We just got back from Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix. Three days on the floor, a lot of booth conversations, and a few things that kept coming up no matter who we talked to.
Here’s what was actually top of mind.
1. Tool overkill is the real execution killer
Everyone at Forrester takes AI for GTM as a given now. That conversation is over. The new one came up constantly: what happens when you’ve bought into every promising solution on the market and somehow ended up with less clarity than before.
The volume of tools, the big promises, the near-total lack of guidance on how to use them, that holds teams back more than the absence of AI ever did. Most tools add tasks, not clarity. Thousands of stranded insights sit in platforms nobody opens, helping no one execute better.
The vendors in the room are starting to hear it. The appetite for consolidation, for platforms that reduce cognitive load instead of adding to it, was one of the loudest undercurrents of the conference. The teams that figure it out first will have a real structural advantage.
2. Native AI is having a moment
If tool overload was the frustration, native AI was the aspiration.
People are tired of decade-old platforms that bolted AI on later and now struggle to reconcile a legacy UI with agentic workflows. The seams show. The workarounds multiply. GTM teams don’t have time to babysit software, and they’re noticing.
The appetite for platforms built AI-first has never been louder. AI as the foundation the whole workflow runs on, not a feature, not a tab you click into. Every interaction gets smarter, every update happens automatically, and the team’s energy goes toward selling instead of managing the tools meant to help them sell.
Music to our ears.
3. Human skills are still the headline
Even with AI dominating every session, the conversations that drew the most energy were about empathy, creativity, and judgment. That’s not a coincidence.
Where AI works well, it makes humans more effective. It carries the operational weight so people can do the things that actually require a human: reading the room, building trust, making the call no model would make. Where it doesn’t work well, it’s busy trying to mimic those things instead. Teams can feel the difference.
The best GTM motion isn’t humans with better dashboards, and it isn’t agents replacing reps. It’s agents doing the work that shouldn’t require a human, so the humans can do the work only they can.
We had a lot of fun in Phoenix
Great conversations, good energy, and a clear sense that the market is sharpening its thinking, moving past the hype toward the harder, more honest questions about what actually works in production.
