI dominates the agenda, many of the biggest risks for vendors are around misaligned value propositions, weak change management, and a failure to adapt to more informed customers, according to the new B2B Growth Agenda 2026 report by consulting firm Bain & Company.
AI may be the headline, but alignment is the issue, Rob Stein, Partner at Bain and one of the report’s lead authors, told CX Today in exclusive interview.
While AI investment continues at a pace, many organizations are still grappling with foundational challenges, starting with how they articulate value to customers. “We’re playing up the importance of a company’s value proposition and actually understanding that,” Stein said.
That sounds straightforward, but execution often falls short. In many cases, vendors’ sales messaging has not evolved in line with the market:
“They have sales teams out there with the same message they had 22 years ago, and that’s not keeping up with the times.”
This disconnect is frequently compounded by internal silos, Stein noted. “The sales and product teams aren’t really talking to one another to be aligned on what the winning messages in the market are.”
This has direct implications for customer experience leaders. Inconsistent messaging across touchpoints, from marketing to sales to service, creates fragmented experiences for customers who increasingly expect clarity and coherence. Stein added that consistency across the entire journey is critical:
“The consistency of the hero messages and your value proposition need to be there throughout, from the beginning of the early funnel all the way to the end.”
Better-Informed Customers Are Raising the Bar for B2B Vendors
Bain’s survey found that 87 percent of respondents see their markets evolving “faster or significantly faster than they did in the past.”
One of the primary drivers of the accelerating pace of change affecting B2B customer relationships is the ongoing evolution in buyer behavior. As Stein pointed out, “it’s so much easier to be well informed before a first conversation with a sales rep today.”
With AI tools enabling buyers to carry out deeper pre-engagement research, customers are entering conversations with a much higher level of knowledge of products and competing offerings. This shift is changing the nature of sales interactions, Stein said.
“You’re able to ask that rep very targeted questions, versus allowing them to pitch to you. The questions you’re going to get back for many of your buyers are not going to be 101-level questions… They might be 201- or 301-level questions.”
This is compressing the traditional sales funnel as early-stage conversations increasingly resemble later-stage discussions, placing greater pressure on sales and customer-facing teams to be prepared earlier in the sales process, Stein said.
It also elevates the importance of core sales capabilities, making objection handling increasingly important.
The market environment demands focused innovation, with the report finding that “companies with customer-tailored offerings grow nearly twice as fast.”
To achieve that, Bain has developed a Sales Play System that includes a strategic approach to choosing the right plays to prioritize based on real-time customer feedback; data-driven identification of target customers; and sales narratives based on a clearly defined value proposition. This also requires coordination between go-to-market and product teams and prescriptive plays with sales and marketing collateral targeting specific customer personas.
All this needs to be integrated with revenue technology and customer relationship management (CRM) systems for consistency and scalability.
Market Volatility Is Forcing Greater Agility
Beyond AI, external factors are also reshaping how B2B companies operate. As Stein put it:
“Uncertainty is the new certainty in our world.”
From geopolitical shifts to supply chain disruptions, enterprises are being forced to respond more dynamically.
Bain’s report notes that volatility is making it harder for leaders to know what will happen in 12 months, widening a confidence gap as more businesses miss their targets even as their growth ambitions climb. From 2023 to 2025, the share of businesses that failed to meet their revenue targets climbed from 33 percent to 42 percent.
Enterprises need to be able to adapt in real time to market conditions to meet these goals, Stein said.
“Everyone can have a five-year strategic plan, but you have to be developing at an executive level a way to be responsive to what’s happening in the market, and to decide… ‘does what happened yesterday have a meaningful impact on us or not?’ And then make a decision and move on.’”
Bain’s survey showed that while businesses that source inputs from China or the Middle East, for example, are directly affected by geopolitical developments, “almost any B2B company that’s at scale certainly has customers beyond just either the U.S. or Europe.”
“So when you’re thinking about cross border trade and tariffs… no matter what industry you’re in, if you’re not planning, if you’re not thinking about how to operate in a more nimble and agile way… then you’re potentially missing out.”
For CX leaders, this indicates a need to build more flexible customer engagement models that can adapt quickly to changing conditions.
AI Adoption Is Being Undermined by Execution Gaps
Enthusiasm about the role of AI, even in enabling companies to become more nimble and agile may be widespread, but many AI initiatives are struggling to deliver sustained impact.
Stein points to organizations treating AI deployment like a box-ticking exercise rather than a transformation as a recurring issue that often leads to stalled progress.
Even more concerning is a lack of structured rollout and enablement. Leadership introduces a new AI tool but never follows through with formal training sessions. As Stein noted:
“People underestimate the human change management aspect of rolling out even a single use case. Humans still need buy-in and training, and to hear from other humans how they have used it. Just giving them PowerPoint slides on it is not really training them. The way to upskill someone… is to show them the actual… workflow happening in real time.”
This is critical for CX teams, as customer-facing applications of AI, whether in sales, service, or support, depend heavily on employee adoption. Without buy-in and proper enablement, even well-designed tools fail to deliver consistent experiences.
Ownership and Operating Models Remain Unclear
Another barrier to effective AI adoption is ambiguity around the ownership of AI initiatives.
While many companies have introduced AI leaders or councils, these roles are often under-resourced or lack authority. But Stein indicated that success requires both central coordination and executive-level accountability:
“There needs to be an owner and a centralized… operating model around this.”
At the same time, decision-making cannot sit in isolation and should be cross -functional at the board level. This balance is critical. Without C-suite support, initiatives struggle to gain traction. And in a fast-moving environment, speed matters.
The key message for B2B vendors from Bain’s report is that success depends on investing in new technologies while reinforcing the fundamentals of customer experience, agile sales execution, and organizational alignment in an increasingly complex environment.
