Reinventing Growth for the AI Era - Part 2
Trust, AI, and the Rise of Buying Networks: How B2B Growth Is Being Rewritten
August 6, 2025
In an era where B2B buying is increasingly complex, distributed, and AI-assisted, one constant remains: trust is the currency of growth. No longer a “soft” brand attribute, trust now directly accelerates sales velocity and conversion. As Forrester’s Buying Networks: Your Buyers’ New Reality (2025) report highlights, trusted providers gain “shortcuts to consideration,” enabling faster movement through decision cycles and broader endorsement within buyer ecosystems.
The New Reality: Buying Networks, Not Buying Groups
Forrester’s latest research signals a major shift in how organizations purchase technology. What began as a move from individual leads to “buying groups” has evolved into the buying network — a broader ecosystem that includes internal teams, external influencers, analysts, partners, customers, and increasingly, AI agents.
This shift represents more than a semantic change. It reflects a profound reconfiguration of trust and influence in the buying process. According to Forrester, 87% of B2B buyers used generative AI in the past 12 months to support purchasing, and nearly 35% of Millennial and Gen Z buyers now involve 10 or more external participants in their decisions — a number expected to rise to 50% in 2025.
In this new environment, providers can no longer depend solely on traditional demand-generation tactics. Instead, they must become active participants in their buyers’ extended networks — shaping perception, building trust, and influencing the agents and humans who inform and automate buying recommendations.
Trust as the Shortcut to Consideration
B2B trust operates as an accelerant. As Forrester’s Business Trust Survey (2023) found, buyers are more likely to trust industry peers (72%) and analysts (68%) than provider executives (66%). The implication for marketers is clear: third-party validation carries more weight than direct promotion.
Organizations that systematically build credibility within these networks enjoy a measurable edge. Trusted brands reduce friction across the buying journey — from early discovery through final decision — because trust collapses time. It compresses the consideration cycle, increases internal advocacy, and makes procurement approvals easier.
AI as Both Enabler and Gatekeeper
Generative AI is not just transforming content creation; it is becoming a new gatekeeper to visibility. As AI-driven tools increasingly aggregate, summarize, and recommend vendors, being present in the right digital ecosystems matters more than ever.
Forrester predicts the emergence of “agent-to-agent buying,” in which buyer and provider AI agents negotiate and transact. The challenge? Trust. Adoption will depend on buyers’ confidence that AI can act transparently and faithfully on their behalf. Providers who build verifiable, high-integrity data ecosystems will be best positioned to thrive as agentic AI scales.
Informa TechTarget: Precision Trust at Scale
Amid this evolution, Informa TechTarget stands out for its ability to combine trust, data precision, and market proximity. Recognized as a Leader and Customer Favorite in The Forrester Wave™: Intent Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2025, TechTarget achieved the highest possible scores in 12 criteria — including vision, innovation, buying group prediction, and noise filtering.
This recognition underscores a key differentiator: TechTarget is the only provider delivering intent data at the market, account, buying group, and contact levels. That granularity allows marketers to interpret nuanced buyer behaviors across the network, not just within the purchasing organization.
By analyzing activity across more than 220 digital properties and leveraging insights from a 50-million-member opted-in tech audience, TechTarget helps clients target, qualify, and engage prospects with precision — a capability increasingly critical as self-service and AI-mediated research dominate the early buying stages.
Data That Builds Confidence
Forrester’s Revenue Operations Survey (2024) found that the average rate for converting marketing-sourced opportunities from the target stage to the qualified stage is only 4.5% — a symptom of misaligned targeting and wasted motion. Providers that incorporate high-quality intent data into their GTM systems see not only improved conversion but also enhanced trust among buyers, who recognize relevant outreach as a sign of credibility.
In this sense, intent data becomes both a targeting mechanism and a trust signal. When a provider understands what a buyer is researching and engages them with timely, contextual content, it signals empathy and competence — two qualities central to trust formation in B2B relationships.
Competing on Credibility
The rise of buying networks blurs the boundaries between brand and demand marketing. As Forrester notes, the pendulum will swing toward harder-to-measure, brand-centric investments — influencer relations, analyst engagement, and thought leadership — that sustain credibility across the extended buying ecosystem.
However, measuring ROI in this new model requires new frameworks. The value of brand trust, influencer advocacy, and AI visibility must be quantified not only in pipeline contribution but also in network amplification — how often and how credibly a provider is cited, recommended, or shortlisted by trusted intermediaries and AI systems.
The Future of Growth: Networked, Trusted, AI-Enabled
The organizations that will outperform in the next decade are those that help buyers buy the way they want to buy. This means designing experiences that support both human and agentic participants in the network, investing in transparent data ecosystems, and nurturing external influencers as extensions of the brand.
As Forrester’s analysis suggests, providers who embrace this model achieve 20%–50% improvements in sales efficiency and uncover 10%–20% more opportunities from existing engagements. These results come not from doing more, but from earning trust earlier and extending influence further — across people, platforms, and AI systems that now define the modern buying journey.
In this sense, trust isn’t merely a competitive advantage. It’s the infrastructure of growth.