As AI can do more, where do people add most value in the Commercial Engine?

AI is making information more accessible.

Much more accessible.

A B2B buyer can already use AI to understand a problem, map a market, compare solutions and prepare for a purchase.

And they already do.

45% of B2B buyers say they used GenAI in a recent purchase.

So what happens when information is no longer hard to find?

One thing I see is that it changes where people add value.

When it matters, buyers still turn to people

B2B buyers increasingly want to do more themselves.

They can research without talking to Sales. Compare alternatives. Challenge claims. Ask follow-up questions without booking a meeting with anyone.

But when they need to make sense of what they've found, they seem to want something else.

69% of B2B buyers say they want to validate AI-generated insights with a salesperson.

And buyers are considerably more likely to say that a human salesperson helps them feel confident in their decision and understands their needs better than GenAI.

I find that interesting.

Because we spend a lot of time asking:

What can AI do instead of people?

A perfectly reasonable question.

What can we automate?

What can we produce faster?

Where can we remove manual work?

I think there is another question we should spend more time on:

Where can people add most value when AI can do more?

Take Sales

If the customer already understands the market, has compared the alternatives and read everything they need to read, another product presentation probably isn't adding much.

But understanding the customer's particular situation might.

Seeing something they haven't considered.

Challenging an assumption.

Helping a group of people with different priorities make a decision.

Or simply being someone the customer trusts when the answer isn't obvious.

That's a rather different job.

And it's not just Sales

The same question applies elsewhere.

If AI can produce more content, Marketing probably doesn't need to win by producing even more of it. Knowing what is actually worth saying becomes more important.

If AI can analyse thousands of pieces of customer feedback, Product doesn't necessarily need more analysis. Someone still needs to decide what matters and what to do about it.

If AI can handle many routine customer questions, Customer Success can spend more time on the situations where understanding the customer and their business actually makes a difference.

And the same applies to leadership.

Having access to more information has never automatically meant making better decisions.

AI isn't going to change that.

It will just give us considerably more information to make decisions from.

There seems to be a pattern here.

The more AI can do with information, the more human value may shift towards judgement, context and trust.

So what does this have to do with growth?

In the first two posts in this series, I've been exploring the idea of growth as a system.

Not just whether Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Success perform well individually, but whether what they do makes the rest of the system stronger.

I think AI makes that question more interesting.

Because as information becomes easier to access, judgement, context and trust may become more important.

And none of this belongs to one function.

Trust, for example, can start with something Marketing says.

It can be strengthened or destroyed in a sales conversation.

Confirmed by the product.

Built over time by Customer Success.

And influenced by what other customers say when we're not in the room.

So perhaps we shouldn't only be asking:What can we automate?

We also need to think about where people can add value that AI can't.

And I don't think those decisions should be made function by function.Because the customer certainly won't experience them that way.

But that raises a bigger question. If the value is created across the system, how do we make sure we're optimising the whole, rather than each part?

Because every function can actually perform well without the Growth Engine working as well as it could.

That's what I want to explore next.

Source: Gartner B2B Buyer Survey, 2026. 45% of surveyed B2B buyers reported using GenAI during a recent purchase; 69% preferred to validate AI-generated insights with a salesperson. Buyers were also more likely to say a salesperson gave them confidence in their decision and understood their needs better than GenAI.